19/10-26/10 Can we solve the Enigma?-complete

[Alez]

http://boincstats.com/en/stats/challenge/team/chat/460

Name Can we solve the Enigma?
Status Upcoming
Project Enigma@Home
Issued by Vancouver, Washington
Start time 2013-10-19 19:00 UTC
End time 2013-10-26 19:00 UTC
Late entrants allowed? Yes
Number of teams participating » 7
Number of users participating 0

[Silver]

Any chance we can stop the challenge now?
I'm in second place at the moment :)

[Megacruncher]

Any chance we can stop the challenge now?
I'm in second place at the moment :)

You mean you don't want more time to try for first?

I, on the other hand, am 81st of 84. Still, could be worse: I could be 82nd. Like Alez!


Early days, I'm sure we will move up the table a little. :)

[Alez]

I, on the other hand, am 81st of 84. Still, could be worse: I could be 82nd. Like Alez!

Hey !!!!
Unfair
I'm on holiday so that means I've spent most of the last week, painting and cementing. Completely missed this, only Paul posting got my attention. I'm on the case now, do my bit for the team etc. etc. As you said, early days.... don't count the chickens yet

[Megacruncher]

The chickens are hatching even as we post!

[Alez]

The problem with chicks is that sparrowhawks, foxes and my kid find them sooooooo tasty
Also if they manage to grow up ....... they then try to cross the road

[Silver]

Glad to have woken Alez up, even if that means I'm now likely to be overtaken by him and mega by the end of the comp and possibly skywalker too who seems to be on board....

[Alez]

This must be kick a pirate day..... and from a fellow shipmate too
As a perfect start to this Caro has just errorred every unit for the last hour. A simple missing 32bit library file needed. libgcc_s.so.1, simples. So why can't 64 bit linux include 32 bit libraries and why does it take 15 mins searching online and about 4 different repositories before I can get it. And yet sometimes people wonder why computers run windoze
Way to make my life easy after having to do a complete Linux re-install after the update broke everything.

[Silver]

I only nudged you to get my fellow pirate on board with the comp
Sounds like you are making slow progress with Caro, fingers srossed you get it sorted soon!!

[Megacruncher]

Going by the stats it looks like Caro is back in business. :)

We are doing okay in 4th of 8.

Individually, I have an awful lot of chickens hatching and, as predicted, have marched past you.I am in 10th place, you, Paul, are 12th, Alez is 21st and we have 6 other members doing their bit including Lauren Reid who is I think a new member. Welcome! :)

[Alez]

Yip munching like a good one GPUgrid and Enigma incoming. Thought I'd better give you a bit of a head start always safer to be up-range than down-range. TSBT in 4th froggies , korea and the poles to chase, almost 6 days to go, I believe the game is afoot. See you at the finish line Oh and for the POGS challenge next month you are not getting a head start

[Silver]

I quite happy that I'm still inside the top 15 so far :)
Not confident it'll last too much longer though, wave on the way past though Alez

[Alez]

:occasion5:

[Silver]

Damn, passed by my pirate pal
It was only a matter of time to be honest, my three core farm can't really compete with my serious crunching colleagues.
I'll take my victories where I can though, and be happy that I was leading the TSBT charge for the first day or so :)

[Alez]

For only 3 cores you are doing a remarkable job in 16th but nothing between you and 14th. Could go all the way to the wire. On the team front we are 4th well ahead of the chasing pack but LAF remain stubbornly 100k in front, but there again there is herds of them all beavering away :)

[Silver]

My overclocked i5 does reasonably well considering however I did plan ahead for this one and bunkered for a day before the start which helped me a bit :)
I have been running some units on my phone today to see if that'll help me....

[Alez]

You are still up there and we are still in 4th. Wondering how the chicken counting is going though .... I'm thinking a 3rd and 4th individual finish could be on the cards with 3 days to go, the question is whether there is a fox outside the coop or not

[PinkPenguin]

LAF... but there again there is herds of them all beavering away :)

... a herd of amphibians ? ...wouldn't that be a "ribbit" or a "croak" of the things and I suspect the beavers might have something to say about being associated with LAF... ...Zebedee tells me it's time to shut up and go to bed!

[Alez]

I believe the correct terminology is an army of frogs...... but then you have to google ' famous french military victories' , you can then hit I feel lucky and sit back and laugh
I'm an equal opportunity insulter, so if the beavers are not happy, then my work here is done !!!
Despite this , the army, ribbit, croak or indeed herds of LAF refuse to be caught, still in 4th where I suspect we will end up.
4th and 5th individually..... I prefer my eggs fried both sides on toast

[Alez]

20 hrs to go, we are 'only' 55k behind the army. As predicted we now have individual 3rd and 4th and 6 of us in the top 100. Will we manage a last hour smash and grab. Will the army surrender ? Guess we'll find out tomorrow

[Megacruncher]

All cores on deck capt'n. I've got a nice new i7 laptop on the case. My fourth place is badly in need of securing and taking the legs from under the frogs is A Big Ask!

