News archive

January 17, 2010, 09:35 CST
The Windows ATI v2.09 application has been made the standard appliciation. This version brings a slight performance inmprovement over v2.06 for HD 3xxx and HD 4xxx series cards and a larger performance improvement for HD 5xxx series cards. Note: This is the same version that has been available for the last two weeks as an optimized application.



January 9, 2010, 11:05 CST
With the help of a few volunteer testers (Paul and Zombie) and a special version of BOINC just for MAC OS X CUDA (thanks to Charlie), the first successful MAC OS X CUDA workunits were completed this morning. We are still working out some of the installation issues in attempts to make it as easy as possible, but the good news is IT WORKS!



January 5, 2010, 09:18 CST
Version 2.09 of the ATI application for Windows has been made available on the power/optimized applications page. This version should run a little faster on all ATI cards. Install now, or just be patient. Version 2.09 is slated to become the standard application for Windows ATI within the next week if no issues are found by those running it as a optimized application.



January 2, 2010, 11:00 CST
Version 2.08 of the ATI application for Windows has been made available. This version allows running an HD 5xxx card along side older series cards (HD 2xxx thru 4xxx) in the same machine. This version is currently available only as an optimized application. As was true with v2.07, there is no speed benefit to installing this for ATI HD 2xxx, 3xxx, or 4xxx series GPUs.



December 29, 2009, 22:58 CST
Version 2.07 of the ATI application for Windows has been made available on the power applications page. This version takes advantage of some new performance features of the RV8xx chipset used in HD 5xxx series ATI GPUs which should allow them to run faster than with the v2.06 application. While older (HD 2xxx thru HD 4xxx) GPUs will not see any speed improvement, this version will also work with those GPUs. Please take care when installing to download the appropriate versions for your operating system and Catalyst drivers. Please refer to the readme included in each zip file for more information. (Thanks Gipsel!)



December 28, 2009, 23:13 CST
A MAC OS X application is now available for those running a 64-bit version of OSX 10.5 or higher.



December 22, 2009, 23:58 CST
If the winter weather cooperates, I'll be visiting family over the holidays. Unlike the shepherds of old who kept watch over their flocks by night, I'll only be checking the server every day or two. Either way, peace on earth and good will towards crunchers!



December 21, 2009, 18:06 CST
Version 2.01 is now available for Mac OS 10.4 or later running on Intel processors.



November 29, 2009, 12:18 CST
The optimized applications page now has updated ATI and CUDA applications which run at normal priority.



November 27, 2009, 14:50 CST
The server migration has been completed. The backup/restore took a little longer than expected as did figuring out some of the permissions on the various directories but the BOINC WIKI pages came to the rescue again.



November 25, 2009, 08:28 CST
The Collatz project will be down for a few hours on Friday, November 27th in order to complete the migration to the new server.



November 22, 2009, 20:38 CST
The validator/transitioner backlog has been cleared. The database has been migrated to the new server which should reduce the I/O strain that caused the backlog in the first place.



November 12, 2009, 08:05 CST
For the next 10 days, there will be limited support and monitoring of the Collatz project while I am on vacation. I'll try and check it once or twice a day if Internet access is available.



November 5, 2009, 11:35 CST
Thanks to Crunch3r, Collatz now has an ATI application for the 64-bit linux platform. The application is available on the Optimized Applications page. It must be manually installed at this time. Please refer to the readme included in with the download for installation and testing instructions.



November 5, 2009, 00:26 CST
The size of the workunits was increased by 50% which should help those with high end GPUs cache more hours of work by increasing the runtime by 50%. It should also reduce the load on the server which has been needing constant attention lately to keep it running. Increasing the size of the workunit will also increase the total steps and therefore the credit in proportional to the increased size.



November 2, 2009, 14:23 CST
The ATI v2.06 application was released two weeks ago, but there are still users submitting results with ATI v2.05 applications which are known to cause the validator to crash. On Friday, November 6th, I will be intalling a new validator that will mark any ATI v2.05 results returned after Thursday, November 5th as invalid. Credit will not be granted. The result will be discarded and re-issued to another user.



October 26, 2009, 12:41 CST
The CUDA app for Linux 32-bit has been added to the Optimized Applications page and the app_info.xml for the 64-bit Linux CUDA app has also been corrected. (Thanks Crunch3r!)



October 20, 2009 15:37 CST
Give yourselves a pat on the back! Collatz participants from 72 countries have now completed more than one million Collatz workunits, returned more than 3.5 million results and, according to BOINCstats, earned over a billion BOINC credits. Thanks for contributing!



