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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: Optimized projects ? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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Exar Kun [HoloNet]
Advanced Cruncher France Joined: May 30, 2007 Post Count: 52 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I just saw that a recent optimized SETI app can improve the calculation time by 2 or 3 times, regarding the CPU.
----------------------------------------I know that no WCG projet is currently using such optimized applications, maybe it's not interesting regarding the "small lifetime" of WCG projects. But do you know if some people are currently working on optimized app (even outside WCG) ? For the longest WCG projects it would be interesting to have such optimized code... Thank you :)   [Edit 1 times, last edit by Exar Kun [HoloNet] at Jun 26, 2008 3:55:43 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
All the science projects are constantly optimizing their applications.
Just look at the project websites for more info. |
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Exar Kun [HoloNet]
Advanced Cruncher France Joined: May 30, 2007 Post Count: 52 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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All the science projects are constantly optimizing their applications. Just look at the project websites for more info. SETI optimizations are specific apps for Intel or AMD CPU, SS3, SSSE3x, etc. This means that "real" optimizations must be built for specific hardware, or am I wrong ? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello Exar Kun [HoloNet],
Optimizing for specific machine instructions is difficult. For one thing, it is likely to produce slightly different floating point results. BOINC has been updated to return the CPU specifics to the server, but we do not make use of it. We would have to maintain many versions of each project application. The improved number of results would not compensate for the cost of additional personnel to maintain programs and server queues. (At least, that is my opinion.) We have already gone far along this path by supporting Linux, Mac (PPC and x86) and Windows. Lawrence |
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Exar Kun [HoloNet]
Advanced Cruncher France Joined: May 30, 2007 Post Count: 52 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thank you for your answer, Lawrence.
----------------------------------------I understand that anything has a cost, and an optimized app for SSE3 instruction set (for example), for a specified WCG project, would be costly. I think that SETI is a project far longer than WCG ones, but some WCG projets are long, too. I saw that the optimized SETI app are made by another person and not by the Scientist Teams; so I hope that a little genius can make the same with WCG, it would be great ;) And a GPU client too, please ;) |
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Dmitrio
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Sep 6, 2007 Post Count: 68 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Hi!
----------------------------------------2lawrencehardin I suppose, that except for Mac PPCs, all other systems use either AMD or Intel processors. And as far as I now, they do have some similar extensions. For ex., all of them make use of MMX extensions. And I think that even the oldiest computer crunching do have a MMX support :). So, independently from the project, software can use MMX. Also both Intel and AMD CPUs have SSE, SSE2, SSE3 support. Of cource, not all crunching machines have support of all of these extentions. But if 90% of them have an SSE and SSE2 support, and these extentions will give 10-20% benefit to a project - I suppose it's worth of efforts of supporting 2 versions of application. Also, as I understand, there are projects that use 1 core application or SDK. So if such support would be implemented in this "core app", then more than 1 project would benefit from it. Everything I've written is not that WCG, or you, lawrence, are fooling us or that you are lazy guys. It's just I think that not everything so simple  Dmitrio  [Edit 1 times, last edit by Dmitrio at Jun 27, 2008 10:33:53 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi, Dmitrio. Are you volunteering to write an optimised science application? If so, we can talk. AutoDock is now open source, and anyone can improve it.
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Dmitrio
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Sep 6, 2007 Post Count: 68 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Hi!
----------------------------------------2Didactylos Though I am a programmer, I'm not so good at low-level CPU programming to implement such CPU extentions support. Instead I'm already a kind of CA for DC teams from Ukraine, which want to participate in WCG. Also I offered my services in helping translate WCG site to russian language. So I'm doing my best to help. Dmitrio |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
You do, and we appreciate it. Thanks!
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