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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Completed Research
Forum: Help Conquer Cancer
Thread: Why no work for Mac PowerPC? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 8
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mwgiii
Advanced Cruncher United States Joined: Aug 17, 2006 Post Count: 131 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I have an iMac G5 PowerPC 1.8 GHz with 1.25 GB ram running OSX 10.3.9. I have noticed that since mid January I have not been receiving any work from HCC. I am running Boinc 5.10.34.
----------------------------------------I receive these messages: Fri Feb 22 18:32:18 2008|World Community Grid|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work Fri Feb 22 18:32:18 2008|World Community Grid|Requesting 28069 seconds of new work Fri Feb 22 18:32:23 2008|World Community Grid|Scheduler RPC succeeded [server version 509] Fri Feb 22 18:32:23 2008|World Community Grid|Message from server: No work could be sent. Fri Feb 22 18:32:23 2008|World Community Grid|Message from server: (there was work for other platforms) My Mac Powerbook with an Intel is still receiving work along with my PCs. Anyone have a clue what the problem might be?   [Edit 1 times, last edit by mwgiii at Feb 23, 2008 3:19:32 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello mwgiii,
The last I heard was on 12 Decx 2007 when armstrdj posted that he intended to test a new HCC for Mac OS X in a few weeks. But people just do not say much about Mac PPC, so I will query the staff. Don't expect any answers before Monday. Lawrence |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello mwgiii, The last I heard was on 12 Decx 2007 when armstrdj posted that he intended to test a new HCC for Mac OS X in a few weeks. But people just do not say much about Mac PPC, so I will query the staff. Don't expect any answers before Monday. Lawrence Could this have been postponed due to the work unit lockups we've been seeing on the mac (both ppc and intel)? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I'm actually a bit surprised to find out that the work units are targetted to a specific platform. I would have thought that the BOINC agent, which is specific to each platform, would have been able to process a generic work unit for a project. I know that adding another layer to the process would slow things down a bit, but perhap for the sake of ease in handling work units or ease in creating new projects, there should be an interpreter layer so that all platforms can handle the same work unit. It can't be that bad because Apple somehow was able to create efficient interpreters to successfully transition from 68K processors to PPC processors to Intel processors, allowing loyal Mac users to port over many of their old programs without a performance hit.
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
No, BOINC is only a 'housekeeper' managing the work streams but does zero zilch for the science computations and they never had intention, nor could they ever, build a universal translator. Much of the sciences run by the many Distributed Computing projects are closed source, few open source.
----------------------------------------Except for HPF2, WCG use the Homogeneous Redundancy method when needing quorum (bit for bit comparison). Each platform, even Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 produce slightly different results. The programmers are miffed about Steve J because it complicated distribution (Dear Steve of course only considered the porting of his own software and did not tell the world e.g. that Leopard IS different). WCG are though hoping to identify the cause and code around the differences at least to get all the Apple OS, except the PPC, to produce identical result. PPC is really on its way out and too small to continue supporting for much longer.
WCG
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mwgiii
Advanced Cruncher United States Joined: Aug 17, 2006 Post Count: 131 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks for the info Sekerob.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
It's just a matter of time before Apple stops support on the Power PC processor. When that happens everyone will stop supporting it including WCG, I suspect. I believe that time is rapidly approaching. My advice to PPC Mac users is to dump their system on eBay and go get yourself a Intel based Mac. As soon as I can find my original box in the garage I will be taking pictures and putting mine on eBay.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Well, yesterday, I just completed the last WCG workunit that I will do on my 867MHz PowerBook G4. In part, because I could not get HCC workunits, but also because the workunits I could get, FAAH and DDDT, took a long time to run, over a day and almost two days. I am leaving the crunching to my idle Wintel 1.66GHz Duo Core.
But a 1.8GHz iMac G5 is hardly obsolete. In fact, my 5 year old 867MHz G4 still has several years of life in it, just not for crunching WCG workunits. I just upgraded the RAM to see if it would help it to crunch, but no luck there. Everything else that I use my G4 for still works perfectly fine, if not better than ever since I upgraded my RAM. A couple years ago, I bumped into a friend who was just thinking about upgrading from a first generation 68K Mac. If your computer does what you need it to do, then it's not obsolete. I constantly use my Mac, so using it to crunch was also a bit of an inconvenience. But anyone with an idle PowerPC can consider crunching for FAAH and DDDT, or even other non-WCG BOINC projects. Don't pack it up for eBay just yet. |
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