Is there an optimized version of SETI@home for AMD processors?

[Nick]

as title


Nick

 

[Ken g6]

No, and you're not the only one who wants one. Here's an article from Armin Lenz, one of the founders of DCypher, about this problem: http://www.fullon3d.com/opinionated/issue20.shtml

 

[dawks]

As far as I know, the latest version of SETI, 2.xx Does not have any special SSE code, ie. 3DNow!, or PIII SSE.

I have heard rumors that the new version, due out sometime, no idea when, might have SSE code in it.

 

[dawks]

Ack, Kenny beat me to it.

 

[Assimilator1]

Hmmm ,thats the 1st time I've heard of an SSE optimised clients.

One thing that article totally misses out is the upcoming new client which will search for additional signal types ,this will make better use of the cpu power avialable to them.Also (hopefully!) when they release the new client it won't be too much slower than current clients.They estimate 25% maximium.
BTW ,don't take v3b(v2.66) WU times as any indication of the final release WU times! ,Windows version anyway.

BTW ,his point about global warming would apply to ALL distributed computing projects

Nick

Whilst there isn't a 3D Now SETI version ,there is a non-intel client avialable ,I've heard varying reports of it on Athlon systems ,some say they are slightly faster ,others notice no difference.

BTW are you in a SETI team?

 

[Nick]

Assimilator1

Yeah, i'm on the NC state team. The reason I was asking is because I and trying to figure out why my friend's P3-450 is killing my Athlon @ 750 (1/2 cache). I have done some looking around and I did find an article at Team Lambchop's Seti page about the Athlon being bad about cache latency but I'm still wondering how this dude is beating me. I'm running the latest command line client.

nick

 

[BLACKBEARD]

Version 2.0 was more friendly to my athlon than version 2.4.
See if you can find the version 2.0 client, it runs about 20
mins. faster on my machine than the 2.4.

Also see if you can crank the front side bus up some, that helps
more than than absolute processor speed on the athlon.

If you want even better times, set up a ram drive, this really works!
Athlons seem to really lose it when they have to talk to the
hard drive while proccessing a work unit.


johnk

 

[Assimilator1]

Nick

At those high cpu clock speeds ,memory bus speed & latencies make a big difference.
Assuming your PC remains stable ,try lowering the CAS/RAS latency(in bios) from 3 to 2.Riase the FSB as high as you can (in small steps).

My fathers Athlon 700 on an ABit KA7 ,PC133 RAM set to fast & CAS2 averages WU times at about 6.5hrs

Blackbeard

>>>Athlons seem to really lose it when they have to talk to the
hard drive while proccessing a work unit.<<<

(You didn't install the VIA bus mastering drivers did you?)

Assuming this is true ,then how on earth can you get faster times with v2.0 CLi? ,v2.4 accesses the HDD much less than v2.0 ,whilst I haven't tried on an Athlon system yet ,I have noticed that v2.4 is slighly quicker on a Celeron system.
Something odd is going on there!

 

[Nick]

Thanks guys, you all have some good ideas and advice. First off, how do you setup a ramdrive in win98. I've tried this already and it complained about needing an extended memory manager like HIMEM, but won't Win98se have a prob with that?

also, i'm running on a GA-7IX board so FSB is stuck at 100. Also, my ram is already CAS2 so I don't know how much more I could do for it.

anyway, thanks again

nick

 

[Assimilator1]

BTW what are your WU times?

 

[Nick]

Here are a couple from my last 10 WU's.

8 hr 07 min 39.6 sec
8 hr 17 min 05.7 sec
8 hr 44 min 21.5 sec
8 hr 38 min 05.5 sec

it usually stays around there with the occasional 9 and sometimes will spike up to 10 or 12 but rarely. But, check out a couple of my friend's P3-450 results.

