28 april 2008 Last week a group of 3rd year bachelor students conducted a project on Leiden Classical. They tried to compute the diffusion
coefficient of the water model we are studying. During their project they made use of the new Classical Builder. This new builder
version is capable of submitting calculations directly to the Leiden Classical BOINC desktop grid! On of their findings for this
model was that even at 298 K the water still lacks correct liquid like behaviour. Further scientific study is needed on that project!
Furthermore, two other 1st year students are setting up a project on Leiden Classical too, they intent to improve the HCl in water
simulation of two year ago. They took on a challenging task and we are all curious what the result will be!
30 march 2008 Today BOINC.BE broke through the 10,000,000 credit boundary. Hopefully other teams will follow shortly!
11 march 2008 The Linux 64 bit trajtou apps have been recompiled on an up to date system. The problems on newer Linux systems should be solved by this.
18 january 2008 Updated Classical app. It appeared that the 5.51 version had an issue when the WU has finished. The GPF fix of the 14th has been been removed and another method is implemented.
14 january 2008 The Classical application has been updated. A fix has been introduced in the screensaver that hopefully resolves a GPF under windows that sometimes appeared when a workunit finished when the screensaver was active. Other applications were not affected.
17 december 2007 Last week Hugo and Hugo finished their Pre-University project. Look here for their report and findings.
10 december 2007 The Classical application has been updated. It includes a different definition of how to calculate the pressure now. Please update.
14 november 2007 Two high-school students, both called Hugo, have been studying very hard lately and are now ready to start their project on Leiden Classical. They will be investigating the water model we have been studying already on Leiden Classical. They will try to determine the correct density for the system and see if the water model also 'freezes' correctly. This research is part of the their pre-University college the University of Leiden offers to high-school students and their high-school graduation project. Let us wait and see what they find out and discover!
15 october 2007 Next Sunday the 21st of October the University of Leiden will open the doors for the general public. See http://www.wetenschapsdag.leidenuniv.nl. The Leiden Classical project will be there too! If you want you can have a look at the servers than run here for this project... You can also ask one of our professors anything you want regarding the science... The entrance is free! Hope to see you there...
18 september 2007 We are back from Geneva and we had to relocate the Leiden Classical servers yesterday afternoon. Somewere this week they will find their final location and we hope this has not caused to much greeve.
2 september 2007 We are off to Geneva to the BOINC workshop. When we are back, on the 14th of september, Dr. David. P. Anderson will pay Leiden Classical a visit too. His (open) presentation will start at 14:30 in the Havinga room here at the Gorlaeus Laboratories in Leiden. We are all very excited!
13 july 2007 Leiden Classical appeared on the news list of BOINC Berkeley. It is stated there that we use
BOINC for educational purposes... That is most certainly true! but we do science with BOINC too ;-)... Students are the scientist
of tomorrow and therefore doing good science implies doing well on their education too... We do like to combine both worlds as was
done in our previous project of which the new item appeared on the 25th of june!
25 june 2007 Last week two students, Thomas-Jan and Bart-Jan, finished their LO1 research project on Leiden Classical. In this project the goal was
to teach these first-year graduate students to work in a scientific manner. The presenentation they gave in Leiden and Delft can be
found here. During the project Thomas and Bart have performed over 675000 classical
dynamics trajectories within a weeks time on the Leiden Classical grid. With these calculations they have reproduced the 'rotational
hindering' effect that was experimentally observed on the dissociation of hydrogen on copper, making use of a Modified Sheppard
interpolated potential energy surface. We are all very excited about these new scientific results and other similar projects will
follow!
21 june 2007 The server software has been updated to version 5.10. Let us wait and see how things behave the next days ;-)...
12 june 2007 Found a bug in the 5.10 BOINC API that affected predominantly Linux 64 bit and fixed it. Also recompiled all
applications and linked against the fixed API library. Please update...
11 june 2007 The 64 bit 'trajtou' applications sometimes fail in the 'boinc_init_graphics' call for some unknown reason
(return code 204 ?!). Further investigations will have to be made, but because this might take some time
and we are currently in the middle of testing the 5.10 release for the server software too, they have been
removed for the time being... The 32 Linux bit applications have no problems... Yet again another bump in
the road... so... Keep you posted!
09 june 2007 The F2C boincyfied library has been recompiled against the 5.10 release and the 'trajtou' applications have
also been recompiled and linked against the 5.10 release. Moreover the Linux 64 bit binaries are now true 64
bit binaries for the 'trajtou' applications and EM64T support for the F2C boincyfied library has been
included. The updated F2C library can now be downloaded. Back to testing the patched server software...
