41) Message boards : News : The Grand BOINCale for Kaktwoos? (Message 496) Posted 28 Jan 2021 by Hy Post: Thanks Neil, some additional info on what this means: With the last batch of Kaktoos work you had done in November/December, we have prepared more Kaktwoos tasks and uploaded all the seed data (cacti) we can reasonably use to make a tall cactus. So now, we will be running through as many layers as we can believe to be worth it, or give us a chance to find unreasonably tall cacti. At the moment, we have generated around 130,000 initial tasks for everyone on BOINC to work with us through. This will search through all of block height 64 and was the next, most likely height to find new record-setting cacti. I suspect we will re-run parts of y=62 and y=63 (original run) as well with some other cacti to see if we can re-confirm or add to our previous results, but *only* looking for 22-block tall or higher. In the short-term (as in, 1-2 months) will we load up heights of y=65-y70 to begin 'Phase 1' of our final search. Each y-level makes it incredibly difficult to find another tall cactus due to us having to merge cacti from two adjacent chunks of the same height together. If sand or anything overlaps off-axis, then stacking fails, or doesn't go as planned. Below though is our first tall Superflat cactus at y=64! Say hello! (Found by user 'Jas:10284893' and Matt/Kappa from Discord) Sadly, this cactus didn't reach its full potential due to that dry bush nearby, sapping its growth (figuratively and literally) due to failed placement pre-stacking. To Kaktwoos, this was a 22-Tall, but to us in reality it was only 17 blocks in a Superflat desert. As the entire nature of Tall Cacti is random and almost all luck-based, disappointments like this can and do happen.

42) Questions and Answers : Windows : any way to contribute with only cpu? (Message 490) Posted 25 Jan 2021 by Hy Post: Hello, currently there are no CPU only tasks. There's a few reasons behind this, but mainly CPUs are not that powerful (those with a good enough CPU often have a better, or just as fast and efficient GPU), and another is our code is mostly OpenCL. At one point we were testing "Kaktwoos-rs", built in the Rust language but due to issues with configuration and optimizing, it was never publicly released. Additionally, a lot of new changes to Kaktwoos-cl will need to be ported over to the code, which has not been touched since August. We are though re-starting kaktwoos work, and a lot more if our tests in the next day go to plan.

43) Message boards : News : From sandy valleys, up to sand dune peaks. Kaktoos rises to the challenge! (Message 489) Posted 24 Jan 2021 by Hy Post: Hi, in terms of the BOINC side of Minecraft@Home, we haven't used it as much as we expected to. But, we have more cactus-searching (Kaktwoos) tasks coming up as we have gone through enough of the previous data and last task's to do another run. Others are on break from finding various world seeds with code that was optimized so well that we didn't need BOINC. What ran in December was Kaktoos, which provides all the potential cacti required for our multi-gpu and much more intensive Kaktwoos application. Kaktwoos Tall-Cactus searching has always been our long-term project, and we project to do runs for layers 64-75 after final adjustments of code on our Github page. Github made some changes to their compile environment, and we spent time to do debugging of the OpenCL code so the BOINC server could do much easier changes of where/which layers we are searching. Running for layers above 75 is possible, but the likelyhood of any tall, special cacti (except for in Superflat worlds) is 'essentially impossible'. Each layer produces around 120,000 tasks that take around an hour on a mid-range gaming GPU (GTX 1060/RX 580), not including confirmations and re-tries. So, the long-term 'final runs' are being prepared and I hope you shall see them in your client, starting with a y=64 'test' run. There are many people behind the scenes involved that have the tools and knowledge (that I don't) to make these runs possible (interpreting the data and converting it into a BOINC-friendly format which we create jobs from) that can be another bottleneck at times. I have been asking and organizing ourselves over the past week or two as the other seedfinding projects yet again caused some distractions. Y=63 was our best, as we found 20-22 tall naturally generating cactus, but no 23/24 aside from in Superflat Y=62 found additional Superflat 23/24 tall, putting our 'cactus limit' at 22:24. With any luck we can smash either of those records, but we must have two chunks with tall cactus at the *same block level/layer* to stack successfully.

44) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 446) Posted 1 Sep 2020 by Hy Post: Small update! We're moving to finding Pack.PNG ('PackCrack CUDA / Nvidia) on BOINC. At the moment we're very close to finishing this current run of Kaktwoos, which is amazingly fast. We shall be looking through all the images, but For the first y=62, 22 tall! A beachside cactus Credit to Dutchen18 on our Minecraft@Home discord, who has been combing through the seeds to find us the finished tasks's cacti.

