Today afternoon, I worked on setting up a sorting option allowing you to sort my finished BOINC tasks by date and by host, or one of them in the Finished BOINC Tasks section of my website.
The result looks like this:
You can, for example, select the tasks that’s been processed today, for my AMD Ryzen machine, and you’ll get this:
Note that I’m not an expert at HTML or CSS, but I’ve managed to bring this functionality to my site for all of you to enjoy.
That’s right! I’m already at position #8 in the Cosmology@Home challenge:
And that’s why I also made the Finished BOINC Tasks section at my website, so everyone can keep track of my completed BOINC Tasks 😁, as I sometimes get asked what hardware I use to crunch tasks that allow me to go up in the leaderboards 🙂.
That’s all!
New Gridcoin BOINC Challenge: Cosmology@Home – Installing VirtualBox and configuring the project
Today, a new BOINC challenge for the project Cosmology@Home started. This challenge was issued by Team Gridcoin:
I went ahead and added my machines to this project, only to realize I need VirtualBox installed:
So in order to crunch tasks for this project, I went to install VirtualBox as well as configure the project. Here I detail you the installation and optional configuration process, which is really simple:
2. Because I’m using Windows, I’ll download the Windows version:
3. We’ll click Save:
4. And after the download finishes, we will click on Run:
5. We press Next:
6. We’ll leave this as it is and press Next:
7. We’ll press Next again:
8. Now, we’ll click Yes:
9. Now on Install:
10. It will ask us to install some driver software. We’ll click Install:
11. When the installation finishes, uncheck the Start VirtualBox checkbox and press Finish:
Configuring the project
I recommend doing these steps if you have a really bad lag or unresponsiveness in your PC. I had to apply a customized version of the configuration posted in the Cosmology@Home FAQ section as the VM would get stuck in my AMD Ryzen machine, so I configured it to use half the PC cores.
2. Open your favorite Text Editor and copy the contents you copied recently. I used Notepad++ here. Then, change the <avg_ncpus> section to specify the amount of threads you want the VM to use. I first limited it to 4 cores and kept going up until I could maximize my PC resources while keeping it stable. In my Intel machine, I tried this configuration to test it:
3. Save the config in the Cosmology@Home folder. If you installed BOINC and left the directories at their default location, then this directory/folder is C:\ProgramData\BOINC\projects\www.cosmologyathome.org. Save the file as app_config.xml:
4. You’ll see the syntax is highlighted. It should be like this meaning it saved as an XML file:
And that’s it! We’ve finished the configuration.
Testing the installation and configuration.
Now, we need to launch BOINC and perform a project update. For this, exit BOINC if it is already running and launch it again. Then select the Cosmology@Home project and press Update:
You should see in the log that it is downloading tasks:
And that they are running:
You can also check VirtualBox and see that the task VM is running:
And here’s how the CPU of one of my Intel machines looks like:
Eventually, I upped the CPU threads to 8 so that it can use every resource in it. The only exception is my AMD Ryzen 7 2700X machine which is limited to 8 threads out of its 16.
If you followed this guide and are running Cosmology@Home tasks, congrats! And I wish you luck in the competition!
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