7 hr 42 min 45.5 sec
7 hr 49 min 51.8 sec
8 hr 20 min 51.7 sec
7 hr 10 min 36.3 sec

I'm just not getting this?

thanks,
nick

 

[Assimilator1]

Nick

Those PIII 450 times look about right ,your cpu times are rather high.
What version of SETI are you using?
What other programs have you got running alongside?
Use this program to see how much cpu utilisation SETI is getting.

http://www.iarsn.com/index.html#/register.html

You should be getting around 95-97% with nothing much else running.
Here's the last 10WU's from my fathers Athlon 700 on a KX133 board.

7/13 Thu 1:00am 396d06a0 qresult.32 6h35m42s COLIN
7/13 Thu 7:37am 396d6397 qresult.33 6h36m37s COLIN
7/13 Thu 2:24pm 396dc2f6 qresult.34 6h44m18s COLIN
7/13 Thu 8:46pm 396e1ca1 qresult.35 6h22m34s COLIN
7/14 Fri 3:32am 396e7bd5 qresult.36 6h46m10s COLIN
7/14 Fri 10:16am 396eda60 qresult.37 6h43m22s COLIN
7/14 Fri 4:32pm 396f3292 qresult.38 6h16m16s COLIN
7/14 Fri 11:56pm 396f9a9a qresult.39 6h50m53s COLIN
7/15 Sat 6:26am 396ff621 qresult.40 6h30m30s COLIN
7/15 Sat 1:28pm 397058da qresult.41 6h55m04s COLIN
7/15 Sat 10:04pm 3970d1e4 qresult.42 6h47m16s COLIN

Damn ,I didn't know that Taskinfo 2000 was a paying 1 now ,try this 1 instead for a freebie.

http://atm.idic.caos.it/higheng.html

 

[Nick]

COLIN,

Thanks for the info...I thought my times were a little longer than they should be. My system is running: Mcafee antivirus, Rain, ICQ, and Motherboard monitor 4. I'm going to download the task manager and see what's up. Do you think any of the above progs could be stealing from the seti usage?

thanks,
nick

 

[Nick]

Assimilator1

That last one was for you, I accidentally pasted colin from your seti times...opsss

Nick

 

[Assimilator1]

no probs

>>>My system is running: Mcafee antivirus, Rain, ICQ, and Motherboard monitor 4.....Do you think any of the above progs could be stealing from the seti usage?<<<<

I also use Rain,ICQ &amp; MBM these take very little cpu time ,just make sure that MBM isn't polling more than every 3 secs though ,I don't have a virus monitor running in the back ground so I don't know about that 1.ATM will soon tell you

 

[Nick]

Assimilator1

ATM puts Seti at 99% usage with the occassional drop because of MBM probing for temps and fan speeds. I have MBM set at every 20 seconds and just about everything else is nearly 0% at idle. It does show the Seti process at an IDLE state, this might be normal but just seemed odd. Anyway, i don't see any reason why I'm getting such slow speeds.....who knows.

nick

 

[BLACKBEARD]

Assimilator, No on the via drivers, on benchmsrks they lower the
cpu utiization, but overall performance seems to suffer. I quit
using them.

I have two machines, #1 is a 500 atlon-sd-11, #2 is a 750 athlon
abit-ka7.

The 750 was only a little bit faster than the 500 when wu's were
run from the harddrive @100mhz. 20 maybe 30 mins.

I ran about 10 wu's with version 2.4 on the 500, The wu's seemed to
process about 15 to 20 mins. slower. At the same time a friend at
work said that his machines were running faster. Go figure.
(friend runs intel machines exclusively)

I write this not to whine and snivel about code optimization, but
these are the results I got.

More in another post

johnk

 

[BLACKBEARD]

Nick

When I get sobered up I will look at my config and see what I can do.
I got my info from a sheet which left me dazed an confused.
As I remember now I had to load Hi-mem.sys to get it to work.

