Page 1 of 1

HowdyDoody

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 4:51 pm
by Zed
Hiya y'all

I'm a dedicated Setiathomer, been running it on everything that I can get away with for nearly 19 years now. Currently running on a pair of 8 core 4GHz thingies, with GTX950 and 970 thingy-thingies. Seems to do nicely.

LINUX - it's the only sensible solution! In computing, follow-my-leader is often a good attitude. I've learned most, nay all of what I know (and was a professional programmer for 21 years) by peering over smarter shoulders than mine. On the choice of operating system, I peer over the shoulders of those running a trillion dollar spacecraft. They threw 'doze off the ISS years ago. I took the plunge and lunged into debian. I'll admit it was uphill for a while, but now I can't imagine going back to Bill's Big Bloat. Recently I've managed to dispose of the last "app" that I needed 'doze for, when I replaced Cakewalk with Musescore.

My systems weren't built for setiathome - it's a render farm really, but I like to keep it busy. I have four more 8 core thingies in boxes somewhere, but there's only room for two under my bed in the homeless hostel where I have to live at the moment. Hrumph. Things will be better one day. Presently entertaining myself with trying to work out how to run a splined speed profile along a splined path, to make (hopefully) amazing animations with thousands of lego bricks without growing old(er) trying to fit them all together. It's a big pile of impossible integrals, so it's all Runge-Kutta and binary-search backwards through splines and stuff. Going nicely.

The "Watchguard" poxy proxy thingy they run here is pathetic - it denied me access to this forum because it was uncategorized. The stunning piece of deviousness and sleuth-like leger-de-main that got me past that was to put ?a=b on the end of the URL and to "oops discover" the open squid proxy, which seems to cause it to miss the uncat check. Pathetic. Poor old Watchguard. The only good thing about it is that setiathome gets through!

Setiathome is like fishing, just waiting for a bite. I've been fishing for a long time. Personally I don't believe I ever will catch anything, but there's only one way to find out.

I would say "Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse" but I missed my chance!

Good luck y'all, and may you never be homeless.

Re: HowdyDoody

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 5:15 pm
by UBT - Timbo
Hi Zed

Welcome to the UBT forum.

Great to hear from you...and well done for persevering with WatchGuard....I don't know the thingy myself but I can understand the technicalities of it...so, you've done well to get here.

Keep on crunching and if we can be of any help, then just ask away :-)

regards
Tim

Re: HowdyDoody

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 5:23 pm
by Woodles
Hi Zed,

Welcome to the forums.

I also started off on SETI but sadly, we had a bit of a falling out a few years back and it's now one of only two projects that I'm reluctant to crunch. A few "thingies" there, must be fun :)

Linux is the sensible choice for most things, cheaper (free!) and plays better with older hardware but Windows does handle multiple, different manufacturers GPUs better on Boinc. Even so, I've not gone past Windows 7 if I can help it. Only wish I had the time to get in to Linux better, at present I have a few dual boot systems but the Linux side of it has been set up by following careful instructions and then left alone "as it works".

I have two systems that are general purpose and for work but other than that, most of my systems WERE built for crunching. I don't have the same space contraints as you though.

Sounds like an interesting animation, way beyond anything that I could even think of attempting (but then, I'm a hardware engineer not a software one)

Good to see new blood on the forums, make yourself at home and welcome.

Mark