Keep you posted!
09 june 2007 The classical application has been updated and now the Mac Intel platform is also supported. We are currently
in the middle of testing the latest (5.10) server software and as soon as that turns out to work, this project
will be updated... First the other apps will be recompiled and linked against the latest (5.10) boinc
API too... Keep you posted on that!
22 may 2007 The Classical application has been updated; 1) the code has been ported to 64 bit for Linux and the executable is now a true
64 bit binary, 2) the code has been profiled and optimized and 3) the standalone (non-boinc) version has also been parallelized using
OpenMP with the Intel 9.1 C++ compiler for Linux EM64T. The latest binaries and the most updated source code can now be downloaded.
02 may 2007 The Classical application has been updated and now includes Langevin dynamics. The sources and the new binaries are
available for you to download from their usual places. The manual has also been updated...
26 april 2007 A little update on some of the science; we have adapted the water model to include 64 water molecules. We are
currently investigating if the 'Flying Ice cube' effect still occurs with bigger system sizes. With the current
flexible water model of Ferguson [J. Comput. Chem., 16 (1995) 501], the fluid seems to freeze up after about 10 ps
at 25 degrees centigrade. This should not happen and literature suggests that this might be due to the way people
usually keep the fluid at a constant temperature during the simulation. One often adopts some sort of “velocity
rescaling” method to achieve that. At the same time investigations are being made to include other thermostats
into the program to solve this artifact. We are actually thinking of including 'Langevin dynamics' into the
program... Keep you posted!
23 april 2007 Last week 3rd and 4th year chemistry students tried to calculate the diffusion-coefficient of water as part of their modern
computational chemistry courses. They have used the grid for that. Currently we are also investing the water model in more
detail. Moreover, like was mentioned around Easter, this week first year students will start to use the grid to calculate
the rotational enhancement and hindering effects of molecular hydrogen dissociating on Cu(111). In this project a new
potential energy surface for the system is investigated.
17 april 2007 Update of Classical. Found a typo in the input file reader causing some WU to crash at the start. Please update to the latest version.
16 april 2007 Added support for the FreeBSD 6.2 platform thanx to Dotsch. Also updated the Classical application to include some new
scientific simulation features. The sources too have been updated and the new FreeBSD binaries are ready for you to download...
5 april 2007 Because it is nearly Easter, try to find the 'easter egg' of this project ;-). Hint, maybe after Easter, some students will
start with a project using the Leiden Classical Grid. Can you guess now? Furthermore, have a look at sharedmemory.php. With special thanx to Andre Kersten from the Docking@home crew... Happy egg-hunting you all!
13 march 2007 A final update of Classical was perfomed; the program is now stable. Furthermore, checkout our new Classical-Builder project. Classical-Builder is a Java3D graphical user interface to build input files for the Classical application.
9 march 2007 Don't you just hate typos? Well I do! So... a new version update! Please update yet again ;-)...
8 march 2007 Another version update has taken place. There was a problem with the accuracy of the checkpoint file. Please update
to version 5.39 now!
5 march 2007 This weekend the new 5.38 version of the classical application became available. This version has been compiled with the
ieee correctly rounding math library crlibm and should give far more consistent results on all different hardware classes.
Hopefully the 'no credit granted' issues because of results classified as 'invalid' by accident, go away as soon as all
hosts have updated to the new 5.38 binary! Let's wait and see what now happens ;-)...
27 february 2007 The scheduler has been adapted to deal with the new CPU naming conventions of the BOINC clients. The hr_classes have also
been updated and now include a special class for the Intel Core2 CPU's. Furthermore, the code has been successfully adapted
to use the ieee correctly rouding math library crlibm. Currently tests are performed on how this code behaves and as soon as
things turn out to be working, the new code version 5.38 of Classical will be made active!
05 february 2007 The feeder scheduling algorithm has been slightly updated. Now the odd/even workunits (and not the results) are being scheduled
across the two servers. Hopefully this will allow for a higher throughput of work with less waiting times involved in waiting
for results to be validated and credit being granted... Currently, also investigations are being made in how a correclty-rounding
floating-point library (crlibm) can be used to get more consistent results without the round-off problems across the different
hardwares available... Keep you posted on the subject...
04 february 2007 The hosts that were affected by the crashing workunits of the 15th of january have recieved their missing credit. Sorry for the delay...