45) Message boards : Number crunching : ETA on new work? (Message 444) Posted 1 Sep 2020 by Hy Post: We're know searching for Pack.png (or at least, doing a bunch of seedfinding just like with Panorama/Mainmenu). We might have multiple rounds of Pack.png but it will be a fairly short run. Hopefully we'll find it!

46) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 438) Posted 22 Aug 2020 by Hy Post: The waiting game is over, as we have begun Kaktwoos 'y=62' (Round 2) of cactus searching. We are attempting to stack cacti together on sand that is 1 block lower than before, which may potentially provide another set of fresh, 22+ tall cacti to find. Wish everyone luck in their stacking and MC@Home's cactus search is officially re-opened.

47) Message boards : Number crunching : no work (Message 437) Posted 22 Aug 2020 by Hy Post: Kaktwoos round 2 has begun and so a bunch of new tasks have been created. We shall be targeting cacti of a height of 22 or taller for this round of searching, and with a bunch of new data to work with.

48) Message boards : News : Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti) (Message 433) Posted 19 Aug 2020 by Hy Post: Just a bump to this thread, as we are preparing to begin the new set of tasks. All Kaktoos (prelim part-2 cactus search) tasks are essentially done, meaning we have a lot more cactus to attempt stacking for 22+ or taller cacti. We found some very nice 13 tall cactus that might make it easier to go higher than 22 tall as well.

49) Message boards : Number crunching : no work (Message 431) Posted 19 Aug 2020 by Hy Post: There's no work currently as we are still waiting for code to be pushed to the server that provides a bunch of new jobs and begins the next search for taller cactus. https://github.com/minecrafthome/minecrafthome/pull/48 I expect another 120,000 or more tasks to be sent out once this is done, and the old kaktwoos data to be backed up / moved off. We may potentially find taller cactus, and as the current run is done, I shall try to work through the data with the other devs to get a nice list of tallest cactus / seeds and how to find them That's all I can say for now

50) Message boards : Number crunching : 197 (0x000000C5) EXIT_TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED (Message 383) Posted 27 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: A P100 is very decent, and as fast as Vega 56 / 64s for seed mining. I can't tell you why BOINC thinks it should have a timeout, but it's likely not for the reason you expect it to be I've seen if kaktwoos hangs or doesn't provide updates to BOINC, then this timeout kill will be more likely to happen

51) Message boards : Number crunching : AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPU requirements (Message 380) Posted 26 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Not sure if anyone will see this with a new post, but we've been doing some calculations today for some things we are working on atm: Per-GPU "TFLOPS vs Seeds" architecture comparison 15,276.52 GFLOPS / 874.033 seconds (Turing) 2,178.28 GFLOPS / 6104.476 seconds (Pascal) 6,313.96 GFLOPS / 5216.085 seconds (Polaris) 11,401.80 GFLOPS / 2586.161 seconds (Vega) 9,500.00 GFLOPS / 1136.033 seconds (Navi) 15,276,520,000,000 flops / 114,410,000 = 133524 FLOPS per seed on Kaktwoos-cl (Turing RTX 2080ti ) 2,178,000,000,000 flops / 16,380,000 = 132967 FLOPS per seed on Kaktwoos-cl (Pascal GTX 1050ti ) 6,313,960,000,000 flops / 19,170,000 = 329367 FLOPS per seed on Kaktwoos-cl (Polaris RX 580) 11,401,800,000,000 flops / 38,670,000 = 294849 FLOPS per seed on Kaktwoos-cl (Vega 56 OC) 9,500,000,000,000 flops / 88,030,000 = 107918 FLOPS per seed on Kaktwoos-cl (Navi RX5700XT) TLDR, with current Kaktwoos-cl optimizations, Turing and Navi GPUs are by far the best architectures "Per TFLOP" to calculate seeds. Obviously, this data is of a small sample size and also, RX 5700XT TFLOPs are incorrectly reported by BOINC as "4.5" rather than the reported 9.5tflop by the device specs. May be because of the RDNA architecture splitting compute units in 'half' versus Polaris and Vega? We also can now make a better estimate on average for how much real compute power is needed per Kaktwoos-cl task as well

