Recent items from the news feeds of various BOINC projects.

[Minecraft@Home] Repeating Decoration Seeds opencl app

Hi everyone,

The OpenCL version of this app has been launched as a beta app.

AMD/Intel users can contribute with their GPUs for this app now.

Please let us know if you encounter any issues. We'll be monitoring and pull it out of beta once it seems stable.

View article · Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:17:43 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Repeating Decoration Seeds v1

Hi everyone,

We've had a new CUDA app in beta for around the last 24 hrs and it seems stable enough to push it out of beta at this time.

Here's the technical explanation from the lead developer of the app, MC "PseudoGravity":

While each Minecraft world possesses a single world seed, every 16x16 chunk within the world possesses its own derived seed, known as a decoration seed. Each chunk’s decoration seed is determined by the unique combination of world seed and chunk location. This decoration seed in turn guides the generation of features such as trees, ores, and portions of structures.
The decoration seed formula is as follows:
decorationSeed = (AX + BZ) ^ worldSeed
Here, A and B are 64-bit pseudorandom odd numbers generated from the world seed and are therefore the same throughout the world. Variables X and Z are the coordinates of the chunk and are always multiples of 16. This formula is designed to ensure that each chunk within the world has a different decoration seed and thus different trees and related features.
However….
Taking a closer look at this equation reveals that the portion AX+BZ is the only part that depends on the chunk coordinates. If this subexpression produces the same value at multiple locations within the same world, then those chunks will have the same decoration seed. Specifically, if NA=MB mod 2**64 for some small integers N and M, then
A(X+N) + B(Z-M) = AX+BZ mod 2**64
and we see that the decorations seeds repeat along a line formed by (N,-M). When N and M are very small, interesting effects occur, as chunks form stripes along which identical trees and related features repeat endlessly.
Participants in this GPU-based BOINC project will exhaustively comb through all 2**64 Minecraft world seeds to uncover those in which the pseudorandom values A and B produce repeating patterns. Preliminary searches have discovered a few diagonally-repeating worlds, including several which repeat every single chunk diagonally. This full-scale search will produce a complete list of all Minecraft worlds in which decoration seeds repeat within a distance of 8 chunks, including non-45-degree angles.

View article · Sun, 27 Jul 2025 03:42:13 +0000

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View article · Sat, 26 Jul 2025 06:24:14 +0000

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[DENIS@Home] Project status and next steps // Estado del proyecto y pasos futuros

Dear volunteers,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you since the simulations were completed. Over the past few weeks, and with a special mention to all of you, Iván defended his Final Degree Project. In the weeks leading up to it, we were somewhat disconnected as we reviewed his project and prepared for the defense. He achieved an excellent grade (one of the highest in his class). Congratulations to Iván for all the hard work!

These days, we are preparing a paper for the Spanish Society of Biomedical Engineering Conference, to present the new features of DENIS and some initial performance tests. The idea is to later carry out a larger set of tests to see how volunteer computing can help with this type of problems, which types of simulations could benefit most from your support, and what the limitations are.

Once this more technical part is further along, we have two challenges ahead. The first, which is delayed on my part, is to run a few more simulations for the model optimization and publish all the results. The second is to advance in the area of model optimization, but now using the fiber simulator: this opens many new doors for us.

The holiday season is approaching, so I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to launch before then, but we’ll keep you informed as things progress.

Thank you all very much for your support.

Best regards,
Jesús

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Estimados voluntarios:
Disculpad por haber tardado un poco en daros noticias desde que se terminaron las simulaciones. En las últimas semanas y con una mención especial a todos vosotros, Iván defendió su Proyecto Final de Grado. En las semanas previas estuvimos algo desconectados revisando su memoria y preparando la defensa. Consiguió una magnífica calificación (de las mas altas de su promoción). ¡Enhorabuena Iván por todo el trabajo realizado!
En estos días estamos preparando un artículo para la Conferencia de la Sociedad Española de Ingeniería Biomédica, para presentar las nuevas funcionalidades de DENIS y unas primeras pruebas de rendimiento. La idea es hacer más adelante una batería de pruebas más grandes para ver cómo la computación voluntaria puede ayudar en este tipo de problemas, qué tipos de simulaciones son las que más se podrían beneficiar de vuestro apoyo, y cuáles las limitaciones.

