This Month in MLC@Home
Notes for Oct 23 2021
A monthly(-ish) summary of news and notes for MLC@Home

Summary
It's been a while since the last update! But there's been a lot going on. From DS2 slowly working through its backlog, to backend updates for maintainability that went a little awry, DS4 backend work, and DS3 analysis.

First, two weeks ago we had a mishap with the WU generation, and "continuation" WUs were sent with the wrong parameters leading to computation failures. It took us a few days to fix and clear up, but no data was lost. We've been updating and modernizing our backend scripts to consolidate them and make them less fragile (this is a good thing for maintainability!), and one of our updates went awry. Thank you for your patience while we worked it out. We've had a pretty good track record until now, so I hope you'll continue to support us in the future despite this setback. We're looking for new ways to test these further to avoid similar issues in the future.

The majority of the work over the past few months has been analyzing DS3 data. We've been updating the existing paper with the full DS3 analysis. It is disk, bandwidth, and memory intensive on our backend, and sadly isn't quite as easy to break up into WUs to distribute over BOINC. In fact, just tar/gzip-ing the entrie DS3 dataset (2.6TB) takes over 24 hours, since it's over 4 million small files. We will be making all of DS3 this available as a torrent soon. I've been posting updates on this on our Discord server if you're interested.

Since we've been focesed on DS3 and modernizing our backend/management scripts, DS4 has suffered. I wish I could say that DS4 WUs are flowing but they aren't yet. Everything is in place, we just need to start the tests.

Thanks again for your continued support, and know that while these updates have been coming slower, that doesn't mean work isn't being happening behind the scenes!

Other News

• We've also spent some time trying to port the new statically-linked client to CUDA and ROCM, neither of which have worked so far. The Windows CUDA client should be a standard recompile, but the Linux clients did not compile and link as planned and need some more work.
  
• We're starting to see SPAM in the forums. To combat this, we've disabled posting in any thread except "Issue Discussion" unless you have at least 100 credits. If you see things that look like spam in the forums, please press the report button to report it as such and we'll take care of is as soon as we can.
  
• The ARM64-specific client also isn't ready, because of a strange linker error with the size of the static binary. Honestly, we're not sure how to make it work. If you know about Linux linking with large relocations on ARM64, please get in contact with us. Until then, please run the ARMHF client (32-bit) on 64-bit ARM systems.
  
• Many thanks to Delta for his tireless work on modernizing out backend. We already have a new database access for both the BOINC database and our MLDS-specific MongoDB database thanks to his work, and soon we'll be consolidating 21 different scripts into a small handful.
  
• Reminder: the MLC client is open source, and has an issues list at gitlab. If you're a programmer or data scientist and want to help, feel free to look over the issues and submit a pull request.
  

Project status snapshot:
(note these numbers are approximations)






Last month's TMIM Notes: Aug 6 2021

Thanks again to all our volunteers!

-- The MLC@Home Admins(s)
Homepage: https://www.mlcathome.org/
Discord invite: https://discord.gg/BdE4PGpX2y
Twitter: @MLCHome2