52) Message boards : Science : Cactus Run & Beyond? (Message 327) Posted 22 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Well, been over two weeks since the last post! Recap, if anyone hasn't seen the news in the News board: Jul 10: Adjusted cactus seed range & tasks down to 120,000, from 230,000 Jul 19: 12:49am EST Found the old Minecraft main menu (Panorama!) Jul 22: Completed ~70% of all tasks, greatly increased our average working power to 4.2 PetaFLOPS and 1,500 computers with credit. Speculative dates: Jul 25: Estimated end of Kaktwoos "Round 1", aims of finding 23 and 24 tall naturally generated cactus Jul 2X: Beginning of Kaktoos (CUDA) single-chunk re-search for cacti to aid in stacking, from a lower height (block y=62 vs block y=63) Aug XX : Pack.Png recreation server completed, more ideas realized to help cut down the number of seeds and to search https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_we_have_found_the_seed_of_minecrafts/ If anyone wants an update on what's next... https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=44&postid=324#324

53) Message boards : News : Server outage resolved and supporting our infrastructure (Message 324) Posted 21 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: As an addition to Chip's message: We are slowly returning to our previous levels of compute, and many members of this project have been busy assisting new users (from /r/Minecraft and SalC1's video on our seed findings) in joining this project. On the bright side, we are working on or preparing to- Close up: Kaktwoos-cl (GPU dual-chunk cactus stacking) "Round 1", our main project. As of writing, we have 66% of tasks finished. Likely by next week, current tasks will be finished and any cactus height related findings will be disclosed Launch: Kaktwoos-rs (Rust lang, CPU Cactus stacking) as a beta application. The speed of an 8 core CPU is comparable to a midrange, last-gen GPU (20 million seeds a second) Planning: Kaktoos (CUDA) with a new set of tasks to find taller, single chunk cacti from a height of 62. Stock kaktwoos works off of cacti from a height of 63, meaning more chunks with tall cacti we can stack can be found. and... Investigating: Pack.png with a recreation, organized on our Discord server. We are planning to use approaches and terrain checks learned from the MainMenu/ Panorama project to hopefully get closer to finding this elusive world. During this week, we have jumped massively from an average of 1200 recently credit computers and 3.5 PetaFLOPS of 'average' online computing power to 1500 with 4.2 PetaFLOPS. Thanks so much for the contributions so far!

54) Message boards : Number crunching : Can't get work (Message 323) Posted 21 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Please see: https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=44 for an update on this situation. I apologize for the server crash, as we had a huge increase of users due to the Panorama seed being found, causing various scheduling issues and compounded by tasks being cleaned up improperly by the server. We are slowly returning to our previous levels of compute, and many members of this project have been busy assisting new users (From SalC1's video on our seed findings) in joining this project. On the bright side, we are working on or preparing to: Closing up: Kaktwoos-cl (GPU dual-chunk cactus stacking) "Round 1", our main project. As of writing, we have 66% of tasks finished. Likely by next week, current tasks will be finished and any cactus height related findings will be disclosed Launch: Kaktwoos-rs (CPU Cactus stacking) as a beta application. The speed of an 8 core CPU is comparable to a midrange, last-gen GPU (20 million seeds a second) Planning: Kaktoos (CUDA) with a new set of tasks to find taller, single chunk cacti from a height of 62. Stock kaktwoos works off of cacti from a height of 63, meaning more chunks with tall cacti we can stack can be found. and... Investigating: Pack.png with a recreation, organized on our Discord server. We are planning to use approaches and terrain checks learned from MainMenu/ Panorama project to hopefully get closer to finding this elusive world. During this week, we have jumped massively from an average of 1200 recently credit computers and 3.5 PetaFLOPS of 'average' online computing power to 1500 with 4.2 PetaFLOPS. Thanks so much for the contributions so far!

55) Message boards : Number crunching : AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPU requirements (Message 305) Posted 20 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Now, even if you don't have a compatible graphics card: For those with a multi-core, relatively modern (Bulldozer/Phenom and Intel Nehalem) and newer CPU, a version of kaktwoos is being made to run on CPU only systems or those with incompatible GPUs. It will serve the same purpose as kaktwoos-cl that all of us are running atm, but it's actually a decently fast alternative. On my Ryzen 1700 (8c/16t, 3.75GHz all cores) I get a speed of ~20mseed/s if nothing is running and I set it to use all of the processor. This is comparable to a RX 580 on our latest kaktwoos-cl version! A Intel 8600K runs at 12-13mseed/s, and I expect a Ryzen 2600 to perform similarly On a Ryzen 3950x or older 16 core threadripper, we can expect 40 million seeds a second, at 150W; comparable to my desktop's overclocked Vega 56. Sadly, a Raspberry Pi 4 at 1.95Ghz, 4 cores (32bit OS) runs this at... 1.2mseed/s If you would like, progress of our CPU kaktwoos application can be tracked here: https://github.com/DutChen18/kaktwoos-rs (Orig) https://github.com/Hyenadae/kaktwoos-rs/commits/master (BOINC native mods + auto build for linux and soon Windows)

