Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On 6 Nov 2001, at 16:09, Gerry Snyder wrote: In a recent ethics briefing I was told that running seti@home on work PC's was a no-no because there had been three break-ins to computers using that program as a back door. No idea whether that is really the case, and no idea what communication scheme seti@home uses. Anyone familiar with this perceived problem? I went checked this out. There do appear to have been a few incidents involving seti@home. In one of these the server was hacked details of the participants were stolen; at least some of the e-mail addresses were subsequently used by spammers. This is of course a serious incident, but nowhere near as serious as the disclosure of credit card numbers and other personal information which happened last weekend due to a security breach of the Microsoft Passport system. In at least one other case a number of systems at a site were compromised by installation of the seti@home client - but only because a Back Orifice type trojan had somehow become attatched to the copy of the client concerned - N.B. _not_ a direct download from the seti@home site. This sort of thing has reportedly also happened several times with the RC5 client. Note that the risk of unofficial replacement of clients downloaded from the net can be virtually eliminated by computing the MD5 checksum of official binary images and posting this somewhere _before_ the binary itself is made available. The point is that it is almost impossible to modify a binary image without changing the MD5 checksum - in fact, to the best of my knowledge, this has not been demonstrated, even in a laboratory environment - a very great deal of trial and error would be required to match the 256 bit checksum; unlike some checksum algorithms, MD5 was designed to be reasonably quick to compute once, but impossibly expensive to compute a very large number of times. Virus checkers are pretty effective at detecting trojans, provided the virus database is kept up to date. Finally, reasonable configuration of a firewall (even a personal firewall product installed on the workstation itself) will prevent exploitation of a Back Orifice type trojan, even if one does manage to sneak in unnoticed - these work by creating a listener which allows those in the know to connect to the system using telnet, ssh or a similar protocol, using a non-standard port number. I have been unable to trace any instances of security breaches of user systems due to running official copies of the seti@home client, or dependent in any way on client/server communications. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Finally, reasonable configuration of a firewall (even a personal firewall product installed on the workstation itself) will prevent exploitation of a Back Orifice type trojan, even if one does manage to sneak in unnoticed - these work by creating a listener which allows those in the know to connect to the system using telnet, ssh or a similar protocol, using a non-standard port number. many of the newer remote control trojans connect out to a IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server (often using non-standard ports) and 'offer' themselves to the hackers rather than passively waiting for the hackers to connect to them. This will slip past a lot of firewalls. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 21:33:59 -0500, Rick Pali [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Aaron Blosser wrote: Good old sysinternals... they have the neatest tools. Damn straight! I've been using (and loving) PageDefrag since I stumbled on that site. A few other gems have since made their way onto my system... Rick. See also HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ClearPageFileAtShutdown This setting was put in place by a 'twink' program I tried a month or two back, and has been working great for me (marginally more secure too). Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Another other way to fix the problem is to have the compute- intensive process voluntarily relinquish its timeslice at intervals which are much shorter than the minimum timeslice (which is typically of the order of 200 ms). This reduces the efficiency of the compute-intensive task to some extent but does make it coexist better. I suppose it would be possible to build this into Prime95; if this is done I would like options to be multimedia friendly or optimally efficient - probably the best way to implement would be to have the code contain the relevant system calls but to NOOP over them if efficiency is demanded. I've made good experience with throwing a sched_yield() into the MFAC code. The machines MFAC was running on had a Linux 2.4 kernel which gives even niceness 19 process about 10% cpu when another normal niceness process is running, which some users complained about. I wasn't particularly careful where I put the sched_yield(), I think it was called far more often than neccesary (many times/ms) but the effect on performance was not that dramatic - about 5% slowdown. The overhead in the scheduler seems to be pretty low. With that, when another process was running, MFAC worked at about 1/1000 the normal speed, so it must have gotten less than 0.1 % cpu time. Users were happy again. Perhaps the performance loss can be reduced by placing the yield somewhere in the code where the data currently in cache is finished and new data must be read from memory. If another process wants to run, at least it'll throw data out of the cache that we dont need anymore anyways (let some other job do our dirty flushing). Alex _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On 30 Oct 2001, at 14:39, John R Pierce wrote: near as I can guess, the issue here is that Prime95 is running a few priority notches above idle and when another process tries to run at a lower priority it will stall behind prime95. Well - a process that keeps being preempted will tend to rise in priority a process that keeps preempting will tend to fall (unless it's running at real time priority) - so that might explain it. Reducing the timeslice would still help in the steady state when continuous heavy I/O is occurring, by reducing the proportion of the time the compute-intensive process has the CPU. