Warning

Some optimized Boinc and SETI/boinc binaries for Linux

Disclaimer

Can't do without it these days, so here it goes:

These binaries are provided as is. No guarantees about proper operation can be given. Only you will be to blame if binaries cash your computer, damage data or hardware, kick your dog or insult your mother.

I did some limited testing of binaries below and they do work for me, both correctly and faster than corresponding original binaries. The binaries may or may not run on particular CPU. Before dropping-in selected binary in place of official one, you might want to test them for correct operation.

You might ask yourself: how do I use this stuff?

Note for proud AMD processor owners

The binaries available from this page are optimized for Intel processors. They do offer some gain also for AMD processors. But you really want to have a look at Ned Slider's pages.
Contents of sections Verification and Miscelaneous are still valid and worth to read.

Contents

Basic info

BOINC CC v5.2.13 binaries

SETI/boinc binaries

Verification

Miscelaneous

Some benchmarks - BOINC CC

Some times - Seti

Basic info

Here you can download some Boinc and SETI/boinc binaries for Linux. Common characteristics of all binaries include:

• are graphics-less
• ia32 binaries compiled using Intel CC version 8.1
• are fully static
• are fully optimized to the extent allowed for a given hardware architecture and CPU type.
• source of Boinc CC version 5.2.13 is boinc_core_release_5_2_13a branch as of 2005-11-30
• source of SETI/boinc (IPP) version is snapshot as of 2005-06-12. Additional sources for support of IPP are included in this file. They were kindly provided by Tetsuji Maverick Rai.
  For more information about IPP see here.


• if you want to run seti on an Intel Pentium III processor, you may want to check Ned's excellent i686 binary (be sure to get version 4.07.3 or later) as it sems to be the fastest binary for that platform around. I'm not sure about Pentium II or older.

BOINC CC v5.2.13 binaries

SETI/boinc binaries

Verification

It's quite important to verify proper execution of chosen binary. In my opinion, the way to do it is to crunch some WU with known good result. Luckily project developers provided us one and is included in source code tree. You don't have to download whole source code just to verify execution of custom binaries. Instead follow these two links to get needed files:

• Reference work unit: reference_work_unit.sah
• Reference result: reference_result_unit.sah

After you download selected SETI/boinc cruncher and the two files above, create a new directory and put all three files in it. Then rename reference work unit to work_unit.sah and set executable bit for cruncher binary.
Now you can run the cruncher binary like this:

    ./setiathome-4.07.i686-pc-linux-gnu

Miscelaneous

• You don't have to manually check the MD5 sums. You can get all of them in a single file instead.
  Afterwards, simply run md5sum -c md5sum and check the output.
• I've made a simple script to create proper app_info.xml file (see anonymous platform documentation). It does some error checking and spews contents of app_info.xml file to stdout.
  
  Usage example: ./app_info.sh > app_info.xml
  
  It includes support for work units already downloaded for official SETI science application (4.02 as of time I'm writing this).
• The reason for me running P2-optimized binaries on my P3 machines is that P3-optimized binaries are in fact slower than P2 binaries (see below).
  I don't know for sure what's the reason, but it just might be that Intel CC performs lousy optimizations for their own processors. I don't really care.

Some benchmarks - BOINC CC

Some times - Seti

1. This is a dual-boot machine, so the times are pretty much directly comparable between Linux and Windows crunchers.
   This machine has a HT enabled CPU. During tests HT was disabled though. Tests were (unlike all the rest) run on otherwise idle machine.
   Interesting enough is that CPU times don't differ very much regardless of HT setting (enabled or disabled) when machine is idle otherwise.
2. I minimized graphics window (which pops-up upon start of setiathome cruncher app). This way it is supposed to skip all graphics-specific code and only spend CPU cycles on scientific work.