How To: run multiple BIONC clients on one machine - not an app_info method

[bluestang]

That's it. But why would you ever want to do that?

What do you mean?

[Bun-Bun]

This method is superior to app_info method. Why would you choose app_info over this method?

[bluestang]

For my 2600k using 8 threads I can see it helping. But not sure it's really doing anything for me running 2 WU on my 7770 in my work pc.

[Bun-Bun]

Ah fair enough. So your just going back to 1 WU on the 7770?

[bluestang]

Doing 2 as I only have 2 CPU cores.

Once I get my 2nd 7870 card for my 2600k, I'll be asking for your help setting this up though

[Bun-Bun]

[bluestang]

So which steps do I need to do from the 1st post before I use your "launch everything" VBS script?
(Thanks for all your help!)

[Bun-Bun]

Step 1.
BOINC needs a place to keep its config for each running instance. So make a new BOINC directory for this new instance. The default BOINC data directory is C:\ProgramData\BOINC so something similar to that would be good. (EG: C:\ProgramData\BOINC_2). PS: the C:\ProgramData folder is a hidden folder. You can do this now by opening a cmd prompt and just copy/pasta this into it:

mkdir c:\programdata\boinc_2

Step 2.
Next is to get the new client's data directory populated with the configs.
Hit Win+R and type CMD, a command prompt opens. Type (with the quotes, adjust your path if needed), or just copy/paste if your path's are default like mine:

"C:\Program Files"\BOINC\boinc.exe --allow_multiple_clients -dir c:\programdata\boinc_2

Once it loads up you'll see a bunch of stuff happening, the data dir is now ready so hit Control C to break out.


Step 3.
Change the password in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file which now resides in the new BOINC data directory.

notepad c:\ProgramData\boinc_2\gui_rpc_auth.cfg

erase the temporary password, type in something easy to remember -> save the file.

Step 4.
Copy and paste into notepad and save as boinc.vbs or something under startup. Make sure to put the password (in red) you put in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg. And make sure the path is correct (in blue)

'Variables
Dim WshShell, oExec, boinc2_cmd, boincmgr2_cmd, cmd_a, cmd_b, cmd_1, cmd_2 
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 

'boinc2
cmd_a = "C:\Program Files\BOINC\boinc.exe"
cmd_b = "--allow_multiple_clients --dir C:\programdata\Boinc_2 --gui_rpc_port 9999 --detach_console --redirectio"
boinc2_cmd = cmd_a & " " & cmd_b

'boincmgr2 
cmd_1 = "C:\Program Files\BOINC\boincmgr.exe" 
cmd_2 = "/a /s /n 127.0.0.1 /g 9999 /p password /m" 
boincmgr2_cmd =  cmd_1 & " " & cmd_2

'Execute boinc
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec(boinc2_cmd)

'Wait to start in ms
WScript.sleep 5000

'Execute boincmgr
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec(boincmgr2_cmd)

[bluestang]

Much easier now...works perfect!

[Buck Nasty]

Keep getting an error the "n is not recognized" when launching from the script. Antone else have issues with this?

[Bun-Bun]

Keep getting an error the "n is not recognized" when launching from the script. Antone else have issues with this?

Can you post a screenshot?

[Bun-Bun]

So a little bit of weirdness last night. I went to reconfigure my second instance of boinc on my main rig. stopped getting new tasks, let it clear out its backlog of WU's. Changed app_info and bam, couldn't load both instances of boinc at the same time. Would say another instance of boinc is running.

Wracked my brain for awhile. Finally just deleted the second boinc instance entirely and started over. It started working again.

I have no explaination for this. Just thought I would share

[bluestang]

Did you forget to "shut down connected client" on the 2nd instance?

[Bun-Bun]

I restarted the machine and it would not load the other instance. It would start a fresh one but not the two I had together. Could launch either or, but not both at the same time.