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On 29 Oct 2001, at 19:37, John R Pierce wrote: I've had similar problems with a few other multimedia sorts of junkware. Near as I can tell, some of these things put their video or animation thread at Idle_Priority+1 or something, and it gets eaten alive by Prime95. Isn't it the old problem - no matter what priority a process is running at, unless it's interrupt driven it won't preempt a process running at a lower priority. The problem here is that the multimedia stuff wants to do a very little work but very often. It gets slowed down because Prime95 hangs on to the processor until its timeslice expires - it almost never has to wait for some external event. Ideally the multimedia stuff would be driven by timer interrupt. But for some reason (maybe something to do with there being a limited number of timer channels, and those having rather poor resolution) this approach seems to be quite rare on PC systems. One way to improve the performance in these circumstances is to reduce the minimum timeslice for low-priority processes. This will cause the task scheduler to be busier and therefore reduce the overall performance to some extent, but multimedia type applications will coexist much more happily with compute-intensive tasks if this is done. Sorry, I have no idea how to do this, or even whether it is possible, in any of the versions of Windows. The linux 2.4 kernel does this almost automatically, by having a much smaller minimum timeslice for idle-priority processes than for processes running above idle priority. (The timeslice is reduced again for processes running at unusually high priority, so that they can't hog the whole system quite so easily.) I believe the timeslice parameters are tunable (without having to recompile the kernel), but I have no personal experience of actually doing this. Another other way to fix the problem is to have the compute- intensive process voluntarily relinquish its timeslice at intervals which are much shorter than the minimum timeslice (which is typically of the order of 200 ms). This reduces the efficiency of the compute-intensive task to some extent but does make it coexist better. I suppose it would be possible to build this into Prime95; if this is done I would like options to be multimedia friendly or optimally efficient - probably the best way to implement would be to have the code contain the relevant system calls but to NOOP over them if efficiency is demanded. The remaining problem with this approach is that how often you would want to make these system calls would depend very heavily on the processor speed. Relinquishing the timeslice very frequently would enable even slow systems to run multimedia pretty seamlessly, but at a heavy cost on all systems. Placing the system calls in a position where they would be effective but not too costly, across a large range of processor speeds and a large range of FFT run lengths, would not be a trivial task. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
I've had similar problems with a few other multimedia sorts of junkware. Near as I can tell, some of these things put their video or animation thread at Idle_Priority+1 or something, and it gets eaten alive by Prime95. Isn't it the old problem - no matter what priority a process is running at, unless it's interrupt driven it won't preempt a process running at a lower priority. ... process and thread dispatching in MS Windows IS interrupt driven. Anything that causes a thread or process thats waiting to become ready will cause it to immediately dispatch if its the highest priority ready process, the system doesn't wait for the next major quantum tick. Multimedia stuff is either waiting on sound buffer events, or multimedia timer events (which have 1mS resolution) or disk IO buffer events, or software semaphore events, all of which are interrupt driven and will cause an immediate dispatch. near as I can guess, the issue here is that Prime95 is running a few priority notches above idle and when another process tries to run at a lower priority it will stall behind prime95. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
One way to improve the performance in these circumstances is to reduce the minimum timeslice for low-priority processes. This will cause the task scheduler to be busier and therefore reduce the overall performance to some extent, but multimedia type applications will coexist much more happily with compute-intensive tasks if this is done. Sorry, I have no idea how to do this, or even whether it is possible, in any of the versions of Windows. There is a program that can set the quanta for programs... let me find that durned thing... Aha. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/frob.shtml Good old sysinternals... they have the neatest tools. Apparently that's just for NT4 machines (I think...). For Win2K (and presumably XP?), they have another page that tells you about the settings on there, and to wait for a new version of Frob that works with win2k. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/info/nt5.shtml Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
