If i take a look at the Server Stats (http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/server_status.html) there are currently no tasks available for Mac Users, so i can't download any new task.
Will there be any new tasks available in the near future? :)

Thanks in Advance
Thomas Holzer

There are I think some being crunched on the beta site at the moment which is usually a precursor to them being released on the main site but I don't know what the lead time is for that. We have had a good run of tasks being available most of the time for all platforms for a bit and as noted elsewhere on these forums, it can often be a case of dearth or glut.

Those with a closer link to Oxford may be able to offer more information but I suspect it will be a matter of checking back regularly.

In the meantime it is not a bad idea to have a backup project for times like this when there is no work available from CP.

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There are currently two applications available for Mac:

UK Met Office HadAM3P-HadRM3P Australia New Zealand (Version 6.10)
UK Met Office Coupled Model Full Resolution Ocean (Version 6.07)

There have been problems on Macs with the Version 7 applications and these have been withdrawn to reduce the number of failures and to make sure that those models that Macs do download are completed successfully.

The question then is whether any models are or will be available for those two application types - and I don't know the answer to that. The ANZ models have come out in batches and there may well be more; likewise the HADCM3N model has been used for a variety of experiments and there may be more of those as well. There will also be resends of failed models already running, so it might be worth setting your preferences to pick up any models that are available. The server status page shows what models are currently ready for download.

I'm not aware of any policy to reduce the range of supported platforms, but the project team does seem to be struggling to release versions of some applications even for Windows (which is by far the most popular platform) - so Mac is going to be an even greater struggle.

Since I'm a Mac user you can at least rely on me to keep piping up on behalf of other Mac users, though I do think that fewer reliable applications is better for everyone than more unreliable ones.

... and over 10,000 ANZ models have just appeared in the queue.

Stock up while you can!

Thanks, i just picked up 2 of the ANZ Models. (Maybe later some more) :)

No Mac apps for a couple of days now. Is there usually rule of thumb for how long it will be like this?

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Hello Ian

Data sets are provided by various external research groups, as and when they have something that they want to check.

So, no, there's no rule of thumb.
But I'll mention it to our project people.

Thanks Les -a new task has duly popped up!

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Aaand then there were none...

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There's a bunch of ANZ models, but they're also for Windows, so they won't last long.

Yep - got one of them about a minute after I posted!

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Yep - got one of them about a minute after I posted!

It will be interesting to see whether the new ones you get run faster. The latest ones my Mac has completed are 25% faster (4.9 sec/timestep plays 6.5 s/ts).

Hi,

Sorry there are currently no simulations available for Mac. Please stick with us until we release our next set of Mac simulations.

Thanks!

Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

There are more ANZ models that run on Mac. I took advantage of the hiatus to upgrade BOINC Manager to 7.4.42 and then downloaded some new models ...

Could do with some more Mac models, please (got 4 at once the last time!)

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Any idea when we might see some more Mac tasks released? As an aside, is there any specific reason why tasks cannot be compiled for both Windows and Mac given that the underpinning chipsets are the same? Is there functionality missing from the Mac compilers? Just curious.

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Brian:

At the moment the only tasks available for Mac are the Australia and New Zealand models (hadam3p_anz) and one of the whole-world models (hadcm3n) - and those are available only because they are old versions (6 rather than 7). I get a few ANZ models from time to time and there may be another batch at some point.

When the applications started appearing in platform-specific configurations it seemed to be a question of limited programming resources making multi-platform support a problem; however, there have been some recent comments that the dogma of "all platforms are essentially the same from a climate point-of-view" is no longer the case - i.e. some analysis tasks are easier if all models are from the same platform. From my own experience of processing CPDN files I can believe this might be the case for Windows or Mac (which tended in my tests to produce the same results for the same inputs across different operating system versions), but not for Linux where the intrinsic chaos of distributions produces numerically different results for the same model inputs.

So there may be two things going on here: (1) the Mac, as a minority platform, is not favoured by those scientists needing large numbers of minimally varying results, and (2) the Mac, as a minority platform, is not favoured by those programmers whose skills quite naturally follow the most popular platforms.

As a Mac owner myself, I should say in defence of the Mac platform that, except for a BOINC/CPDN problem that temporarily hit Mac performance, Mac users were significantly better at completing models than Windows or Linux. However, that can't make up for their limited numbers.

Really have to point out the chicken/egg situation here. It is really hard to stay enthusiastic about, and recommend, a project that apparently doesn't want the support of Mac users.

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Any idea when we might see some more Mac tasks released? As an aside, is there any specific reason why tasks cannot be compiled for both Windows and Mac given that the underpinning chipsets are the same? Is there functionality missing from the Mac compilers? Just curious.

Nobody knows when new work for Mac might happen.
The Mac chipsets and Intel chips are the same, and the compilers are more or less good, but the mathlibs (the OS-dependent software bits that actually do the math) are different. I think that's where the problem is.

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