[Vinas]

I restarted the machine and it would not load the other instance. It would start a fresh one but not the two I had together. Could launch either or, but not both at the same time.

There should be some error messages in the cmd window, assuming you can open the second instance that way (for troubleshooting instead of the vbs). Sounds like you got it worked out though, I really dislike resetti g projects as im sure you do!

Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2

[StitchExperimen]

I have a question...
Can this be used to run 2 MORE HD 7950s?
I have a 8 core Xeon and run 20 work units 10 through each card and I'm wondering if I can run 4 HD 7950s I have run more than 20 work units but times slowed down.
Or I could go dual Xeon on a workstation board with 4 HD 7950s
Stitch

[OldChap]

It could, but why do you want to?

There are no real advantages to having a second boinc running in terms of cpu cycles etc All program requirements are just divided by 2 and shared.

[StitchExperimen]

OC

I was talking to Movieman on the phone and he said that as is Boinc could run 3 GPU cards and that someone else was doing it. (Don't remember the name.)
So far with this Xeon 8 core I can run 28 instances (14 into each card) into 2 HD 7950, so that means I can run 9 instances into each of 3 HD 7950s.
Previously when I had the i7 3930 I was limited to 14 instances maximum and no hope of a 3rd or 4th card.
Bruce

Update: A Intel Xeon E5-2687w 3.10 Ghz Processor - Socket Lga-2011 - Octa-Core (8 Core) - 20 Mb Cache - 8 Gt/S Qpi
Will do 28 instances but not 30. At 30 it gives "Computation Errors".
Bruce

[bluestang]

OC

I was talking to Movieman on the phone ....
Bruce

You poor soul!

[OldChap]

OK, May I ask... which MB?

You made mention of possibly using a DP board. If that is your intention then I am not sure of the implications when it comes to running BOINC but the pic shows an excerpt from the manual for z9pe-d8 ws from asus



This makes me wonder if there would be limitations caused when perhaps 1 cpu is driving 2 GPU's and the second cpu is driving just 1.

I have no real idea on this and it is surely not insurmountable.... I just wonder...

[StitchExperimen]

Yes I was considering the Asus motherboard that you mentioned.

I have decided to order another Gigabyte HD 7950 (it has 3 fans) and put it in my motherboard Gigabyte X79-UP4 that will run 4-way CrossFireX and hope that boinc will run 3 cards with 9 instances (27 or 28 total) into each card.

My options if that fails might be to make a i7 3770K o/c to 4.6 or 4.7 and power 2 HD 7950s... for a motherboard how about a ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155... what do you think?

[skycrane]

hey guys,

i know its a thread revival from ages past, but im having problems setting this up. can someone look over this post and tell me whats the difference between his instrucitons and ours? ive been working on this on and off for 2 weeks or so, and everytime i try it, my brain goes to mush....
Im good at coppy/paste but with all these other #$?><)(!*@&&#^%^%&*$# that you are doing in the cmd promp, im lost.. lol

the below is coped from BOINC Test4Theory message board by Mr.Wonderful. in his original post he had the clients/host tag mixed up. i have fixed it on this post...

guys what i am wondering is whats the difference between both of these instructions? i can get our instructions to work. untill boinc acutally tries to do work, then it just sits there... and his instructions supposedly works from the others using it... but i cant figure it out on how to implement it. I spent 4 hours last night trying to get either of them to work and nothing



The basic setup

A new BOINC data directory
First create a new data directory (folder) for the new virtual BOINC host. Don't delete your existing BOINC data directory. Name the new directory boinc-2. If you run Windows you could create boinc-2 in C:/ProgramData where your existing BOINC data directory is, I suppose, though I'm not sure of access permission problems that may arise and quite frankly I don't want to know as Windows seems to make it so ridiculously complicated. You might find it easier to create this new BOINC data directory in one of your own directories. I don't know how it works on XP and Vista but on Win7 your "home" directory is c:\users\<your_username>\ where <your_username> is your user account name. I'm going to go with that convention and command examples I provide further down will assume you are using Win7 and have put boinc-2 in c:\users\<your_username>\.