SV: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Ups, by help from Brian Beesley and a little work with the time= I have it working now. I think it was my old paranoia from a time when I was not running the servers alone - I wouldn't let anyone know that a program like prime95 was active. Now I don't care as I have nobody but users to face. Thanks to all. Happy hunting tsc -Oprindelig meddelelse- Fra: George Woltman Sendt: ma 29-10-2001 22:47 Til: Torben Schlüntz Cc: Emne: Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating Hi, At 10:01 PM 10/29/2001 +0100, you wrote: I would like to use the servers; but I haven't been able to persuade George to make a Quit function like quit_at: 06:00 to terminate the program when users arrives and optimum performance is needed Look in readme.txt for the Time= entry in prime.ini This feature can be used to make prime95 go dormant at a specified time. Hope that helps, George _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Aaron Blosser wrote: Good old sysinternals... they have the neatest tools. Damn straight! I've been using (and loving) PageDefrag since I stumbled on that site. A few other gems have since made their way onto my system... Rick. -+--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alienshore.com/seeking/ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Thrashing (was Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating)
What will really slow a workstation or server down is running short of RAM. These days the working sets are getting appreciable as the exponents increase. NT scheduling will wake up the service version of ntprime every second I think and give it at least one quantum. If some more essential service or application needs nearly all available RAM for its working set, and the working set of ntprime is big enough it gets paged out, the disk thrashes wildly and performance can suffer greatly for both the ntprime service and the other service or application, even while the ntprime service only gets a percent or two of cpu time. This is not just a characteristic of NT, but a general property of virtual memory operating systems; eventually it's just too little ram or too much demand, leading to performance decline. Ken At 05:05 PM 10/29/2001 -0800, Aaron Blosser wrote: Still the only time I've ever seen Prime95/NTPrime slow down a system is when I was doing some Netmeeting video conferences. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Hi all, One thing to remember ppl, A LOT of system testers tend to use Prime95 to test overclocking/cooling. I'm sure that *many* abandoned assignments are due to this fact. Due to this usage (which I don't mind BTW, maybe a few will stay on and contribute, I did) I suggest that there be a switch added so that ppl can use Prime95 as a processor test but without ever getting real assignments, thus slowing down the project. Just my two cents. Alan On 27 Oct 2001, at 18:54, Henk Stokhorst wrote: Date sent: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 18:54:24 +0100 From: Henk Stokhorst [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Mersenne: number of processors participating L.S., I read a message some time ago on this list that claimed that the number of processors had gone down by about 9000. I don't have stats on this other than the actual available from the status pages. Does anyone have stats over the last year, like numer of pc's and/or processor types, processor speeds? If there would really have been a decrease in participating processors, (I don't think so) an updated graph of Primenet throughput would show by now, is there any update in the pipeline? I went through the status.txt file to see if the new 'stress test' button could have played a significant role, I don't think so. By the way if one runs prime95 without a user name the application fills in an S0 as user name. I found 3170 entries with a name '.' (only a dot) The fast majority of these entries seem to be have been abandoned. They have been reserved over a long time with a constant daily flow. Does anyone know more about this? YotN, Henk Stokhorst _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers A programmer is a person who turns coffee into software. Alan R. Vidmar Assistant Director of IT Office of Financial AidUniversity of Colorado [EMAIL PROTECTED](303)492-3598 *** This message printed with 100% recycled electrons *** _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 09:35:40 -0700, Alan Vidmar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, One thing to remember ppl, A LOT of system testers tend to use Prime95 to test overclocking/cooling. I'm sure that *many* abandoned assignments are due to this fact. Due to this usage (which I don't mind BTW, maybe a few will stay on and contribute, I did) I suggest that there be a switch added so that ppl can use Prime95 as a processor test but without ever getting real assignments, thus slowing down the project. This is already the case as of the latest version, IIRC. Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Alan Vidmar wrote: I suggest that there be a switch added so that ppl can use Prime95 as a processor test but without ever getting real assignments,... This is a VERY good suggestion. However it has already been implemented in the latest version (v21). That version contains more improvements so I wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to inform users through the occasional newsletter. Particulary because it gives a 10% improvement for Pentium I, II and III users and it skips P-1 if it has been done. YotN, Henk Stokhorst. PS those abandoned assignments do't slow down the project. They just scatter the work over a larger range. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