Una vez avanzada esta parte más técnica, tenemos dos retos por delante. El primero, que van con retraso por mi parte, es hacer algunas simulaciones más de la optimización de modelos, y publicar los resultados. El segundo es avanzar en el tema de la optimización de modelos, pero haciendo uso ya del simulador de fibra: aquí se nos abren muchas puertas nuevas.

Se acercan ya los días de descanso, por lo que no sé cuánto podremos lanzar antes, os iremos informando según vayan saliendo.

Muchas gracias a todos por vuestro apoyo.

Un saludo,
Jesús.

View article · Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:43:31 +0000

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[SETI@home] SETI@home papers accepted for publication

View article · Wed, 18 Jun 2025 03:23:30 +0000

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View article · Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:40:10 +0000

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View article · Fri, 30 May 2025 15:41:30 +0000

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[DENIS@Home] New version with checkpoints // Nueva versión con checkpoints

Dear Volunteers,

Over the past few weeks, we have been testing the server and the new application developed by Iván. After verifying that the application is running well and having a general idea of the server's limits for the application, we have just launched a new version. This new version includes checkpoints so that we can run longer simulations without issues arising from restarts. Debugging checkpoints has always been one of the most challenging aspects when developing new versions, so we will be monitoring how things progress gradually. It will remain in beta mode, so please be patient if this leads to tasks that are not validated or other types of problems. One of the risks at this stage is that if the simulation does not restart correctly at the checkpoint, it becomes corrupted and the results will not match those submitted by other volunteers.

Thank you very much to everyone who is running our beta version. Without this validation, it would be unthinkable to be able to advance towards creating better simulations.

Sincerely,
Jesús.

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Estimados voluntarios: En las últimas semanas hemos estado poniendo a prueba al servidor y la nueva aplicación desarrollada por Iván. Tras ver que la aplicación va bien y tenemos más o menos claros los límites del servidor para la aplicación, acabamos de lanzar una nueva versión. Esta nueva versión incluye checkpoints para así poder lanzar simulaciones más largas sin que sea un problema por reinicios. La depuración de los checkpoints siempre ha sido uno de los elementos más difíciles cuando desarrollamos nuevas versiones, así que vamos a ir viendo poco a poco cómo va. Seguirá en modo beta y tened paciencia si esto genera tareas que no se validan u otro tipo de problemas, es uno de los riesgos en este punto. Si no se reinicia bien en el checkpoint la simulación queda corrompida y los resultados no coincidirán con los enviados por otros voluntarios.

Muchísimas gracias a todos los que estáis corriendo nuestra versión beta, sin esta validación sería impensable poder avanzar para hacer mejores simulaciones.

Atentamente,
Jesús.

View article · Mon, 26 May 2025 10:08:44 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] More xoroshigo2 configs

Hi all,

I know it has been awhile, but the developer behind the xoroshigo app has created additional configurations to run xoroshigo on to hopefully get the search going in the right direction.

The new work is generating now, and I'm cancelling most of the 11 million or so tasks that have not yet been sent.

I made sure to exclude those which had one task complete with the validating task remaining, as to not affect partially completed workunits.

View article · Wed, 21 May 2025 00:44:06 +0000

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View article · Sun, 11 May 2025 15:51:06 +0000

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View article · Sat, 10 May 2025 07:32:18 +0000

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View article · Wed, 7 May 2025 20:21:59 +0000

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View article · Fri, 2 May 2025 18:48:28 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Xoroshigo2 v1.06 - MacOS

Hi everyone,

We've added some new binaries for this project to allow macs to run.
Both x86 and ARM64 based macs should run just fine.

The linux and windows binaries remain at v1.05, there'd be nothing new for them if we did bump them to 1.06.
Macos is on 1.06 because I uncovered a bug in my deployment of the macos binaries and had to use a version bump to replace the old version.