Linux users... hmmm.... why not just create ~/boinc-2 and be done with it. It'll work regardless of whether your primary BOINC installation is from the Berkeley installer (the standard installer aka "that big .sh file") or from your distro's BOINC installer. For Linux newbies, remember ~ (the tilde character) is simply shorthand for your home directory so if your login name is bob then ~/boinc-2 is simply /home/bob/boinc-2 when expanded to longhand. I will use ~ wherever I can.

Moving in
Let's move some files into boinc-2.

1) In your primary BOINC data directory (i.e. your existing BOINC directory) there will be a file named account_lhcathome2.cern.ch_test4theory.xml. Copy that file from your primary BOINC data directory to boinc-2. Putting that file in boinc-2 effectively attaches your new BOINC virtual host to T4T project, quick and simple.

2) On Linux copy the locale folder and ca-bundle.crt from ../BOINC/ to ../boinc-2/. On Windows copy the symbols folder from .../BOINC/ to ../boinc-2/.

3) Create a directory named projects in .../boinc2/ and in it create a link to .../BOINC/projects/lhcathome2.cern.ch_test4theory/. This should remove the necessity of downloading the 240 MB VM image again.

4) Create a link to .../BOINC/gui_rpc_auth.cfg in boinc-2.

5) Open a text editor (Notepad in Windows) and copy'n'paste the following 7 lines into it. Don't save the file yet.

<cc_config> <log_flags> </log_flags> <options> <ncpus>******</ncpus> </options> </cc_config>


Now delete the ****** and replace it with 1 if you intend to run only single thread T4T tasks. If you intend to run multi-thread T4T tasks then replace ****** with 2. You must be very careful to not leave any spaces between the > and < and the number. You must double-check that very carefully because if you do leave a space in there it will cause severe problems later. Then save the file as .../boinc-2/cc_config.xml and exit the editor. Make a mental note of whether you put a 1 or a 2 in the file because you're going to need it later. I will refer to that number later as the magic CPU number.

Don't put/move anything else into boinc-2.

Let's pause for a moment and plan for possible future expansion. You now have a template for a new BOINC host that will automatically attach itself to the T4T project with no further intervention from you when you invoke the client the way I am going to show you in the next section. It will automatically request a task and begin crunching. Consider the possibility that you may want to run more than two T4T tasks, perhaps three or four or more. If you wish you can now copy .../boinc-2/ and all of its subdirectories to .../boinc-3/. You can do that with just one quick and easy copy operation if you do it now before you invoke the client at which point additional files will be created in .../boinc-2/ which will change it from a convenient and easily cloned template into a directory for a specific host. If you decide in the future to crunch a third T4T task you won't have to copy files and folders one by one the way you did to create .../boinc-2/, you'll just clone .../boinc-3/ to .../boinc-4/ in anticipation of crunching four T4T tasks and start crunching with .../boinc-3/.

Starting the virtual host
You may be familiar and comfortable with simply clicking the BOINC manager icon to start BOINC client. That should work with multiple BOINC hosts running on the same physical machine but i doesn't seem to work reliably for some reason. Instead I am goin to give you a simple and direct approach to starting the virtual host you have setup in boinc-2. You'll start the host in a terminal (command line prompt in Windows jargon) and leave it running there. I'll show you how to run the host in attached mode which means it's output messages will output to (appear in) the terminal which is convenient for you because you can then monitor the host without using BOINC manager. The messages you see will be the same messages you see in the manager's Event Log. The output should indicate that the client runs the benchmarks, goes to the T4T site and registers a new host ID, downloads the VM image and other files, requests and receives a task and starts the task. If it does all that then you've done everything properly but that does not mean your job is finished. You must then proceed to the section titled Cleanup and do the procedures there to finish the job properly. The new client will continue running alongside your primary client until you either shutdown the terminal or enter Ctrl-C in the terminal. Many applications simply terminate and terminate dirty when they receive Ctrl-C so using Ctrl-C is often frowned upon. BOINC client, however, will shutdown any running tasks and terminate nicely/cleanly so don't hesitate to use Ctrl-C with BOINC client.