I admit I'm not that good in telling primenet what computers I have and what throughput rate to expect. eg.: I made 14 accounts all using the same 150 Mhz machine, though I knew none or only few would be 150 Mhz. These accounts all run occassionally, eg. in company holiday around the clock, outside of holiday more random. Over time I have been wiser to use more power of those machines staying awake all night anyway. :-) I would like to use the servers; but I haven't been able to persuade George to make a Quit function like quit_at: 06:00 to terminate the program when users arrives and optimum performance is needed (with no question what so ever about serverperformance); And I don't wake up at 6 to turn prime95 or anything else off unless there is a severe error reported by users. Happy hunting tsc -Oprindelig meddelelse- Fra: Henk Stokhorst Sendt: ma 29-10-2001 19:30 Til: Alan Vidmar; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Emne: Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating Alan Vidmar wrote: I suggest that there be a switch added so that ppl can use Prime95 as a processor test but without ever getting real assignments,... This is a VERY good suggestion. However it has already been implemented in the latest version (v21). That version contains more improvements so I wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to inform users through the occasional newsletter. Particulary because it gives a 10% improvement for Pentium I, II and III users and it skips P-1 if it has been done. YotN, Henk Stokhorst. PS those abandoned assignments do't slow down the project. They just scatter the work over a larger range. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
SV: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Yep! But the time entry only allows the program to sleep (still eating all CPU cycles even when running at zero priority). Take any NT 4.0 or W2K machine and you will see the system idle time doesn't add seconds while Prime95 still eats them (and doing nothing). For my servers to become prime95's I need to be sure they only run what I have planned at anytime. I can start Prime95 scheduled. I don't mind! But the users should never have one chance of claiming servers aren't available or even running slow. I know you are certain and I know you gotta be damn good at this (very far beyond anything I will ever manage); but still any doubt will become my users advantage. Make the sleepy nights for my servers glorius. I make them start prime95 by a schedule and You make prime95 die by harikiri - and I decide when everything happens. :-) Tnx in advance. Still happy hunting tsc -Oprindelig meddelelse- Fra: George Woltman Sendt: ma 29-10-2001 22:47 Til: Torben Schlüntz Cc: Emne: Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating Hi, At 10:01 PM 10/29/2001 +0100, you wrote: I would like to use the servers; but I haven't been able to persuade George to make a Quit function like quit_at: 06:00 to terminate the program when users arrives and optimum performance is needed Look in readme.txt for the Time= entry in prime.ini This feature can be used to make prime95 go dormant at a specified time. Hope that helps, George _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On 28 Oct 2001, at 0:28, Terry S. Arnold wrote: Another consideration is that many system/network administrators have gotten ludicrous about what they will allow on their networks. They think that Prime95 just might let in a virus or even worse spill company secrets. By and large they are totally ignorant of the real issues involved with securing networks. All most of them know about the implications of the various protocols in the TCP/IP suite was what it took get their MCSE if they have even that much training. As a system/network administrator specialising in security matters I just _have_ to answer this one. 1) It's perfectly true that there are a large proportion of sites with incompetent sysadmins - especially from the point of view of networking. Especially in small companies, where the sysadmin function tends to be bolted onto another job as a low-priority extra task. 2) AFAIK none of the MSCE courses cover security in any depth at all. In fact the approach seems to be the _reverse_ i.e. teach people how to set up administer systems in an unduly risky way, without even bothering to mention basic security tools or methodology because they're not essential to _Microsoft_ networking in a laboratory/classroom environment. Based on recent experiences with Code Red Nimda, 95% of the problems on our site came from the 1% of the systems located in business incubator centres attatched to the University but administered by the businesses themselves. Basically it's rare for these people even to be aware of most of the services running on their systems (anything that comes preloaded on the system gets run, irrespective of whether it's absolutely neccessary or absolutely unneccessary); as for applying critical updates, they seem to be trained to think one of (a) it's much too hard, (b) it will break the functionality, (c) they simply don't understand why they need to bother with such things. _Despite_ how easy it is to run Windows Update. The only way I've been able to get these people to apply updates is to get sanctioned to scan their systems for vulnerability to Code Red Nimda, block _all_ access to vulnerable systems until they get patched (or take down the IIS service). To my knowledge, many ISPs had to take similar action. At least _some_ universities Fortune 500 companies have competent sysadmins, but there are a whole lot of mom pop businesses out there; a high percentage of them would be an absolute pushover to anyone wearing a black hat, even if IIS installations have now mostly been patched to a reasonable level. As for distributed computing projects being a security risk - basically I think in many cases _management_ may be misusing security as a screen for filtering out anything _they_ don't understand. In my experience few of these people are aware of the scale of network _abuse_ (note, not _neccessarily_ a threat to security) that goes on by way of end users installing peer-to-peer file sharing software on their workstations; probably 99% of the files shared over these P2P networks are in effect illegal distributions of copyrighted material. They're certainly _not_ aware that Windows systems with e.g. Kazaa clients are quite capable of sharing not just the offending copyrighted material but also everything else on the system - or attatched to it through open LAN shares. Yes, including company secrets. Quite apart from that, the volume of traffic involved with these P2P networks can be huge, certainly enough to seriously impact network links. (Before anyone takes me to task on the above paragraph, quite frankly I am totally opposed to the DMCA, the proposed SSSCA and all similar legislation. But I am also opposed to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. IMO the force of the law should be applied against those individuals making the copies, not against those who write software or the posession of hardware which might possibly be used to make illegal copies.) Under these circumstances I find it hard to understand how anyone can think that compute-intensive, network-friendly applications can be a problem. As for letting in a virus - if people really thought that, they just wouldn't use Microsoft products. How much of a threat was Code Red or Nimda infection on a system which wasn't running Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Internet Information Server or (in the case of Nimda) Microsoft Internet Explorer? Well, _other_ infected systems might load up your network to some extent, but _your_ system certainly wasn't going to get infected! Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On 29 Oct 2001, at 19:30, Henk Stokhorst wrote: [... snip ...] However it has already been implemented in the latest version (v21). That version contains more improvements so I wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to inform users through the occasional newsletter. Particulary because it gives a 10% improvement for Pentium I, II and III users and it skips P-1 if it has been done. Umm - I haven't noticed any significant improvement in v21 speed on Pentium or Pentium II - the big changes are implementing prefetch, which is only applicable to AMD Athlon family, PIII and faster Celeron processors, and exploiting the SSE2 instruction set on Pentium 4 only. Apart from (sometimes) skipping P-1, the changes between v20 and v21 are pretty well cosmetic if you're using a 486 / Cyrix / AMD K6 / Intel Pentium (Classic or MMX) / Pentium Pro / Pentium II / Celeron 533 MHz CPU. There _are_ some other changes - including a bit of fine tuning of the exponent / FFT run length size breaks - but nothing which really makes an upgrade look inescapable. In fact, these older systems are more likely to have a memory constraint than newer systems with faster processors; due to the inclusion of the Pentium 4 specific SSE2 code, the v21 binary has a significantly bigger memory footprint, so systems which won't benefit from the prefetch code which are feeling memory pressure might be better _not_ upgrading. The speed improvement from v20 to v21 on a PIII or Athlon system should be somewhere close to 25%, rather than 10%. On these systems an upgrade seems highly desirable. If you're still running v20 (or earlier) on a Pentium 4, then quite frankly you really SHOULD upgrade. NOW. The execution speed will approximately treble. As for reduced participation - whilst other reasons certainly do have an effect, I've previously mentioned two other possible reasons: (1) adverse publicity stemming from the prosecution of a sysadmin for running RC5 clients on his systems without the agreement of the management at the college which employed him; (2) steep rises in electricity prices and unreliability of supply in some places e.g. USA West Coast deterring people from running extended jobs. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Still the only time I've ever seen Prime95/NTPrime slow down a system is when I was doing some Netmeeting video conferences. With it running, the video conference would run DOG slow. Stop the NTPrime service and curiously had to restart the video conference for the effect, but the video would then be running great. That was with, umm.. version 20 I think? I haven't tried again with later versions... wasn't one of the things George did something to do with the priority setting? I've had similar problems with a few other multimedia sorts of junkware. Near as I can tell, some of these things put their video or animation thread at Idle_Priority+1 or something, and it gets eaten alive by Prime95. -jrp _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 17:05:02 -0800, Aaron Blosser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still the only time I've ever seen Prime95/NTPrime slow down a system is when I was doing some Netmeeting video conferences. With it running, the video conference would run DOG slow. Stop the NTPrime service and curiously had to restart the video conference for the effect, but the video would then be running great. That was with, umm.. version 20 I think? I haven't tried again with later versions... wasn't one of the things George did something to do with the priority setting? Aaron Out of curiousity, have you tried tinkering with the thread priorities of the programs in question? I find the utility bvslice (http://www.blueneptune.com/~maznliz/marius/software.shtml) to be quite useful. Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
