Processor Use

[L Snider]

Hello,

We have been able to use Bitcurator on certain machines, but then on others it just stalls (black screen after Ubuntu screen and it just stalls). We are trying to figure out the stall. I looked on the website and couldn't find information on what processor one should use.

We have been trying it on a Core 2 Duo with 3 gigs of RAM and a Core 2 VPro with same RAM. Is there a recommended processor?

Thanks!

Lisa

-- 

Lisa Snider
Electronic Records Archivist
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219
Austin, Texas 78713-7219
P: 512-232-4616
www.hrc.utexas.edu

[Jarrett M. Drake]

Hi Lisa,

Are you trying to run BitCurator through the virtual machine or as a host OS?

Best,

Jarrett

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[L Snider]

Hi Jarrett,

Sorry, forgot that! We are using VM Ware to run it. Machines are both Win 7.

Cheers

Lisa

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[Jarrett M. Drake]

Hi Lisa,

The latest Quickstart Guide, which can be found at http://wiki.bitcurator.net/downloads/BitCurator-Quickstart-v0.9.12.pdf, notes that:

"8GB RAM recommended. Running a virtual machine in Virtual Box on a host with 4GB RAM is possible, but performance will be restricted."

I don't know how using VM Ware correlates to this, but I am guessing that you may want to start with allocating more RAM through the VM Ware system settings for BitCurator. If that doesn't work, I'd try increasing the number of processors allocated.

Best,

Jarrett

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[L Snider]

Hi Jarrett,

Thanks. So there is no processor recommended?

I only had 3 gigs of RAM on a laptop that successfully ran BC, so that is why we are looking at the processor. In our settings we can only give it 1CPU, it won't let us go up from there. So this looks to be the issue, the processor.

Thanks again,

Lisa

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[Porter Olsen]

Hi Lisa,

It is possible to run BitCurator with a single processor allocated, so that is likely not the issue. I suspect the issue is support for hardware virtualization on that system. The Intel Core2Duo chips may or may not have hardware virtualization support. You can take a look at this chart here to see if your particular CPU does or doesn't: http://ark.intel.com/Products/VirtualizationTechnology

If your CPU is listed as having hardware virtualization support, you will want to go into the BIOS and make sure that it's enabled.

Best,

Porter

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[Kam Woods]

Hi Lisa,

(And, just as a reminder to future readers) - BitCurator is built on a 64-bit build of Ubuntu, and will run fine *natively* on any 64-bit machine (all Core 2 and newer, in particular). However, in order to run the *virtual machine* in VirtualBox, you need a machine that has the Intel VT-x extensions. You can find a list of such processors here:

http://ark.intel.com/Products/VirtualizationTechnology

If you scroll down to the Core 2 list, you'll notice that some older Core 2 models *don't* support VT-x extensions (but there are a range of model numbers, and I'm not certain exactly which one you have).

Even on some machines that *do* have VT-x extensions, you'll have to enter the BIOS when you first boot the actual computer (not the VM), and enable "Intel Virtualization" or sometimes "VT-x", depending on the BIOS. Some manufacturers, including Lenovo and HP ship many of their machines with these turned off as an administrative measure.

So the answer is, in short, we try to support as wide a range of processors as possible. If I had to give a one-line reply to anyone thinking about working with BitCurator in-depth, I'd say "Use an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 machine". Our memory recommendations are based on performance considerations, rather than "ability to run". You can run BitCurator with as little as 512MB of RAM in a VM, but you probably won't be able to do very much.

Kam

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[Kam Woods]

Hahah. Jinx.

[L Snider]

Hi Porter,

Unfortunately, we had already done that with the settings. We changed the virtualization settings to on (they were off by default), and still no go.

Any other ideas?

Cheers

Lisa

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[L Snider]

Hi Kam,

Yep, even with that enabled these boxes wouldn't run it (the first thing we did was look at the RAM and then the visualization).

I would agree with the Intel Core i5 or i7, that would be ideal or a Mac (I have an older Mac and it ran it fine).

I think this has to do with how the VM Ware works with our particular processors. For some reason there is a mis-match that is causing it to stall.

Luckily we have it up and running happily on another laptop!

Thanks again,

Lisa

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Kam Woods <kamw...@gmail.com> wrote:

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