My company, Neocortix, operates a fleet of thousands of powerful 64-bit Arm compute nodes. We are one of the biggest contributors to the rosetta@home project.

We would like to contribute to your project, but I have encountered a problem after attaching to it. No tasks are assigned or downloaded. See the boinc.log messages at the end of this post.

I am currently testing on an EC2 a1.xlarge instance. It runs debian linux 9.12 and lscpu gives the following attributes.
Architecture: aarch64
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
Model: 3
BogoMIPS: 166.66
Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32

Does anyone know a good way to solve this problem?

Here is what the boinc.log says.
23-May-2020 19:28:24 [https://universeathome.pl/universe/] Master file download succeeded
23-May-2020 19:28:29 [https://universeathome.pl/universe/] Sending scheduler request: Project initialization.
23-May-2020 19:28:29 [https://universeathome.pl/universe/] Requesting new tasks for CPU
23-May-2020 19:28:32 [Universe@Home] Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
23-May-2020 19:28:32 [Universe@Home] No tasks sent
...
23-May-2020 21:51:49 [Universe@Home] Sending scheduler request: Requested by project.
23-May-2020 21:51:49 [Universe@Home] Requesting new tasks for CPU
23-May-2020 21:51:52 [Universe@Home] Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks

I didn't come up with this, but I remebered that it was posted some time ago:

To get work with aarch64 you need in /etc/boinc-client/cc_config.xml a alternate platform string.

<options>
<alt_platform><span class="mark">arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</span></alt_platform>
</options>

Hope that helps,
vpf

I didn't come up with this, but I remebered that it was posted some time ago:

To get work with aarch64 you need in /etc/boinc-client/cc_config.xml a alternate platform string.

<options>
<alt_platform><span class="mark">arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</span></alt_platform>
</options>

Hope that helps,
vpf

You'll need to install the 32-bit ARM architecture on your 64-bit Debian ARM systems before installing BOINC.

Remove BOINC first (keep the settings files when/if asked).

Install the 32-bit architecture and update the system:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf && sudo apt-get update

install BOINC and 32-bit libstdc++6 package, BOINC is then installed with all files needed to run 32-bit and 64-bit WUs (I only install the client on my ARM64 machines):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install boinc-client libstdc++6:armhf

The BOINC file I edit is in a different location on the Debian/Ubuntu/Raspbian ARM machines I use:

/var/lib/boinc-client/cc_config.xml

I use a slightly different entry in that file:

  <options>
    <alt_platform>arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</alt_platform>
  </options>

Regards,
Jon

Thanks for the replies, but I would much rather have a 64-bit application to work with. Does anybody know if the source code is available? We have a strong ARM development team, and would be happy to sign any required NDA.

well, I hope the project replies and works this out -

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Hello Neocortix,

an aarch64 application was available at some point in time (I still see it in my project directory), however my 64bit ARM boards are utilising the 32bit variant right now as well.
I remember doing some benchmarks comparing the two last year and found the both versions to complete in the same time.

Just add the alt_platform config on your systems, it's going to be fine.

Universe benefits from a recent libC though, eg. 2.30 or 2.31 as found in Ubuntu 19.10 & 20.04, average run times decreased when upgrading from older 18.04 with libC 2.27.

I'm loathe to experiment. I have my Jetson Nano working on the Einstein BRP4 gpu tasks with a special application along with Rosetta tasks. I don't know if I want to risk adding the 32 bit architecture to a closed OS like the Nano has with the 4.9.140-tegra restricted kernel that I developed the app with.

I don't even want to try updating to the new JetPack 4.4 image because it would mean starting from scratch on the compiling environment.

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Thanks for the replies, but I would much rather have a 64-bit application to work with. Does anybody know if the source code is available? We have a strong ARM development team, and would be happy to sign any required NDA.

How is this effort going?

I would like the ARM64 application back for this project. I tried to add the alt_platform for my Nano but found out it does not support 32 bit libraries at all. No libraries are in the distro at all.

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)