Software Update: Boinc 6.6.36

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 grid 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 6.6.36 as the version number. The corresponding list of changes looks like this:

Version 6.6.36:

• client: read app_info.xml’s AFTER scanning GPUs. Otherwise we’ll discard all GPU apps and results.

Version 6.6.35:

• MGR: CBOINCClientManager::ProcessExists?() finds the process by name if we don’t have a pid (Mac, Linux) or process HANDLE (Windows). On Mac and Linux, it returns the pid if the process was found.
• MGR: Use code like get_client_mutex() to determine if client is running. New CBOINCClientManager::KillClient?() uses process name to kill client if we don’t have a pid (Mac, Linux) or process HANDLE (Windows). NOTE: Windows implementation not yet finished.
• MGR: Implement CBOINCClientManager::KillClient?() and IsBOINCClient() for Windows. NOTE: I have confirmed that the “ps -a -x -c -o command,pid” command as used in IsBOINCRunning() should works in Ubuntu under VMWare, but it needs to be tested on other Linux platforms.
• lib: Fix FILE_LOCK::unlock() to reset fd to -1 so FILE_LOCK works correctly with repeated calls.
• MGR: Fix compiler error on Windows.
• lib: Fix compiler error on Windows. *Mac MGR: In Async RPC logic, use posix mutexes and conditions instead of wxWidgets implementations on the Mac, as this appears to fix an intermittent hang in wxCondition::Wait().
• lib: FILE_LOCK::lock() makes lockfile group-writable so both client and manager can create and write it under sandbox security.

Version 6.6.34:

• client: if scheduler request didn’t request work, don’t report 0 tasks
• client: show “est. delay” correctly in work fetch debug msgs
• client: show times correctly in rr_sim debug msgs
• client: in “requesting new tasks” msg, say what resources we’re requesting (if there’s more than CPU)
• client: estimated delay was possibly being calculated incorrectly because of roundoff error
• client: add a 1e-6 slop factor in deciding if a resource is fully utilized.
• client: when parsing app_info.xml, make sure coprocessors are present. fixes #911

Version 6.6.33:

• client: include plan class in other_result list in sched request (for resource-specific jobs-in-progress limit)

Version 6.6.32:

• MGR: fix display problem when talking to old clients
• MGR: In Async RPC logic, change calling order for wxCondition and wxMutex from to be consistent with examples in literature, hoping this might fix an intermittent hang in wxConition::Wait().

Version 6.6.31:

• client: fixed nasty bug that caused GPU jobs to crash on startup when they’re preempting another GPU job. The problem was as follows:
  • job A is chosen to preempt job B
  • we tell job B to quit, and initialize job A but don’t start it; however, we set if scheduler state to SCHEDULED (rather than UNINITIALIZED)
  • job B exits, and we start job A. Since its state is not UNITIALIZED, we don’t set up its slot dir.
  • job A runs in an empty slot dir, doesn’t find its files, and bombs out.
• client: add option (prints messages about allocation of slots, creating/removing files in slot dirs).