Any plans to investigate a 64-bit application as S@H Beta has?

Thanks.

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I wasn't aware Eric Korpela was working on a 64 bit edition of the Application for Seti beta. I'd believe it was being worked on by third parties, but haven't seen it from Eric. Can anyone confirm? Yes, I'm already also on teh Seti Beta message board and will ask/confirm there.

tony

So far, two projects have added support for x86-64: SETI sends the x86 application and SIMAP, a true x86-64 application. Would you consider supporting the platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu similarly?

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So far, two projects have added support for x86-64: SETI sends the x86 application and SIMAP, a true x86-64 application. Would you consider supporting the platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu similarly?

Chess960 now supports AMD64 with a native Linux application too...

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Good evening, Augustine

What is the effect of running the 64 bit as opposed to the 32 bit versions of these applications?

The reason I ask is that I understand that it would not necessarliy speed things up, hence get through more work.

But then I believe "Folding@Home" tested a 64 bit version of their application that was a bit faster than their 32 bit one.

However, notwithstanding this, if there was ever to be a 64 bit version of Rosetta, which would of course need testing via Ralph, I know of at least one person who'd volunteer!

Martin

Martin,

I did the AMD64 port of the SETI Classic application. Right off the bat, it was about 15% faster. Later, as all AMD64 processors support SSE, I added some vectorized code which improved it by other 10%. Although it was too late to add it to SETI Classic, it became the basis for some experiments at SETI Beta before FFTW was used instead. But now that even GCC can generate vectorized code, taking advantage of SSE is even more attractive. And on AMD64 it's not necessary to go through hoops to go around the lack of SSE support.

More recent Linux distros and Windows also provide faster and more accurate math routines for AMD64.

Therefore, there's a potential performance improvement that can be achieved by just recompiling the application for AMD64.

BOINC 5.5 is said to consider CPU capabilities and if AMD64 support is one of them then even a 32-bit core client would be able to run AMD64 applications.

I have a 4P AMD64 system running both the 32-bit and the 64-bit core clients, with 2P each. As you can see, the one running the 64-bit Chess960 application is considerably faster than the other.

I wish I had SIMAP results too, but the AMD64 system is a production server whose kernel version is deemed too old by the AMD64 application. The advantage is that SIMAP WUs have a fixed amount of processing each, making comparisons straight-forward.

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So far, two projects have added support for x86-64: SETI sends the x86 application and SIMAP, a true x86-64 application. Would you consider supporting the platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu similarly?

Chess960 now supports AMD64 with a native Linux application too...

HashClash now supports AMD64 with a 32-bit Linux application...

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I have a 4P AMD64 system running both the 32-bit and the 64-bit core clients, with 2P each....

I wish I had SIMAP results too, but the AMD64 system is a production server whose kernel version is deemed too old by the AMD64 application. The advantage is that SIMAP WUs have a fixed amount of processing each, making comparisons straight-forward.

Now that SIMAP is releasing WUs for the HMMER application, I can compare the performance of the 32-bit and the 64-bit applications. Again, the 64-bit application. running on the same server, is about 7% faster.

They used GCC 3.3.3 though. Had they used GCC 4, they could have enabled vectorization for the 64-bit application and the difference would be even greater. All that using a freely available compiler with no hoops to go through...

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So far, two projects have added support for x86-64: SETI sends the x86 application and SIMAP, a true x86-64 application. Would you consider supporting the platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu similarly?

Chess960 now supports AMD64 with a native Linux application too...

HashClash now supports AMD64 with a 32-bit Linux application...

HashClash now supports AMD64 on Windows with a 32-bit application...

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FWIW, running two instances of the client, one the 32-bit client, the other, the 64-bit client, on the same 4-core system, but limiting each client to 2 cores, I can compare the relative performance of 32-bit and 64-bit SIMAP's HMMER: the 64-bit version is about 7% faster.

By enabling vectorization (supported by default on AMD64), the SIMAP developers observed other 8% improvement.

Bottom line: porting the project application to AMD64 has the potential to improve performance by 15%!

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So far, two projects have added support for x86-64: SETI sends the x86 application and SIMAP, a true x86-64 application. Would you consider supporting the platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu similarly?

Chess960 now supports AMD64 with a native Linux application too...

HashClash now supports AMD64 with a 32-bit Linux application...

HashClash now supports AMD64 on Windows with a 32-bit application...

Guess what? Leiden Classical now supports AMD64 on Linux with a 32-bit application. ;-)

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Here's a development version of the x86-64 Linux client:

• Untar the file boinc_5.10.10_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.tgz at the BOINC working directory.
  
• Read the file "README.x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".
  

The official client for x64 Windows client can be found at boinc_5.10.13_windows_x86_64.exe.

The BOINC client 5.10 can now get 32-bit applications from projects that haven't added support for AMD64 (e.g., Lattice, QMC, etc), provided that they run at least the BOINC server 5.0.9. However, such AMD64 clients for Windows may not get applications from some projects that supported AMD64 before due to a platform name change, at least until such projects are updated.

For more information, see the BoincStats Forum.

HTH

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Even though there's an official AMD64 client for Linux, it refers to too many dynamic libraries and requires a fairly recent Linux setup to run on.

So, one more time, I'm making available the AMD64 Linux client here. It refers to a minimal set of standard dynamic libraries whose version requirements should be satisfied by Linux systems up to 2 or 3 years old, however it was built with a fairly recent version of GCC, 4.1.2.

The drill's still the same:

• Untar the file "boinc_5.10.30_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.tgz" at an existing BOINC working directory.
  
• Read the file "README.x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".
  

The official AMD64 Windows client can be found here.

For more information, see the BoincStats Forum.

HTH

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Create. Thanks for the AMD64 client !