23 january 2007 The Classical application has been updated. Another singularity was removed from the torsional interaction. Workunits
should now run normally and not get stuck anymore.
15 january 2007 Please abort any WU's with the name wu_164284800_*. These turn out to run forever and seem to get stuck! I'm Currently testing the
application with some of these specific WU's and trying to locate the problem. Other WU's seem to run fine... Also look at the
thread in the forum about it.
09 january 2007 Well hello crunchers, Happy New Year ! Lets start this year with a small update of the Classical code. After elaborate tests
a possible singularity in the torsional interaction was found. This was not realy a problem, but never the less the fix has been
implemented.
21 december 2006 Time to hit the Holidays! Thanx crunchers for a very fruitfull year as we have reached the 750 Gflops sustained capacity!
I am going on a Holiday and take some rest... No worries, he project will continue on it self... Have a nice Christmas and
a Happy New Year and see you on the 8th of January!
5 december 2006 Sinterklaas has visited Leiden Classical. Leiden Classical is now exactly 1 year old and has reached a size of
about 500 gigaflops (sustained). Moreover, we had a visit from Michella Taufer, who is well known from the
predictor@home and the docking@home projects.
With this meeting we will start a fruitfull collaboration and to make the day even more perfect . . . . .
Today we obtained a very generous donation from our local computer company Quibus: we got an Intel Quad Core Itanium
server! Whouw! This means more work for me installing the thing again... but hey... I'm not the one
who's complaining ;-)! Thanx ! So crunchers... keep on crunching and we'll keep on working too for more work and science!
29 november 2006 The Dutch Power Cows have taken Leiden Classical on as one of their projects! See
this link
for more information (Dutch). Furthermore, last week the scheduler has been updated and
from now on, Pentium D and M processors now have hardware classes on their own. Less
invalid results are to be expected because of this... Keep on crunching!
11 november 2006 Dear crunchers, you can stop canceling the 'wu_80398718_*' WU's from last week. The DB has been
updated and they should crunch correctly now!
9 november 2006 Due to a typing error in a template, all workunits with the name wu_80398718_* sent out between the 6th and now
will probably crash with a disk bound error. Please abort these WUs and read
this thread!
6 november 2006 The work unit crunching time has been increased to allow for more efficiency. Furthermore Leiden Classical
appeared in Wikipedia. Though, still in Dutch,
we do welcome this effort of 'Filmfreak'!
3 november 2006 New work is currently being injected into the database and ready to be crunched! Enjoy!
2 november 2006 The database has been significantly reduced now... The servers should be more responsive now and probably
tomorrow new work can be scheduled! Thank you all for your patience...
22 october 2006 Due to a power failure, the servers were off-line for a couple of hours. Fuse has been fixed now ;-)...
04 october 2006 Leiden Classical was interviewed by Ars Technica! Currently,
the database is filled with new WU's ready to be processed... This might delay some validating, but credit will be granted prety soon!
29 september 2006 The migration to the new servers went rather smoothly... A lot of workunits are being generated now and
it should all work fine by now... It might be the case that some results will be 'pending' for some while
because of the amount of work available... Just be patient, the credits will come in a few days ! Keep
on crunching !
11 september 2006 2nd As it turns out, boinc clients cache IP numbers. Please restart the client to contact the NEW servers!
11 september 2006 1st The servers have been setup, tested and are made active. Currently the DNS has not been updated yet, all http trafic
will be redirected to the two new servers. ! The boinc_test url is therefore temporary ! After a few hours the DNS
will be updated and then new crunchers are very welcome ;-).
30 august 2006 Currently the two servers have been setup and are running a test project. It all seems to be working so far so
probably next week, after I've tested the test project a bit more, the migration can take place. I'll keep you
posted on this and tell you the plans as soon as we have them ;-). I yet emphasise everyone to use the new URL
boinc.gorlaeus.net from now on in order to migrate smoothly!
22 august 2006 Back from Holiday and currently installing the new server, so account-creation will be open soon! Keep you posted!
08 august 2006 Experienced a server outage during the weekend again... The machine is back on-line now, no database
errors seem to have occured. When I'm back from curacao I'll start investigating. By that time we also
hope to have the other server machines up and running and have less problems. Back to the sun for me
now ;-).
