Linux + boinc != Match made in heaven...:(

[narzy]

anyone have any good help for getting boinc running correctly in linux? I'm using ubuntu if that helps. I've tried the help from the offical rosetta site, but I fear it was written by a programmer (makes no sense.) lil help here.

 

[kb3edk]

Yeah I've had some real dodgy results running BOINC on Linux myself. Case in point: I have an overclocked Athlon XP box (Barton 2800+ @ 2.375 GHz) which, while running Windows, just scorches through BOINC SIMAP WUs in 26 or 27 minutes. When this box was running Ubuntu there was a bit of a dropoff, more like 29 or 30 minutes (probably just the Linux executable), but the points per WU dropped from 6 on Windows to only 2 in Linux!!! :disgust:

This is because the BOINC benchmarking code is badly broken for Linux. It is not optimized at all. My floating point benchmark went from 1913 mips down to 1196, and my integer benchmark went from 3236 mips all the way down to 1960!

The solution is to find an "optimized" Linux client that will give you a more accurate measurement of how powerful your CPU really is. I know one has been made for SETI BOINC but I am not sure how well it works (if at all) on other BOINC projects. In any case since I have not crunched SETI in a while I never bothered to try it out. So I recommend doing a Google search on "Linux BOINC optimized client", etc. to see what the latest developments are.

Has anyone else here on the TeAm tried any optimized BOINC clients on Linux?