56) Message boards : Number crunching : AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPU requirements (Message 304) Posted 20 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: So, the truth is it actually never worked But, because you had an Nvidia GPU, a bug with our older multi-gpu on Kaktwoos_2.00 meant all Intel tasks ran on the first Nvidia or AMD GPU. If people with only an Intel 4000/4600 ran the Kaktwoos_200 or newer before we enforced OpenCL 2.0, it'd fail due to its older OpenCL implementation and missing features that we do use. Saw lots of errors and hence the specific requirements posted above (thanks, Jord) A small thing to keep in mind for AMD, we cannot support all 200/300 Radeons because some of those models have Pitcarin/Tahti GCN 1.0/1.1 silicon, and not GCN 1.2+ (Hawaii/Bonair) I recommend for Vega, Polaris (RX 470 -> RX 590) and older that the AMD 19.12.3 drivers or slightly older than that are used (if on Windows). For RX 5000 Navi and Radeon VII, we recommend 20.5.1, though some users can test 20.7.1 if they wish (some bugs reported) Driver support is complicated though for Linux For Intel: Ubuntu 18.04/18.10: (intel) beginet beginet-opencl-icd (works for my UHD 600 on 18.10) Ubuntu 19.04/20.04: intel-opencl-icd ("NEO") For AMD: ROCM for 18.04 and newer for Open-Source drivers https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Installation_Guide/Installation-Guide.html Or, proprietary AMD drivers can be used if they are already installed. I personally have no experience with the proprietary Linux drivers https://linuxconfig.org/install-opencl-for-the-amdgpu-open-source-drivers-on-debian-and-ubuntu For Nvidia: Nvidia official/proprietary drivers of 400 or newer, but for Panorama (cuda) 418 is required currently. After installing the Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, you *must* install the nvidia-opencl-dev packages or the related OpenCL Nvidia headers on your distribution. This has caused major errors due to the OpenCL driver being installed by the package manager, but *not* what helps kaktwoos actually interact with it

57) Message boards : Number crunching : Are the size estimates accurate? (Message 269) Posted 15 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Absolutely, we're VRAM latency and core-clock / core bottlenecked. Bandwidth doesn't matter as much from what I saw super early on (I was surprised to see the same speed going from 480GB/s to 78GB/s HBM2) GDDR6 GPUs with worse compute than their previous gen (AMD RX 5700 vs my RX Vega 56 OC) perform the same or like 25-40% faster despite their similar gaming perf and worse compute perf in some situations than the previous GPUs So, we have to deal with NV: Turing(GDDR6), Pascal (GDDR5/X) and even Maxwell (GDDR5) AMD : RDNA Navi (GDDR6), GCN Vega(HBM2) and GCN Polaris (GDDR5) affecting our time/tflops per task estimates. There's also some in-task variances for some set of seeds/inputs due to cactus placement optimization as well

58) Message boards : Number crunching : Radeon VII CL_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY Error (Message 262) Posted 13 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: I got an idea, but can you try manually extracting or installing : https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/prographics/win10-radeon-pro-software-enterprise-20.q2.exe this driver? 19.6.2 is def on the older side and I use 19.11.2 without issue on my Vega 56... on Win 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhBLqTVxcBM for example. Issue is getting the updated OpenCL runtime but, give it a shot

59) Message boards : Number crunching : Radeon VII CL_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY Error (Message 259) Posted 13 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: Hi, stupid question but I see you're on Windows 8.1. Would it be possible to upgrade it to Windows 10? Or at the minimum upgrade / fresh install the latest AMD driver from the website What driver is your Radeon VII on anyways? We have a user with like a 'dozen' Radeon VIIs and they're all working fine on Kaktwoos-cl : Windows 10 and the 20.5.1/2 driver with no issues.

60) Message boards : Number crunching : Badges. And Stats Export (Message 229) Posted 8 Jul 2020 by Hy Post: I'm making a post just to see the badge I have

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