Running in a terminal does not allow you to control the host. The only control you will have over the host via the terminal is to stop the host by typing Ctrl-C in the terminal. That is likely all the control you will need when things are running smoothly. Linux users have the option of running boinc-curses which is a manager built on ncurses (an interactive text mode interface). There is no such interface for Windows because sadly nobody has bothered to port ncurses to Windows.

I will also show you how to run the host in detached mode instead of attached mode which means the hosts output messages will not appear in the terminal. Output will be sent to the usual stdoutdae.txt and stderrdae.txt files. This makes it more difficult to monitor the host but if it's all running smoothly then maybe it will be adequate for you.

Finally, further down, after showing you the basic ways to start/run the host in a terminal, I'll show you how to use BOINC manager to monitor and control your BOINC hosts though as I suggested above it doesn't work perfectly, at least not in BOINC 6.12.34 for Linux. Perhaps it works better in 7.0.x or Windows. Windows users also have the option of using Fred Efmer's excellent manager, I suspect it will work perfectly and would love to see it ported to Linux one day.

Linux

1) Open a terminal.

2) If you installed BOINC via the Berkeley installer the BOINC client binary is likely in ~/BOINC/ but spare yourself some potential grief and take a moment to verify whether the binary is there or not. If not then modify the command below to suit. If the binary is there in ~/BOINC/ and if you created the boinc-2 directory and set it up as suggested above then do

~/BOINC/boinc --allow_multiple_clients --gui_rpc_port 31417 --dir ~/boinc-2/



3) If you installed BOINC via your distro's package installer the BOINC client binary is likely in /usr/bin/ in which case you should do

/usr/bin/boinc --allow_multiple_clients --gui_rpc_port 31417 --dir ~/boinc-2/



If the client starts and receives a T4T task then be sure to finish the job properly by completing the steps in the section titled Cleanup.

To run the client in detached mode simply add the --daemon parameter to the command line and note that the --daemon parameter does not cause the client to run as a daemon. Daemon was an unfortunate and misleading choice of names for this parameter but we're stuck with it, no problem, just remember true daemon mode is something entirely different.

~/BOINC/boinc --daemon --allow_multiple_clients --gui_rpc_port 31417 --dir ~/boinc-2/



or if BOINC was installed by your package manager

/usr/bin/boinc --daemon --allow_multiple_clients --gui_rpc_port 31417 --dir ~/boinc-2/




Windows

1) Open a terminal aka command line

2) The BOINC client binary is likely in c:\program files\boinc. If not then adapt the following command to reflect the correct path to the binary. Also, there is a potential problem with the path following the --dir parameter in the command below and you need to check and verify that. If you followed my suggestion above then you put the boinc-2 directory in what we Linux users would refer to as your home directory which on Win7, as far as I know, is C:\users\<username>\ but is something different on XP and Vista, I think, maybe. I dunno it's always a wonder/puzzlement/joke what Micro$oft has done in its most recent attempt to make its OS even more difficult than it ever was before and I don't have the time or motivation to deal with it so I'll leave it as it is below and hope it works for you. If not then maybe think about installing an easy to use OS like Linux, I dunno, can't think of anything to say that would be more helpful to you in the long run. Change <username> to your username and do

"c:\program files\boinc" --allow_multiple_clients --dir c:\users\<username>\boinc-2\ --gui_rpc_port 31417



or you could try the following if using Win7 and you created boinc-2 where I suggested,this might work on XP and Vista too, dunno

"c:\program files\boinc" --allow_multiple_clients --dir %userprofile%\boinc-2\ --gui_rpc_port 31417



If the client starts and receives a T4T task then be sure to finish the job properly by completing the steps in the section titled Cleanup.

