Posts by chip

1) Questions and Answers : Windows : Why can't I join the task? (Message 461) Posted 30 Sep 2020 by chip Post: Soon :)
2) Message boards : Science : Credits (Message 460) Posted 30 Sep 2020 by chip Post: I get that. Some projects artificially inflate the number of credits they offer per task, we don't want to do that.
3) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 459) Posted 30 Sep 2020 by chip Post: Understood, more tasks coming soon.
4) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 458) Posted 30 Sep 2020 by chip Post: Likely, yes.
5) Message boards : News : We have found the SEED of Minecraft's title-screen background PANORAMA! (Message 457) Posted 30 Sep 2020 by chip Post: Everyone should be familiar with this world. It's the one that always appeared on Minecraft's main-menu (title-screen), blurred and slowly rotating. It first appeared in 2011 for Minecraft Beta 1.8 and remained for many years, it was only recently replaced in 1.13 each subsequent version. The seed was found on 18th of July 2020 at around 5:45 AM UTC. Version: Beta 1.7.3 Coordinates: X=61.48~, Y=75, Z=-68.73~ Seed: 2151901553968352745 OR 8091867987493326313 (both work) Why two seeds? There are actually 2^16 (=65536) seeds that will all generate the same world. Older versions of Minecraft used only 48 of the bits of the seed. Here's the formula for getting all of them, as explained by Earthcomputer: 25357015387625 + 2^48k, 0 <= k < 2^16; (k is an integer) The two seeds mentioned are the only "valid" seeds, in the sense that they can be naturally generated by Minecraft (due to Java's random function implementation). There is not any word/string of characters that will produce this seed, it was generated randomly. This has nothing to do with "shadow seeds", they are not present in these versions. What can change is placement of trees and fauna as that depends on the order chunks are generated; otherwise, there are no differences between the two seeds. Earthcomputer, Cortex, Neil - wrote the biome and terrain checking code DutChen18 - made multiple tools/mods to help with the recreation and gathering data for the seed checking MC PseudoGravity - reversed the tallgrass colors and found the biome values in the panorama Philipp_DE - hosted the recreation server and screenshot bot Tomlacko - started the project, found the coordinates, produced the panorama viewer with recreation overlay ...many other people helped in other ways (such as building the recreation block-by-block) listed here. To see how this was accomplished, watch SalC1's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRurhiK-Lk Seed reveal video from Earthcomputer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caLCZNLPgrM ~ this post copied mostly in verbatim from Tomlacko's Reddit post on the subject
6) Message boards : Science : Credits (Message 413) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: And it pays very poorly in comparison to other GPU projects. Unlike some other projects, we believe in a level playing field and do not make any changes to the credit calculations which are provided stock by BOINC. It is 200 credits per gigaFLOP day, this will not change.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Can't get work (Message 412) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: The best explanation I can provide you guys is this: First of all, I apologize once again, this is all new to us and we've expanded very quickly. The server was totally crippled by an influx of members and some BOINC services fail silently and could be a little more fault-tolerant; but quite frankly, most of them are ancient and could do with some modernization. The feeder only has 100 slots in shared memory for the scheduler to retrieve new tasks from, if for whatever reason those tasks are unschedulable, they'll just hang around in shared memory and prevent new tasks being fed in. We can mitigate this by automatically removing items from schmem if they don't get scheduled within 'n' minutes, but this is a hack at best. In order to increase this slot limit, we must make changes to BOINC source code and recompile these components. We've avoided this as we don't believe it should be necessary to run the project with any fundamental changes to the software to enable basic functionality. We've attached some basic monitoring around the services logs, and are feeding them into a monitoring solution which alerts me in the event of anomalous patterns, so this should at least let us know when things start to go wrong. Long term, we're working on re-architecting BOINC for Kubernetes which should allow significantly more resilience and fault tolerance to the entire stack.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : 197 (0x000000C5) EXIT_TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED (Message 411) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: Timed out tasks still give us the results up to the point they time out. Usually, timeouts are because the computer took an unreasonably long time to complete a task. I'm planning on upping the limits even further, but they're already pretty enormous.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Getting just one task at a time (Message 410) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: Strangely enough, the config is set up to send multiple tasks to each host. I'll have to investigate this further following the server upgrade.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : new app - syntax error (Message 409) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: This was immediately resolved. Let me know if there are any further issues.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Stats not exporting since 25/7/2020 (Message 408) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: We have no idea what caused this, but the latest deployment seems to have resolved it. We really appreciate everyone's concern and for bringing this to my attention.
12) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 405) Posted 2 Aug 2020 by chip Post: The first round of Kaktwoos processing is nearing its completion. A small number of hosts caused many errors with faulty hardware or software configurations which caused the failure of a handful of workunits. Due to these failures; several thousand new tasks have now been submitted to allow any previously failed workunits an additional chance to succeed. All historically submitted data is currently under re-evaluation as a subset of these completed tasks has outputs which don't appear to be nominal. The re-validation of tasks will reach completion shortly, and soon a follow-up will be posted detailing the tallest cactus found during this round of Kaktwoos processing. The Kaktwoos (kak-two-s) project was initiated by computing a small set of tall 'candidate cacti' using the single-chunk cacti stacking application Kaktoos (kak-tus). The initial cactus seed search assumed stacking began at an elevation of y=63 blocks from bedrock which is the basis of assumption for the Kaktwoos multi-chunk cacti scanning work. You have likely volunteered resources towards this effort over the past few weeks. Now, onto the exciting news: the Kaktoos application (note the missing 'w') shall be launching on BOINC. This application will exist to scan for individual chunk seeds which produce tall cacti (7 blocks minimum) with generation elevation of y=62. Using a lower elevation parameter for Kaktoos will hopefully allow us to discover additional naturally-generated 22+ block tall cacti with Kaktwoos. For those wondering, the next set of tasks will produce many more resultant 'candidate' cactus seeds than the previous y=63 run. We expect 120 million generated seeds despite the required minimum height of 7 blocks we chose to reduce output drastically. This dataset will be used for quad-chunk stacking (Kaktfours anyone?) and is much more challenging to manage due to the lower probability of finding 22+ block tall cacti and increased development overhead. We could theoretically find much taller cacti with this method, with a caveat of requiring significantly more processing power. Don't worry though; there are other projects brewing which will take priority. If you are a 'stacktus' superfan or a member of the 'big cactus community', you also needn't worry; there may be even more permutations of Kaktoos and Kaktwoos inputs to try which should keep us all busy along the way. Finally, and for reference, the tallest known cactus found by MC@Home (in Minecraft: Java Edition v1.14.4) is 22 blocks, and 24 blocks tall if using a superflat world with the desert preset. We distinguish these heights as we consider "cactus naturalis" (cactus of normal generation) cacti to be the true tall cacti, as opposed to "cactus fma vi" (cactus of superflat generation).
13) Message boards : News : Server outage resolved and supporting our infrastructure (Message 322) Posted 21 Jul 2020 by chip Post: Between 23:54 UTC yesterday (2020-07-20) and 15:35 UTC today, we suffered from a catastrophic SQL failure which forced us to restore from backup. There may be some credit issues where the system granted more or fewer credits than you expect for work done during this time. I can't apologize enough. If our BOINC deployment was architected for scale rather than for low cost, we could've avoided this. There are several enhancements to our infrastructure and upgrades we'd like to make, such as migrating services to Kubernetes and potentially using a managed SQL service. You can help! Please consider visiting our Patreon page, reviewing the current set of benefits, and making a contribution of any size; any amount helps - patreon.com/minecraftathome All contributions go towards covering infrastructure cost and quality-of-life improvements to ensure the project's longevity.
14) Message boards : News : That was fast (Message 319) Posted 21 Jul 2020 by chip Post: News regarding this is following soon. Locking this thread for now.
15) Message boards : News : That was fast (Message 313) Posted 21 Jul 2020 by chip Post: All the dangling jobs should be credited now, sorry for not getting this sorted sooner, the trigger was pulled on the cleanup tasks a little early.
16) Message boards : News : That was fast (Message 288) Posted 18 Jul 2020 by chip Post: The origin of the panorama image used in the Minecraft main menu from beta version 1.8.1, released in September 2011, has remained a mystery until now. In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host for Minecraft@Home, in a sheer stroke of luck, found the world seed, 25357015387625. This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into the last 24 hours. The specific host which located the seed belongs to the user vanos0512. Thank you to the 137 users who contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs over the last 24 hours. You all accomplished this. Here are the details if you want to generate this world for yourself: Minecraft version: Beta 1.7 Either of these two valid world seeds: 2151901553968352745 or 8091867987493326313 Co-ordinates: x60, y76, z-67 See the video released by EarthComputer announcing the finding.
17) Questions and Answers : Web site : Friends Function Header Errors (Message 275) Posted 17 Jul 2020 by chip Post: I'll see if this still remains after we upgrade to 1.2.1
18) Message boards : News : Enjoy the scenery (Message 274) Posted 17 Jul 2020 by chip Post: Minecraft@Home is now over one month old! To celebrate this milestone, I present a new research focus; the panorama project. If you were here during beta-testing, you might have received a very early version of panorama tasks, and the eagle-eyed among you may have seen the application details on the server status page. The panorama app is a CUDA-only app for Linux and Windows with an Nvidia driver version of 418.96 or higher. This project attempts to find the world seed of the iconic panorama image which appeared in the background of the main menu of Minecraft between 2011 and 2018. The first phase of this project will only last a few days, and we shall update you with their progress in the coming weeks. Right now, the application is quite substantial. Unlike the OpenCL applications for the Kaktwoos project, if you allow BOINC to run tasks always; you may experience some stuttering or lag in your desktop environment while running these tasks. These tasks do not have checkpointing support, but run in around 1 hour on an average host to mitigate the majority of lost cycles. As always, you can change which projects of which you decide to participate in your user preferences. Let us know if you have any questions, and as always join the discussion over on the Discord server.
19) Message boards : News : Kaktwoos 2.03 and Badges! (Message 254) Posted 11 Jul 2020 by chip Post: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BadgeDoc The BOINC server code supports badges for the top 1%, 5%, and 25% of recent average credit (RAC). They are represented by gold, silver, and bronze medal images, respectively, and are assigned to both users and teams. Ok, so the bages are non-static? Then forget it, lack of motivation... Michael. We're adding some static ones soon, don't worry ;)
20) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : OSX app? (Message 250) Posted 10 Jul 2020 by chip Post: Any chance for an OS X app? MacOS supports both AMD and Intel GPUs. I have an AMD VII that I would like to apply to this project. I think it'll be relatively trivial to cross-compile the linux app for Darwin, but we don't have a cloud testing environment for OSX yet.

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