Mac OS X PowerPC on Einstein@Home

Bernd Machenschalk
Bernd Machenschalk
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Topic 198070

It's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain compatibility with the oldest computing platform on Einstein@Home while the (Gravitational Wave) application gets more and more tuned and optimized to take full advantage of modern computing clusters.

Therefore the current "S6BucketFU2UB" will probably be the last application of the Gravitational Wave search that will have a version for PPC Macs.

However, being a fan of this platform I still intend to continue to supply "work" for it on Einstein@Home. Later today I plan to deploy and test a PPC Mac application version for the Arecibo Binary Radio Pulsar search (BRP4).

This application version will have the same basic requirements as the current GW one (AltiVec CPU (G4 or G5), Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5). We didn't manage to build our "new" graphics application for that old platform (yet), so this application version will have no graphics at all.

If you don't want to (test) run this particular application version on your PPC Mac, please opt-out of the application in your Einstein@Home preferences. Note that this might lead to you not getting work at all after "S6BucketFU2UB" is finished.

BM

BM

Nigel Garvey
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Mac OS X PowerPC on Einstein@Home

Quote:
Therefore the current "S6BucketFU2UB" will probably be the last application of the Gravitational Wave search that will have a version for PPC Macs.

:(

Quote:
However, being still a fan of this platform I still intend to continue to supply "work" for it on Einstein@Home. Later today I plan to deploy and test a PPC Mac application version for the Arecibo Binary Radio Pulsar search (BRP4).

Thank you! :)

NG

poppageek
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Maybe my humble Mac Mini will

Maybe my humble Mac Mini will have completed it's second work unit by then. LOL First one took awhile http://einsteinathome.org/host/11877498/tasks.

Thanks for supporting this platform. Might be poky but it does get there. Eventually....

Cheers!

Bernd Machenschalk
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The first two builds (1.52

The first two builds (1.52 and 1.53) of the BRP4 PPC app had technical issues and errored out right after start. 1.54 works technically, but validation is rather poor (~51% pass). Disabled again while investigating.

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BM

Bernd Machenschalk
Bernd Machenschalk
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With the end of S6BucketFU2

With the end of S6BucketFU2 we run out of (current) work for PowerPC Macs. I don't think I will enable PowerPC app versions for the announced FU3 run, as the machines probably can't make the tight deadline and thus wouldn't get work anyway.

Instead I built and published another PowerPC app version (1.57) for BRP4, which looks more promising in validation of a few hand-picked tasks. Let's see how validation goes on a larger scale.

BM

BM

Bernd Machenschalk
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Ooops - 1.57 (still) produces

Ooops - 1.57 (still) produces lots of debug output. Sorry, deprecated. Will publish 1.58.

BM

BM

noderaser
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I was surprised to see

I was surprised to see Einstein listed as a PowerPC Mac OS project over at WUprop, and found this topic as a result... I thought you had dropped PPC support almost two years ago? Guess I'll have to put my old G5 back on the project when I return home from my work trip. It doesn't get used as much as it used to, but it still puts in a trickle of BOINC work.

That leaves 5 project (not including WUprop itself) that are still issuing work for OS X PPC... Frankly, more than I expected but good to see there's still some support.

Patrick Massey
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Indeed.  When I get my Quad

Indeed.  When I get my Quad G5 running again I'll be adding it to this project since Milkyway no longer does PPC and SIMAP ended.  Now if I could find a project that ran on Solaris on SPARC, I've got quite a bit of horsepower on that platform that could be shared...

"Apollo was astonished, Dionysus thought me mad. But they heard my story further and they wondered and were sad."

Christian Beer
Christian Beer
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Please note that with the

Please note that with the change towards SSL encrypted communication between your BOINC Client and our project Server you may not be able to participate with an outdated Version of OSX for PPC because it doesn't support the SSL version we use.

noderaser
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I don't see any PPC users

I don't see any PPC users reporting in to WUprop anymore; I think Enigma still has a PowerPC client as well. I could check, still have a PowerBook G4 ready to go down in the basement. However, there's only about nine months of work left at Enigma with no future plans.

Gaurav Khanna
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Seems like if you simply

Seems like if you simply update the ca-bundle.crt on the old Mac, that does the trick. I still have my G4 Cube running OSX 10.4 still crunching .. :-)

https://einsteinathome.org/host/12247173

Thanks for your support of such legacy systems, Bernd. Much appreciated. 

 

 

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