14 july 2006 Last night the server went off-line and the database somehow got corrupted. The database has been restored
with a 2h previously made backup. The damage should be minimal, but further investigation is needed to
determine why the server went down in the first-place... Mind you, this is still the old machine that will
be replaced during the next month when I'm back from Holiday... But still... Anyway, things seem to have
been fixed for now... Back to enjoying the sun ;-)...
4 july 2006 Well good news and some bad news... Good is that today the two new server machines have been delivered ;-).
The bad part is... I'm going on Holiday next week for about four weeks... Oh, ah, that's bad ;-)... Anyway,
the servers have arrived, a test install of Scientific Linux 4.3 x86_64 showed we still need to twiddle
with the NIC drivers, but nothing to worry about, I'd say ;-)... Somewhere at the end of next month we
should have been switched successfully without you guys even knowing it... hopefully ;-)... For me,
have a nice Holiday cause I needed one in four years and I'm gone! Bye!
16 june 2006 Yesterday third year chemistry students successfully completed part of their Molecular Mechanics course
by making use of the Leiden Classical desktop grid. Perhaps some of you saw the liquid argon being simulated
on your computer fly by. The assignment the students were given can be found here. At a later stage some of their results will probably also be made public there.
Furthermore, at the end of this month the new dual core xeon em64t cpu's of Intel should be available
here in the Netherlands. This means that our server will be delivered pretty soon! I'll keep you posted
and you guys will be the first to know when the nodes are up and running so more users can join in!
4 june 2006 Last Friday first year graduate students successfully finished their project using the Leiden Classical
desktop grid. The poster (english) and the presentation (dutch) they made can be downloaded here.
31 may 2006 Currently 1st year chemistry student of the Leiden University are using the grid. They are investigating
the forces that are needed to be able to ionize HCl in the Ferguson flexible water model. Next friday
they will present a poster and a presentation. At a later stage the poster and presentation can be
downloaded from this site too. Moreover, the server has been ordered, we are waiting until our supplier
can deliver the dual node dual core machines. Once they are installed, account creation will be enabled again.
Oh, and before I forget, pretty soon other chemistry students will be simulating liquid argon too...
22 may 2006 ! Success ! Starting to buy the new server for this project. Pretty soon more people can join in !
Moreover, updated the server software a bit. The BAM host creation problems should now be fixed. Also
other scientific applications, which will be run on this project too, are well on their way...
4 may 2006 The old URL (http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/Classical), which was actually still active, has now been
set to redirect received requests to the new URL (http://boinc.gorlaeus.net). Physically the same
machine is still used with two diffrent IP numbers. If, however, somehow your client fails to contact
the scheduler, please detach and re-attach to the new URL. Also the project html pages have been
partly updated against the Berkeley CVS.
3 may 2006 The steps that were taken to get a decent server up and running seem to be paying off. Because of
this the stats can be made public, however account creation has been turned off until the final server
has been setup. More info will follow on that pretty soon, so be patient users, be patient... Apart
from that, steps have also been undertaken to allow for other scientific applications of the Leiden
Institute of Chemistry to run on this BOINC grid. These apps will probably not be publicly available
for every one. Soon some extra information on those applications will be made available too. Obviously
the Classical application will remain public, updated and accessible for all users!
24 apr 2006 The Classical application has been updated. One can now make automatic snapshots of a dynamical
trajectory run. Read the updated documentation for more information.
29 mar 2006 The Classical client application has been updated. The LGPL library now includes constraint dynamics.
The latest sources are now available as well as precompiled standalone binaries, including the updated
documentation, all at the usual places.
24 mar 2006 The feeder has been slightly reconfigured to allow for more work throughput; the corresponding
IP shmem table has been made bigger and now allows for 256 units and the feeder now tries to
fill the shmem table with results all from different workunits as much as possible. The jobs
submitted by users are now also set to a higher priority and therefore get scheduled faster than
the regular work.
19 mar 2006 After the success of adding a special hr_class for some of the AMD processors, the scheduler has
been extended to do the same for the Intel CPU's. Now the validation is no longer a problem on
Windows and Linux machines and now less than half a percent of the workunits is marked incorrectly
to invalid because of numerical discrepancies between the different FPU's. Furthermore,
three extra applications have been added. Although one of them gave some troubles in the last
few days (perhaps some noticed the workunits error messages), they now work all fine. The new
applications simulate the scattering and reaction of a hydrogen molecule on a static Pd(110),
Cu(111) or Pt(111) surface. These systems are important in the basic understanding of catalysis
(see http://rulgla.leidenuniv.nl for more info on that). Even better news is that steps have been
taken to get some funding so the project can be run from a decent server. Oh and last but not
least, the f2c program library, which can be downloaded from this site, now also allows for F77
codes to be translated, and linked against a BOINC (graphics too) enabled version of the f2c
library. Old F77 codes can now be very easily translated into C/C++ and automatically made BOINC
aware, with a minimum of work. Just need to add the graphical callbacks if you want the graphics, or
use the text only version without hardly any extra work!