But let's see what we can do!

[Alez]

All cores on deck capt'n. I've got a nice new i7 laptop on the case. My fourth place is badly in need of securing and taking the legs from under the frogs is A Big Ask!

But let's see what we can do!

A big ask indeed, but stranger things have happened, for 1 day only ...... incoming.

[Alez]

7 1/2 hrs to go, 17k in it.......going to go to the wire.
If anyone is holding credit, get it dumped about 7pm tonight.

[Megacruncher]

2hrs 18min to go and we are just 4,015 credits behind the frogs. It's going to be a photo finish! :bounce:

[Alez]

Shouldn't have been. We are in front now by 2k. I was just about to dump 30k and goodnight LAF when AWS terminated my servers. 1/2 an hour more and it would be all over..... dumping what I can salvage. It might just be enough.

[PinkPenguin]

...dumping what I can salvage. It might just be enough.

Indeed it was. Nicely done! :pirate:

[Silver]

I concur with our pink friend.
Well done everyone

[Megacruncher]

Woo Hoo!
Well done everyone!:occasion5:

We were more than 4k ahead of L'AF in third! :wav: of 12 teams! :wav:
Individually we were:
Alez 3rd
Mega 4th
Paul 15th
SkyWalker 30th
Spacehopper 42nd
David Jackson 71st
Iain ABZ 117th
Mark 129th
Lauren Reid 196th
Thinboab 250th

Thanks to all & apols if I missed any one.

[Alez]

Nope, you got everyone.
4K was not bad but thanks to AWS was a bit closer than I anticipated. Should have been by at least 30k but hey yo, smash and grab completed. Not bad from 55k back, guess we can do the big ask Well done to all in the team, great effort.

Now, just need to go check those nests and count those chickens

[Janos (retired)]

Alez, I am curious, why don't you report your AWS credits immediately?

[Alez]

Kindof a complicated story but basically I went to watch my home football team draw out a frustrating draw at home and didn't get home until 6pm, when I then had to cook dinner etc.

The technical story is the way AWS works. Normally I just hire an 8 core server or 2. Due to AWS's great new marketing change you can no longer launch 32 bit linux on 8 core servers. Enigma will not run on 64 bit linux without apt-get of 4 missing 32 bit libs, 1 of which is the one that caused all the issues getting Caro to run . SSH'ing into AWS, installing lib etc, lots of hassle.
To get round this I used some 32 bit, 2 core servers.
For the BIG ASK, I calculated how much credit we needed to overtake LAF within 24 hrs, stuck on a safety factor and ended up with 32, 2 core AWS servers running. Without SSH'ing into each one and creating a config file ( x32 ) to report task immediately or set cache limits you just have to let Boinc connect when it wants, which for Enigma seems to be every 10 - 12 hours. There is no option using boinccmd to set the cache limit, so Boinc always starts with the default cache setting. Normally not an issue as you just SSH in and manually update the project when you want, but in this case 32 servers is impractical.
I SSH'ed into each instance at @ 12 pm and manually updated the project, forcing an update and reporting all work. It would not have connected again before the end of the competition, so my intention was to manually dump the credit from the 32 servers from 7pm, propelling us into 3rd easily ( I put in a big safety factor )and giving LAF no chance of replying as we should have been at least 40k ahead on them. Unfortunately AWS spot price went above my bit price at 5:45 pm so most of the servers were terminated. When AWS terminates a spot request it simply terminates everything, so nothing is saved or uploaded, it's just gone. Luckily I set a range of bids rather than having them all at the same , however most or the servers were on the low side, but we got enough credit from the surviving servers and what the terminated instances crunched in an hour before the end. I was still manually updating at 7:59 pm to stick in what I had.

[Janos (retired)]

Ah! I might be able to help with that.

Option 1:
In Konsole, open a tab onto each server then use the "send input to all terminals".

Option 2:
apt-get install clusterssh
cssh 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 192.168.1.xxx

One command - 32 times less pain.

[Alez]

I've just been using mindterm, a java ssh client lauched through firefox on windows as provided by AWS. As far as I know this only connects to a single server terminal window. Going to have to look into PuTTY or something similar. First time I had so many servers to deal with. All a learning experience for me :)