Software Update: Boinc 6.10.17

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is a distributed computing platform and is available for Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, and Windows. A number of projects make use of this platform, such as SETI@home, rosetta@home, Leiden Classical and Hydrogen@Home. For more information about the how and what of Boinc, we refer you to this page. The developers released a new version for the different platforms a few days ago with 6.10.17 as the version number. The list of changes since the previous entry in the Meuktracker looks like this:

Version 6.10.17:

• Support added for ATI GPUs.
• Support for automatic proxy detection on Windows.
• Improvements to the CPU/GPU scheduler.
• A new default screen saver.

Version 6.6.41:

• client: fix crashing bug introduced in [18605]
• client (Linux): when launching apps, put a relative path to the executable (../../projects/x/y) into argv[0], not just the executable filename.
• MGR: Fix initial first connection problem on startup.

Version 6.6.40:

• client: fix compiler warning (too few args for print format)
• Mac: fix compile breaks
• client (Unix): fix bug that caused GPU reservation to not work. The problem: we were doing the reservation after the fork(), so that the data structure it changed was the app’s, not the client’s.
• MGR: on Linux, check list of running processes from procinfo_setup() to determine if BOINC core client is running.
• MGR: on Linux, accept 2 optional arguments: -clientdir or -e for directory containing client executable, default is the directory containing the manager executable. -datadir or -d for BOINC data directory, default is the directory containing the client executable. These are used by the manager when launching the client.
• MGR: Bug fixes for Linux.

Version 6.6.39:

• client: add a bunch of debugging messages () for showing how GPU instances are being reserved

Version 6.6.38:

• Mac Installer: use escaped form of branded screensaver name when needed.
• GUI RPC: add get_message_seqno() RPC. fixes #931
• client: error if a in app_info.xml has any URLs
• client: don’t write file_infos with no URLs to client_state.xml for anon platform project; they must be from app_info.xml
• client: restored code for project-wide backoff on file uploads and downloads. Fixes #932.
• client: if malloc fails in MFILE writes, exit. Fixes #281
• client: code cleanup for project-level file xfer backoff
• client/manager/GUI RPC: show project-level backoffs
• client: changed file upload logic
• client: if file < 8KB, upload it in its entirety and skip size check
• client: don’t skip file size check if file has multiple upload URLs. We might have uploaded different amounts on different servers.
• client: change the way a resource’s “estimated delay” (passed to server for crude deadline check) is computed.

Version 6.6.37:

• MGR: use branded Manager name in async RPC Please Wait dialog.
• Mac: Update copyright date in InfoPlist?.strings files to 2009.
• Mac MGR: strip /n from command field of PROCINFO struct so log flag works properly on Mac.
• MGR: Change CBOINCClientManager::KillClient?() to get client pid from procinfo_setup() on all non-Windows platforms.
• Mac Sandbox: check_security() writes path of bad file to stderr for some error codes.
• Mac MGR: fix compile break.
• MGR: Compile fix.
• client: include device number in message describing NVIDIA GPU, and call it “NVIDIA GPU” rather than “CUDA device” fixes #879
• client: tweak messages
• client: Fix missing argument in printf statements.
• fix to the above
• Mac Installer: Delete any old PTP branded versions.
• client: prepend rather than append to LD_LIBRARY_PATH; on Mac, change DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH also.
• MGR: Fix Mac compile error in addition of DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH.
• MGR: Fix a long standing bug where the project list control for the account manager info page and the project info page was not consuming available screen space. Previously we hacked around it by setting an explicit size. Note: this works on Windows, I don’t yet know about Mac and Linux.
• MGR: Fix fatal error which caused crash in Account Manager Wizard.
• client: when suspending a GPU job, always remove it from memory, even if it hasn’t checkpointed. Otherwise we’ll typically run another GPU job right away, and it will bomb out or revert to CPU mode because it can’t allocate video RAM
• MGR: Remove project list randomization, sort on name.
• MGR: Previous sorting method wasn’t working, use a sort function pointer instead.
• client: record the time results are received. Process non-EDF GPU jobs in this order.