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On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, tom wrote:
I run folding@home on 4 machines here and one quite often finishes early: " Simulation instability has been encountered. The run has entered a [23:12:46] state from which no further progress can be made. [23:12:46] This may be the correct result of the simulation, however if you [23:12:46] often see other project units terminating early like this[23:12:46] too, you may wish to check the stability of your computer (issues[23:12:46] such as high temperature, overclocking, etc.)."there is no overclocking, cpu is ~29c and memtest can run for days without finding a problem...Any clues/tips?
Once upon a time I worked in the R&D department of an old british supercomputer company... I mainly wrote test & diagnostics, and low-level driver code - worked with the hardware & chip desginers, did some design & integration, system building, etc, etc...
And even then, I could get a system to run all my diagnostics for days on end in & out of the burn-in ovens, then they would fail miserably when subject to application code )-:
And even more yerars ago - I looked after a PDP11 running Unix v6 - every quarter we'd get the DEC engineer in as part of the maintenance contract - he'd hoover the core memory, etc... run all his diagnostics, but I remember him saying that running Unix on them was a much better test than any of his diagnostics ever were!
So you need to think bigger than just memtest - have you tried cpuburn? However that's just a set of CPU tests. There is a user-land memory tester too - it's 'memtester' under debian. Portentially not as thorough as memtest86+, but you can run it in conjunction with other things.
But who knows where the issue is - 9 times out of ten we never found bad memory on those old boards - it was more usually bad PCBs/memory controllers (all custom designed)
As part of a soaktest/burn-in for new servers, I try to get them to run as many different things - so get the PCI(e) bus(es) excercised (disk IO - run bonnie or some custom scripts - dd'ing /dev/urandom to a file for example) and some network activity - FTP big files (and small files) to/from another PC.
I try to get my systems doing as much as possible - so as well as individual sub-system tests, run a disk test and a network test and a cpu test all at the same time...
And good luck... Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html