I run win98, not se, and the major pain which I have not resolved
yet is getting the client to update to the harddrive about once
an hour or so. I do it manually or not at all, which means that if
my machine bombs I lose all the work. (nothing ventured-nothing
gained)

To me it looks like seti likes all the resouces it can get. I run
no monitors and no virus programs. I load nothing at boot except
what I need. On a 750 starting my apps after boot is quick enough
for me.

johnk

 

[Kwatt]

Nick

I have not tried this. But it may be what your looking for.

http://199.217.92.26/Details/Grap/ramdiskshot.htm


EDIT: It is shareware.

 

[Nick]

Thanks guys....
-Kwatt
I'll take a look at that ramdisk thing and

-BLACKBEARD
when ya find you notes let me know.

I still puzzled as to my worse than average performance, even for an athlon. Could it have anything to do what that bug in the chipset which was later called &quot;super-bypass?&quot; My board, GA-7IX, did not support the fix. I've even gone as far as disabling the &quot;CACHE SYSTEM BIOS&quot; and &quot;CACHE VIDEO&quot; in the bios. I read that allowing those to cache would increase your time but i'm not for sure if its actually helping.

Anyway, back to the drawing board...

nick

 

[BLACKBEARD]

Notes as I can find them are below:

(Add to config.sys)

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\EMM386.EXE
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\RAMDRIVE.SYS /E 2248

(Add to autoexec.bat)

F:
MKDIR SETI
C:


(This is save.bat)

xcopy32 f:\seti c:\seti /e /q

(This is ramdrive.bat)

xcopy32 c:\seti f:\seti /e /q




I could not find my sheet of instructions, but these files must
be in your root directory. Understand that the drive letter assignment
depends upon the hardware in your system. Select a drive letter
for these files which comes after your last drive. eg., if your
cd-rom is drive f: then edit all drive references to g:

Also, directory (or directory assingments) should be in the root
directory also. The config.sys line containing the ramdrive
statement /E 2248 determines the size of the ramdrive.

The c:\seti folder will contain the seti client.

Set ramdrive.bat to load the wu. at startup.(ramdrive.bat runs at
startup)

I have not been able to get this to auto-save from the ramdrive
to the c:\seti while the client is running. In order to do an orderly
shut-down, I use CTRL-C to shut down the client on the ramdrive and
then run Save.bat from the C: drive after, I repeat after deleting
the contents of the c:\seti directory.

I know that this is a kludge and could be vastly improved with
some batch file work, but it does work.

More later, I am glad I ran across your thread, since I did not know
that I had lost my instructions and would have been lost had my sys
crashed. It gave me the chance to start piecing this together.

I had to edit this as it appeared to have characters in the files
which did not belong

johnk

 

[BLACKBEARD]

Sorry folks, I managed to double post!

johnk

 

[Assimilator1]

Blackbeard

>>>To me it looks like seti likes all the resouces it can get. I run
no monitors and no virus programs<<<<

I run MBM4.17 &amp; Tclockex on my fathers Athlon 700 &amp; I still get WU times of 6.5hrs (CLi v2.4),MBM polls every 3 secs.It takes a minute amount of resources which will make no noitceable difference to the WU times.Also I have piece of mind in that if CPU temps go too high MBM will shut down the PC

BTW the VIA Bus mastering drivers perform worse than the std MS drivers.Also even if you use the VIA uninstall program it still might not remove the VIA drivers ,this info is on there website ,I'll post a link if you need it

 

[Nick]

Assimilator1

I'm running on a GA-7IX with the amdide drivers and agp port divers installed. You think this could be slowing my processing?

thanks,
nick

 

[Assimilator1]

Nick

You DO want the VIA AGP drives ,but you DON'T want the VIA bus mastering drivers ,this will degrade your HDD performance compared to the std MS drivers.Unless you have Win 95a! (or NT3 too ,I think).

Either way ,it won't effect your SETI times ,HDD performance has little effect on SETI times ,eg I have a PII 233 @ 280MHz with an old 450Mb HDD ,I get WU times of 10.5 hrs on that .
I'm due to switch to a 20Gb ATA66 drive on that machine soon ,if I'm wrong about that I'll post here again with new WU times ,if not ,I won't!