Posted 3 Jan 2022 by
valterc
I moved it out of beta some months ago and found that in some cases it doesn't work well (maybe not updated BIOS). Therefore I prefer to keep it as beta, letting the (smart) users to try it. Anyway, the possible speed gain while using it is not so noticeable (in many cases).
Posted 18 Dec 2021 by
valterc
Just removed a few, less than ten, "zero size" files from the upload folder. Please tell me if some upload doesn't get through,
Posted 30 Nov 2021 by
valterc
There were a lot of tasks in the upload folder with zero size that, for some reasons, were left there in a "strange" state by the NFS file system (the usual storage problem). I deleted them all and this should allow the upload correctly (I tried with one of mines and it worked...)
Posted 25 Nov 2021 by
valterc
Seems to be storage server issues again. Keep getting backed off on uploads.
Yes, again... Unfortunately I don't know any other detail, yet...
Posted 23 Nov 2021 by
valterc
Although the current focus of our job is on the Homo sapiens genome, in the recent past we also ran some gene expansion experiments on the Vitis vinifera organism. We are still evaluating those results, in collaboration with the Edmund Mach Foundation and the Universitat de València (Spain), also involving some students.
We are pleased to inform you that our article "Vitis OneGenE: A Causality-Based Approach to Generate Gene Networks in Vitis vinifera Sheds Light on the Laccase and Dirigent Gene Families" has been published in Biomolecules as part of the Special Issue Gene Regulatory Networks Controlling Secondary Metabolism in Plants: Computational Approaches and Mechanistic Insights and is available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/11/12/1744
Thank you all for your invaluable contribution!
Posted 13 Nov 2021 by
valterc
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/travel/fly-fishing-italy.html
The University of Trento is about 50 km from Bassano del Grappa, the next time you are over there.
I have visited that town many times, it is on the road from Trento to the sea. We are actually surrounded by lakes, rivers and beautiful mountains.
Posted 10 Nov 2021 by
valterc
Any recent news from the university on their storage problem?
I've never been out of work on this project till now.
They are working on it, but it seems that they don't know the origin of the problem. A new storage system has been ordered but delayed due to legal issues....
I will wait until the end of this week, then I will try to switch from the NFS UniTN storage to a local one (not that big but reliable). It will unfortunately take some time to do that, every file operation affecting that storage is painfully slow...
In the meantime you may see the work generator working, from time to time
[EDIT] It seems that people of UniTN were able to fix the storage problem. Let's hope it lasts.
Posted 25 Oct 2021 by
valterc
We are still facing the "storage" problem. Everything, sometimes, is painfully slow (I temporarily disabled the work generator)
Posted 25 Oct 2021 by
valterc
The University of Trento storage system, that we use, is having problems, sometimes it get stuck and the whole BOINC system slows down... They are working on fixing it, there is nothing that we can do meanwhile
Posted 18 Oct 2021 by
valterc
Good news!!!
Really looking forward to that, as my computers are starting to get very hungry now! :-)
Btw., I can see that there where no stats exported to BoincStats today. Is that issue also related to the failing storage system?
I had also to stop all the BOINC's server cron activities...
Posted 15 Oct 2021 by
valterc
Well, I really don't know what's behind the University storage system (hardware, configuration, etc.), we just use it :)
BTW, it seems that the system is slowly recovering, when the numbers in the project status page will be close to zero I will try to start the work generator again and see if it will work as usual.
Posted 14 Oct 2021 by
valterc
The University's storage system (that we heavily use) is having big performance issues thus everything is painfully slow. I stopped the work generator, which actually was not working because of this. No new tasks will be generated until the assimilator will be able to move the finished results to the proper place. There is nothing else to do but wait until the problem will be solved, no ETA, unfortunately.
Posted 14 Oct 2021 by
valterc
The University is having big issues with its storage system (we heavily use it in the BOINC pipeline), so everything was slowing down until our server became practically stuck. We are working to solve this problem...
Posted 6 Oct 2021 by
valterc
One software technician of the University of Trento will shortly attend a dedicated training course offered by AMD about HIP/ROCm, this will eventually provide us some needed skills in order to develop a GPU application
Posted 11 Sep 2021 by
valterc
The current server is a virtualized 4 cores AMD Opteron with 4G RAM, not that easy to run a project on it. The new one, a Xeon Gold 6238R, is here. The project should be moved this October (hopefully). This won't, however, completely solve our (slow) work generation problem, we will gain some raw speed because of the upgraded hardware but the real change will be a new optimized and parallel generator (no ETA on this...).
The AMD funding is actually free access to some big computational resources (mainly devoted to machine learning). It's is a very useful asset for our research but not related to the BOINC server.
Posted 9 Aug 2021 by
valterc
We use "redundancy" (two results from different computers must be exactly the same) in order to check if a workunit is "valid" (successful computation). If not a third copy of the workunit is sent to another computer. At the end, if two results are identical they are declared "OK" and all the others are marked "invalid".
So, an "invalid" is, briefly, a computation that reached its normal end but with something wrong in it, usually incorrect numeric calculations. There are many possible reasons for getting an "invalid", like overheating or a faulty hardware component. In this case I suggest to run a stress test, like Prime95, on your computer and check the results.
There is also a known bug in our code that may flag a result as invalid, this may happen if you stop your calculation at the very beginning, before the first checkpoint.
Posted 29 Jul 2021 by
valterc
Got a database error and the work generator stopped, hopefully just a harmless server glitch... Sorry for having catched this after one day (you know, summer vacation...)
Posted 24 Jun 2021 by
valterc
Hi, any update on this? I confirm that my old phone is still crunching h24 without any error. I think it's safe to add official support to Android in order to allow also users with unrooted phone to participate too.
OK, I completely forgot about this... I will hang a post-it in the proper place...
Is this ever going to be done??
You are right... I will hang a bigger post-it...
Posted 21 Jun 2021 by
valterc
Hi bozz4science, we don't plan to move TN-Grid server's components to the AMD computational node, so you won't see it on the server's status page. We recently bought one server for this purpose. The AMD node will probably be stressed this September, focusing on ML techniques, when we will start classes at the University. Right now we do just small experiments on it, also using BOINC.
Posted 21 Jun 2021 by
valterc
On my FX-8370, FMA jobs fail.I guess that in your case a MB BIOS upgrade might help.
http://gene.disi.unitn.it/test/results.php?hostid=49138&offset=0&show_names=0&state=6&appid=
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0, BIOS latest version 2901.
Well, I don't know how to solve your particular problem... In the meantime I moved the FMA Win64 application to beta again. If someone would like to give it a try please enable beta applications in your TN-Grid preferences.