October 19, 2009, 20:42 CST
The project is back online after the outage this weekend. If you are using an ATI GPU and have not converted to v2.06 yet, you may want to do so now. Any WU that crashes the validator will be deleted. No credit awarded. After having manually fixed several hundred in the last 24 hours, I am tired of fixing. If you are using the standard ATI apps, the ATI 2.06 app has probably already downloaded and your have nothing to do. If you are running an app_info.xml and have not yet upgraded, you may want to do so as soon as possible. If the 2.05 results continue to crash the validator, I will change the validator to reject any new 2.05 results so that the project does not crash again next weekend.



October 14, 2009, 14:21 CST
An ATI v2.06 app has been made available in the optimized/power apps page. This version should reduce or maybe even eliminate the validator crashes as it uses the v2.xx encoding of the output file. Within the next couple days, this will become the standard (stock) ATI app as well.



October 7, 2009, 08:41 CST
The v2.05B apps have been installed as the standard ATI apps. They are also available from the Message Board at this thread and will be moved to the optimized applications page as well later on today.



October 6, 2009, 07:43 CST
Gipsel has provided an updated ATI appplication which is now available on the Power (Optimized) Applications page. For the list of specific changes, refer to the change log section of the readme.txt.



September 29, 2009, 21:11 CST
New v2.04 ATI app for Windows are available on the optimized applications page. If running the 9.2+ drivers, use the *ati.zip versions. If using 8.12 or 9.1 drivers, please use the *amd.zip versions. The new apps are faster and do not require copying and renaming the DLLs. If running BOINC 6.10.10 or higher with 9.2+ drivers installed, the v2.04 app will download automatically. See the readme.txt in each download for information on how you can tune it for your system using the app_info file.



September 29, 2009, 20:20 CST
A Linux 64bit CUDA version has been added and is available on the Power (Optimized) Applications page. I've included an app_info.xml file but the app info is untested. Please see the message board if you need assistance installing the Linux CUDA app.



September 28, 2009, 22:45 CST
The server has been upgraded to support the 6.10.10 clients. Issues should be logged to the message board at the BOINC alpha test message board. We will try to respond as fast as possible to resolve any issues found.



September 28, 2009, 10:39 CST
Thanks to Crunch3r, Linux apps should now be fixed to checkpoint correctly and they should now run on Ubuntu as well. The app version is 2.01 for the new Linux apps.



September 26, 2009, 15:18 CST
I planned on notifying everyone today that the project would be down tomorrow for some planned database maintenance, but since Comcast was kind enough to drop the network line for a couple hours today, I took advantage of the network outage and got the maintenance done at the same time.



September 23, 2009, 20:09 CST
It didn't make it to the weekend without running out of disk space. So, a new drive was added tonight and the database was migrated over to it. I will still need to reconfigure the database this weekend, but at least I don't have to keep tabs on it every several hours any more for fear it will run out of disk space.



September 20, 2009, 18:07 CST
The site is back up for now. The server is still pretty maxed out due to the mysql only growing and not ever shrinking. I will need to take the entire site down for a day in order to drop and rebuild the database so that it stores each table in its own innodb file as well as add more disk to the server. That is currently planned for next weekend.



September 20, 2009, 16:31 CST
The large number of WUs that are erroring out are causing a disk space problem. Hopefully the site will be back up shortly after the space issue is addressed.



September 19, 2009, 13:44 CST
Version 2.01 of the Collatz CUDA app is now available. It should fix the checkpoint problem where it returns the incorrect total steps after starting back up. Also, due network reconfiguration changes to hopefully help make the server more responsive, the IP address has once again changed which means you may need to stop and restart your BOINC client in order to upload/download/report results.



September 17, 2009, 13:04 CST
The v2.0 applications require CUDA 2.3 compatible drivers, so make sure you have the nVidia 190.38 or higher drivers installed. Also, if you ran CUDA apps using Collatz v1.10, you will need to reset or detach and reattach before you will be able to complete a CUDA workunit. This is required in order for the BOINC client to download the new cudartl.dll file. If it thinks you already have one (from v1.10 which is CUDA 2.1) it will not download it and, as a result, all CUDA workinits will fail.