Anyway, something interesting I've discovered is that M1 (and really, all apple silicon so far) LOVES these tasks.

On a sample mini task, I got 120 seconds on my 12700k, and 61 seconds on my M1 macbook air.
On the same sample mini task, one of our project developers tried it on their M4 Pro and got 43 seconds.
Of course, that's not perfectly reflective of runtimes, but I expect to see apple silicon based machines top the charts for this app based on these preliminary results.

Happy crunching, everyone!

View article · Wed, 23 Apr 2025 23:49:47 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] New Badges

Hi everyone,

I've added the following new badges while I was doing some database work today.

1. 1.21 Panorama badge. It's a copper bulb block from Minecraft, which is a block found in Trial Chambers. The pano121 app attempted to find a seed which produces a particular trial chamber matching the one found in the title screen panorama for 1.21.
2. Xoroshigo v1.0. This art was created largely by the lead developer of the xoroshigo project, but I added the "alpha" symbol at the bottom right to represent that it was the first run of the app before optimizations were made.
3. Xoroshigo v1.1. Same art as v1.0, but without the alpha symbol.
4. Xoroshigo Infinity. Same art as v1.0 and v1.1, but with an infinity symbol. I attempted to identify everyone who submitted a task after deadline during the time we had a broken version of the app running that caused runtimes measuring in multiple days for some configurations. If you believe I missed you in error, please let me know. We're in the middle of optimizing the amount of data we're storing in our database, so I may need to review previous versions of the data to ensure I don't miss anybody.

I also managed to re-run the badge assignment for the tall cactus project from years ago. Around 2300 or so participants gained the badge, congratulations!
The discrepancy was likely caused by the method that the previous administrator before me used to apply the badge. Since it did not use a sql clause, it likely used a "snapshot" of data without keeping it updated.

All that said, I will probably also add a loneliest seed badge tonight before I wrap up, but I'll update here if I do.

Thanks for your patience as we've been working diligently to get things running smoothly here.

View article · Mon, 21 Apr 2025 06:22:16 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Xoroshigo2 v1.05 - Runtime fix

Hi everyone,

I appreciate your patience while we worked through this.

v1.05 addresses the extreme runtime issues we've been facing lately.

I would recommend cancelling any v1.04 tasks that are running too long.

I'm looking into ways we can credit those who attempted to run broken v1.04 tasks, but as far as I can tell, boinc does not support that scenario. So I don't have an answer quite yet.

I'm deploying some more tasks worth 10,000 credits each as a consolation for this.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.

View article · Fri, 18 Apr 2025 21:45:46 +0000

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View article · Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:51:09 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Xoroshigo2 v1.04 - New plan classes

Hello everyone,

We've generated some new work, and while I was at it, I implemented the plan class changes I alluded to in discussion with a few users who were trying to use Windows 7 to run xoroshigo.

Python does not support Windows 7 anymore, hasn't since Python 3.8 back in 2018. 3.9 made breaking changes for Windows 7 and will not run on Windows 7.

To remedy the issue, we've implemented "win-modern" and "lin-modern" as plan classes we can use if our apps won't run on older OSes.

Put simply, on linux if your GLIBC is older than 2.27, you won't get work for xoroshigo2 (or any other app that requires lin-modern - which is likely to be all of our work in the future.)
On Windows, your windows version must be 8.1 or higher.

Let us know if you run into any issues running our apps. Happy crunching!

View article · Sun, 13 Apr 2025 01:15:04 +0000

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View article · Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:28:07 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Xoroshiro128++ - New version available, new input data

Hi everyone,

As I'm sure was noticed, there's a 2nd version of the "xoroshigo" project denoted by v1.1.
This new version has had changes made to its input variables that made it incompatible with the old version, so we could not run it as an updated version of the same app.

That being said, after extensive testing, we've deployed v1.02 of xoroshigo2(or v1.1.1.02, depending on who you ask) to production.
I believe there should also be a potential fix for the issue where work would not suspend when changes are made to computing preferences or work is just simply suspended.