11 mar 2006 The server software has been updated to identify Dual Core AMD processors as a
unique type of processor. As it turned out, the dual cores produce different numbers
as their single cores counterparts. Has AMD changed some things in their FPU's ?!
Anyway, the fix should help to get better validation of results... Furthermore,
some other patches have been applied to the validator itself too... It should now handle
error results, for which no files have been uploaded, better and not quit...
07 mar 2006 ! Time to switch URL ! Currently the server has been assigned a second IP number, and
with it a new URL (http://boinc.gorlaeus.net). The old URL
(https://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/Classical) is still active and will be the rest of the
month. After that, the fwnc7003 URL will automatically redirect to the boinc URL for
another period and after that, the fwnc7003 URL will be made inactive. Currently both
URL's point to that same server machine (fwnc7003) but use different IP numbers and
obviously different certificates. People joining in from now on automatically will work
through the boinc URL and should *only* use the boinc URL to attach. Older members are
requested to change URL this month by detaching and re-attaching to the new URL. Also
now you are free to choose whether you want to use the https or http. Both are
supported and by default the scheduler URL uses http now!
01 mar 2006 The Classical application code has been updated. Some little bugs are gone. Both the
sources and the binaries have been updated! Also the user interface to your personal
queue has been improved. You now have colors and you can get info on the workunit of
your job... Furthermore, the versioning now works and it looks like the feeder/scheduler
behave correctly now ;-)... The original code also had some race-conditions ?! Oh oh
Berkeley... Oops ;-)...
24 feb 2006 Well, the feeder scheduling has been validated and the cgi schedular has been optimized.
People should now get a better responce for work when requested... We'll have to watch it
for the time being though. Furthermore, a good sugestion is to hit the project 'update'
button and the project 'reset' button, in that order, in the manager once a week. It
turns out that the verion updating isn't yet optimal and you might want to get the latest
application binary ;-). Time to investigate the error reports now ;-)... Happy crunching...
20 feb 2006 Now compiled binaries of the Classical application can be downloaded from the site.
This allows you to run little test inputs at home on your computer if you want to. Be
sure to read the documentation first though!
20 feb 2006 Code update(s) done. As of today the Classical application has support for checkpointing
and an input check is perfomed on the user input before the job is submitted. Furthermore
the statistics are now fully exported each day and lot's of other fixes. The code should
now also produce the same results on different types / flavours of CPU's, but that still
remains a tricky buisness and still needs to be tested thouroughly ;-)
14 feb 2006 Server down for a day because of software problems. As it turns out, when updating
mysql on the server, a EM64T running in 64 bit, an error in the database caused the
feeder deamon to stop without any error messages whatsoever. Had to debug all night,
to find the cause, but found it I think... Anyway, back in buisness in 64 bit with a
fresh database, so perhaps, you might hit the 'update' button on your client ;-)
31 jan 2006 Maybe you noticed... A new link appeared... Yes sir, now one is able to submit
a personal calculation to the desktop grid... Just hit the 'Your personal calculations'
link on the left here under 'Returning participants'. You are allowed to submit five
calculations in total for the moment for testing purposes obvisously ;-). Have fun !
25 jan 2006 The documentation has been finshed and is available, together with the source
of the code. Also a number of links about classical mechanics have been added.
Currently I'm hard at work making a poster to be presented (and later on to
be downloaded at this site ;-), and to implement the 'personal job-queue' web-
interface. Learning PHP now ;-)... I'll keep you posted !
4 jan 2006 First of all... Happy New Year and congrats with the first two weeks of uninterupted
service of the BOINC server... Yes yes, finally removed a nasty bug from the so-called
'feeder-deamon' running this joint. Moreover, the forum section is now working and the
Q and A part too if I'm not mistaken... You are invited to have a look!
8 dec 2005 Removed a nasty Linux bug from boinc ! No more gigabytes of error messages from boinc
because of bad glutting ;-)...
6 dec 2005 Now you simulate different systems !
5 dec 2005 This site is up and running... Clients are available for
Linux, Windowze and Apple architectures !
Come and join in!