My take is that due to the long test times the instant gratification that used to come fairly quickly even on a most speed machine is no longer there. This will turn off a lot of casual testers. In spite of this the total production keeps climbing. The last time I looked PrimeNet was just over 2 TFLOP. I guess that before long only the hard care testers will be left. Most of them have a number of machines running and many cases several of these are high end machines. Another consideration is that many system/network administrators have gotten ludicrous about what they will allow on their networks. They think that Prime95 just might let in a virus or even worse spill company secrets. By and large they are totally ignorant of the real issues involved with securing networks. All most of them know about the implications of the various protocols in the TCP/IP suite was what it took get their MCSE if they have even that much training. Been around GIMPS since before PrimeNet. Terry At 01:19 AM 10/28/2001 -0400, you wrote: (Sorry Steve, I meant to send this to the list) On Sat, 27 Oct 2001 21:11:51 -0500, Steve Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Henk, I don't have a consistent set of statistics, but I do save the world test status page every few months. So I can tell you that on 2-apr-2001 it showed 38652 machines on 20983 accounts, and right now it shows 30186 machines on 15659 accounts. I'm sure I didn't just happen to catch it at its peak; I recall there being over 21000 accounts at one time. My first guess is that we're beginning to compete with the various commercial projects (of which there are several now, and were none 2 years or so ago). It's hard for me to envision that causing a fifth of the participants to leave, though! Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _Terry S. Arnold 2975 B Street San Diego, CA 92102 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (619) 235-8181 (voice) (619) 235-0016 (fax) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Speaking only for myself. My take is that due to the long test times the instant gratification that used to come fairly quickly even on a most speed machine is no longer there. This will turn off a lot of casual testers. This is certainly one reason why my contribution (the MSRC team) has halved the amount of computation dedicated to GIMPS. It's not the major one, though. Another consideration is that many system/network administrators have gotten ludicrous about what they will allow on their networks. They think The major reason is that I no longer build the workstations for our researchers, and so I no longer get to install the NT service version by default! Another, very important reason is that there are a number of other CNT projects in progress to which I contribute and/or organize. It might not be too tactful to proselytize here, so I won't go into detail. However, some of the stuff we do is eminently suitable for 486 and low-end pentium machines. Drop me a mail if you may be interested. Been around GIMPS since before PrimeNet. Ditto. Paul _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: number of processors participating
L.S., I read a message some time ago on this list that claimed that the number of processors had gone down by about 9000. I don't have stats on this other than the actual available from the status pages. Does anyone have stats over the last year, like numer of pc's and/or processor types, processor speeds? If there would really have been a decrease in participating processors, (I don't think so) an updated graph of Primenet throughput would show by now, is there any update in the pipeline? I went through the status.txt file to see if the new 'stress test' button could have played a significant role, I don't think so. By the way if one runs prime95 without a user name the application fills in an S0 as user name. I found 3170 entries with a name '.' (only a dot) The fast majority of these entries seem to be have been abandoned. They have been reserved over a long time with a constant daily flow. Does anyone know more about this? YotN, Henk Stokhorst _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
Henk, I don't have a consistent set of statistics, but I do save the world test status page every few months. So I can tell you that on 2-apr-2001 it showed 38652 machines on 20983 accounts, and right now it shows 30186 machines on 15659 accounts. I'm sure I didn't just happen to catch it at its peak; I recall there being over 21000 accounts at one time. WRT team '.', I recall a few months ago it seemed to be holding up some double-checks at the low end of the assignments, but it did eventually complete them all. Steve Harris -Original Message- From: Henk Stokhorst [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Saturday, October 27, 2001 1:20 PM Subject: Mersenne: number of processors participating L.S., I read a message some time ago on this list that claimed that the number of processors had gone down by about 9000. I don't have stats on this other than the actual available from the status pages. Does anyone have stats over the last year, like numer of pc's and/or processor types, processor speeds? If there would really have been a decrease in participating processors, (I don't think so) an updated graph of Primenet throughput would show by now, is there any update in the pipeline? I went through the status.txt file to see if the new 'stress test' button could have played a significant role, I don't think so. By the way if one runs prime95 without a user name the application fills in an S0 as user name. I found 3170 entries with a name '.' (only a dot) The fast majority of these entries seem to be have been abandoned. They have been reserved over a long time with a constant daily flow. Does anyone know more about this? YotN, Henk Stokhorst _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: number of processors participating
(Sorry Steve, I meant to send this to the list) On Sat, 27 Oct 2001 21:11:51 -0500, Steve Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Henk, I don't have a consistent set of statistics, but I do save the world test status page every few months. So I can tell you that on 2-apr-2001 it showed 38652 machines on 20983 accounts, and right now it shows 30186 machines on 15659 accounts. I'm sure I didn't just happen to catch it at its peak; I recall there being over 21000 accounts at one time. My first guess is that we're beginning to compete with the various commercial projects (of which there are several now, and were none 2 years or so ago). It's hard for me to envision that causing a fifth of the participants to leave, though! Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