The most notable change is that a member of our team, Andrew, developed a port of one of the most expensive functions (95+% of execution time spent in this function) used in the app to run it as native code for a 20x speedup.
We've cranked the dials, so tasks should be roughly the same size as before, but you may experience runtime variances compared to before. Overall this just means you're completing 20x what you used to in the same amount of time (cheaper on compute resources) - so the credit values are remaining the same.

There is also now an aarch64 build of this app available. We've made best efforts to test this with our limited aarch64 machines, so if any issues are encountered, please let us know.

Finally, I wanted to mention that as of now, we're enforcing a GLIBC 2.17 or above requirement for our apps going forward. I've built a lot of CI test harnesses over the last day or two that allow me to detect issues before they ever hit BOINC, and while I had been doing this already, there is now a check on our internal repo preventing any merges with binaries with a GLIBC over 2.17. This does also mean you'll need GLIBC 2.17 or higher to run the apps we build going forward.

Anyway, happy crunching! As always, please let us know if you run into any issues.

View article · Fri, 4 Apr 2025 07:46:02 +0000

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[SETI@home] Website outage

Multiple disk failure resulted in a web site outage. We think we've recovered almost everything from the web site, so it should be back up and running.

View article · Thu, 3 Apr 2025 20:49:48 +0000

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View article · Thu, 3 Apr 2025 19:04:21 +0000

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[Minecraft@Home] Xoroshiro128++ Guessing Order Optimization Project

You may have noticed some new workunits hit the queue. As of the time of writing, the workunits that are available should be considered "beta" as we're working out a few kinks.
That said, this is a new CPU app! As time goes on, we'll be replacing configuration files for it to further refine the results, so work will be sent out in stages and we'll feel out how much workunits make sense for each stage.

I've included a fairly technical explanation from the primary author of the app, MC, longtime contributor to Minecraft@Home:

The Xoroshiro Guessing Order project aims to uncover exploitable statistical weaknesses in the xoroshiro128++ pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). Recent versions of Minecraft now use xoroshiro128++ for specific aspects of world generation, replacing Java's default PRNG. Unfortunately, this shift creates significant challenges for seedcracking projects, as no efficient algorithm currently exists to reconstruct the internal state of xoroshiro from its outputs.

Our primary goal is to develop a reliable method for recovering the PRNG's 128-bit seed from just two sequential 64-bit outputs. Currently, the most efficient known method (excluding SAT solvers) involves guessing 54 bits of the state, after which the remaining bits can be derived, a process requiring roughly 9 quadrillion attempts on average. Our aim is to significantly reduce this computational requirement.

Xoroshiro128++ belongs to the "xorshift" family of PRNGs, which means its core operations are linear. The internal state can therefore be represented as a binary vector within a 128-dimensional vector space, with state transitions represented as matrix multiplications. However, the primary challenge arises from its use of a non-linear "scrambler" function, which maps the internal state to its output. Due to this scrambler, there is no straightforward one-to-one relationship between the 128-dimensional internal state and the 128-bit output.

Fortunately, the scrambler function is imperfect. Most of the information provided by each output bit is concentrated in a relatively small subset, approximately a dozen dimensions, of the total 128-dimensional state. Even with a partial, lower-dimensional guess of the state, it is frequently possible to determine whether the guess is incorrect based on the known output. If we can identify low-dimensional subsets of the state space that are significantly constrained by the outputs, we can efficiently guess and verify these smaller portions first, rapidly eliminating incorrect possibilities.

Participants in our project analyze these lower-dimensional subsets of the state space, identifying those subsets most constrained by observed outputs. To facilitate this process, we use a large precomputed table that estimates the amount of information (in bits) xoroshiro's output data provides about each subset of state dimensions.

By ultimately identifying an optimal sequence of highly constrained subspaces, we can incrementally guess the state one dimension at a time, discarding incorrect possibilities early on. Achieving this optimal guessing order would produce a highly efficient algorithm capable of recovering the PRNG's internal state within a small number of attempts, significantly advancing future efforts in Minecraft seedcracking and related research.

View article · Sat, 29 Mar 2025 05:56:02 +0000

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