September 17, 2009, 13:57 CST
Collatz applicaton version 2.0 is being released. Credits will be adjusted within the next day or so. When that happens, any results submitted with the v1.10 applications will receive reduced credit. In the mean time, you may either continue to process the existing workunits knowing you will receive reduced credit or abort them and start new ones using the new application version. Any aborted WUs will be resent using the new application version.



September 9, 2009, 12:31 CST
The database has been moved back to the original server due to numerous connection issues. Hopefully, it is back in business for good this time.



September 8, 2009, 21:29 CST
After numerous attempts to repair the database, I gave up. The database has been restored from backup also taken on the afternoon of Sept. 7th so very little if any data has been lost. The database was also moved to a server with more disk space so that I no longer have to monitor to disk usage daily and can spend more time on more productive endeavors such as v2.0 of the apps and automating the highest steps to date pages. Thanks for your patience.



September 7, 2009, 15:55 CST
Due to a complete power failure which lasted longer than the battery backup and since I wasn't around to start the generator, Collatz experienced a total crash. After power was restored, the server daemons fail when connecting to the database. An update message will be posted once it comes back online.



September 4, 2009, 19:25 CST
After a long, difficult life, we had to say goodbye to an old faithful friend. Mr. Micron, also known as IPCOP_1 had a fatal breakdown this afternoon. After several efforts to revive him, we had to call it at 14:33 CST. We will miss him dearly as he had been part of the family for almost 15 years. He is survived by his three 3c905 NIC cards, VGA controller, and KVM cable. Let us pray that the new replacement will continue on in his tradition of service.

Unfortunately, Comcast gave the new replacement a new IP address which has been known to cause problems with BOINC having cached the old address, so you may need to restart your BOINC client in order to report your results.



August 25, 2009, 14:24 CST
Congrats to mia7077 and 3D@P2D who have found a number with 2,134 steps.



August 17, 2009, 09:50 CST
The number with the most steps so far is 2,361,183,863,442,119,416,993 with 2,059 steps which has been confimed by the server. The two individuals who found the above number are Top Viking and Merlyn. Congrats!



August 12, 2009, 18:06 CST
The number with the most steps so far is 2,361,183,616,125,217,830,191 with 2,010 steps which has been confimed by the server. The two individuals who found the above number are Cappy@[SETI.USA] and mia777. Congrats!



July 27, 2009, 20:48 CST
Version 1.10 of the app has been released for Win32, Win64, Linux and CUDA. ATI (CAL) apps are also available for Win32 and Win64. Any results submitted from previous versions will NOT be granted credit as the output of the new version is no longer compatible with the previous version. So, if you have any workunits from prior to v1.10, you can go ahead and abort them.



July 12, 2009, 10:59 CST
Due to at least one unauthorized application being run, the work generator has been shut down. It will not be turned back on until the validator has been changed to ensure fully tested applications are being run and I checked previously returned results to double check their validity.



July 10, 2009, 19:02 CST
The invite code has been turned off so anyone can join. Email notifications are now working also.



July 10, 2009, 12:04 CST
Version 1.08 of the application has been released for ATI GPUs and are available in the Optimized Applications page. Details have been posted on the message board.



July 2, 2009, 23:40 CST
The CPU results were not matching the CUDA results by a very small difference. The validator has been modified to ignore the difference as the results were valid. Keep an eye on any results that show Completed but validation inconclusive. I may have to credit them manually.



July 1, 2009, 12:36 CST
Thanks to Crunch3r, the project now has MAC OSX and Linux x86_64 applications.



June 29, 2009, 08:09 CST
App version 1.07 released for win32, win64, win cuda, and linux. Several optimized apps were also released for win32 SSE and SSE2. The ATI app is slightly faster than the previous version but the CUDA app still has it beat. The WUs generated for app version 1.05 were cancelled but credit was awarded for those in a pending or inconclusive state since the output was correct but but validator had a bug.



June 22, 2009, 12:59 CST
App version 1.05 released for win32, win64, win cuda, and linux. Validation issues also solved due to new release. All previous workunits were cancelled. Credit was give to any in pending status.



June 17, 2009, 18:00 CST
Project URL changed to boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz and accounts are now set to invite only.



June 17, 2009, 17:52 CST
Workunits have been increased in size in order to support GPU processing without overloading the server. Run time on a PIII 800Mhz is 7 days. Run time on an nVidia 9800 GTX+ is about 12 minutes.



June 11, 2009, 20:15 GMT
The first 50 workunits were generated this afternoon. Hopefully more will come.



June 10, 2009, 11:50 GMT
The user of the day daemon is now running and the forums are set up.