To run the client in detached mode simply add the --detached parameter to the command line

"c:\program files\boinc" --detached --allow_multiple_clients --dir c:\users\<username>\boinc-2\ --gui_rpc_port 31417



or you could try the following if using Win7 and you created boinc-2 where I suggested,this might work on XP and Vista too, dunno

"c:\program files\boinc" --detached --allow_multiple_clients --dir %userprofile%\boinc-2\ --gui_rpc_port 31417



Cleanup

If you now have a second BOINC host running and it's crunching a T4T task then you are probably crunching more tasks than you have cores. That won't cause any irreparable damage but it's a bad idea. You must reconfigure your primary BOINC host to use 1 or 2 fewer cores depending on that magic CPU number I asked you to remember earlier. Check in your primary BOINC directory to see if you have a cc_config.sys file. If you do then open it in your text editor and see if it has a section that begins with the <options> tag and ends with the </options> tag. If it does then add the following line between the <options> and </options> tags.

<ncpus>******</ncpus>



but substitute the number of cores your CPU has minus the magic number of cores for the ******. Then save and close the file, skip the next paragraph and pick up with the paragraph that starts with "Now enforce...".

If you do not have a .../BOINC/cc_config.xml file then start your text editor and copy'n'paste the following 7 lnes into it except substitute the number of cores your CPU has minus the magic CPU number for ******. Save the file and exit the editor.

Now enforce your new core setting by starting BOINC manager and going to the advanced view. Then click Advanced -> Read config file. The number of runnin tasks visible on the Tasks tab should decrease by 1 or 2 depending on your magic CPU number.

Controlling/interacting with the virtual host

In theory you should be able to run one instance of BOINC manager and switch it between your primary BOINC host and additional BOINC hosts running on the same physical machine simply by specifying the port number the host cient was configured to use when you started the client. Remember your primary host uses port 31416 by default so that's whit it will be using if it's running and if yo didn't specify a different port when it started. Your new host cliet is using port 31417 if you have followed the examples I have given. If the manager is not running then start it, go to the advanced view, click Advanced -> Select Computer. When the little window pops up enter localhost:31417 in the Hostname box. If you created the links to gui_rpc_auth.cfg as instructed earlier you don't need to type anything in the Passwrod box because the manager will be able to find the gui_rpc_auth.cfg and read the password from it. Then click OK and the manager will connect to your new host client on port 31417. Now click Advanced -> Select Computer again and when the window pops up enter localhost:31416 in the Hostname box and click OK. The manager will connect to the client listening on port 31416 which is your primary (original) client. Now click Advanced -> Select Computer again and when the window pops up click the wee arrow beside the Hostname dropdown box and observe that it has 2 items in the dropdown list: localhost:31416 and localhost:31417. In the future you don't need to type the hostname:port string into the Hostname box, just select it from the dropdown list, click OK and the manager should connect to that client. At least it should in theory but it isn't reliable on BOINC 6.12.34 on my Linux system; sometimes it works sometimes it does not. I haven't tried it yet on BOINC 7.0.x

You should also be able to run 2 or more managers simultaneously and have each one connected to a different host. That seems to work reliably when there is only one host client running on each physical computer but not when you have multiple clients running on the same physical machine. YMMV.

I haven't tested everything in this post as thoroughly as I would like to before giving it to you all so think of it as a guideline. If there are errors or better ways of doing some things I leave it up to you all to fix it up and make it work properly.

[StyM]

nice work...

[OldChap]

I will rewrite this for Windows and Linux over the next few days based on my recent experience.

There are a few observations to add yet regarding files required and the easiest way to replicate if needing a 10 day cache of short duration WU's