KWSN Orbiting Fortress

ToeBee · Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 1:06 am Post subject: BOINC on 64 bit linux

So I just got a new workstation at work (mentioned in the bragging yard as well) and have 64 bit linux running on it. 64 bit linux will run regular 32 bit binaries just fine however the method BOINC uses to determine the platform (in order to send out the right application) detects it as a different platform from "normal" linux and all the projects so far don't have any knowlege of this so they refuse to send any work and say something about "unknown platform: linux x86_64".

Is anyone else dealing with this problem? Or is there anyone with 64 bit windows and does the same thing happen? If so, there is good news. You can still do work for projects that support the "anonymous platform" mechanism in BOINC. Currently I know Seti and Einstein will work. Perhaps others. Here is a short procedure:

For seti I downloaded an optimized client for linux and just followed the instructions for that. Just unpack the application and the app_info.xml file into the <boinc location>/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/ directory. For Einstein it was a little trickier as there aren't any readily available optimized apps so I had to download their standard app which took some searching but I finally found them in the /download/ directory on their website. Then I attached to the project so that it would create the appropriate files and directories. Then I manually crafted the app_info.xml file which also took several attempts. And I am at home right now so I don't have the file in front of me... but I'll post a few more details tomorrow from work. Just wondering if anyone else out there is running 64 bit linux yet.

ToeBee · Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2006 11:25 pm Post subject:

Yeah so I got busy at work and forgot... but then I also realized that I have run BOINC on another 64 bit linux machine at work (red hat) and it didn't have any issues with the platform. So this must be an issue specific to Gentoo and/or a few other distros. If someone still wants pointers, let me know and I'll fill in details

jonnyv · Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2006 12:38 am Post subject:

Fill! Fill! FILL!
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ToeBee · Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2006 5:23 pm Post subject:

Ok fine. It is a slow Friday afternoon and I'm waiting for cygwin to finish installing inside of VMware.

I found the einstein executable at http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/download/. As far as I know their current application is the "Albert" application. It looks like they actually have a new version since I set mine up. I'm using albert_4.38_i686-pc-linux-gnu and I also downloaded the .so file - not sure if it is needed or not. Those files went in the <boinc>/projects/einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ directory.

Then came the app_info.xml which I finally figured out by looking at the client_state.xml file from my windows box that is also doing einstein. Here is a copy/paste:

ToeBee · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 3:51 pm Post subject:

It just occurred to me what the issue might be on my one box. I think this problem may only appear when you compile the BOINC client yourself on a 64 bit machine. On my workstation I used gentoo's portage to compile it using the 64 bit gcc compiler. On the other box I downloaded the pre-packaged binary from Berkeley. However the app_info.xml above will let you run einstein@home on any platform that can execute linux binaries (fBSD for example).

ToeBee · Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:06 pm Post subject:

I just noticed LHC had work again and thought I would try to get this beast to run it once more. I suceeded! 32 bit linux binary is at http://lhcathome.cern.ch/download/sixtrack_4.66_i686-pc-linux-gnu (they have directory listings turned off so I had to link directly to the current version). The app_info.xml looks like this: