boinc stuff

[Brucifer]

So I noticed a recent post on the milky way thread regarding the gpu stuff, and it had to do with issues getting gpu's running on win7 and stuff like that. Not being a boinc fanatic to say the least, I will have to admit that there are a couple of times in the not to distant past where I have even almost remotely contemplated the possibility of installing boinc on a system to fire off on a gpu. So off I go to the various places and before long stuff is inundated with problems, ie no work, connection issues, gpu and boinc version issues, projects either being better on stream or cuda, etc. The long and short of it being that I just figure to heck with it and go back crunching on rc5.

I wouldn't mind giving a boinc project or two a go on a gpu on windows. However there are a lot of projects out there. Milkyway sounds interesting after going and reading about it. What gpus are best on it with the least hassle both setting up and continued operation?

What about the old eternal standby of seti@home. Is work solid on it for gpu's? If so, cuda or stream? Double or single precision gpu's?

What is the team really pushing on boinc, besides everything. Lots of pretty girls out there in the world, but you can't chase them all, DC projects are rather like that. LOL.

So if there is a gpu inclined person on the team that has the good fortune to have been able to figure out all this stuff it would be nice if he/she would post up a how to for team members. And with relatively reasonably priced gpu's too, not the latest and greatest things.

Once upon a time when I was younger, it seemed like various Universities were well known for their specific schools that they excelled in. All the schools want all their fingers in everything now it seems and there is too much mediocrity rather than being truly great in a few areas. DC projects are like that to me. Some people seem to go absolutely nuts in having to participate in every boinc project that comes along. So what's this team really excelling in?

[Nflight]

Since no one answered you and I find myself up early on a Saturday morning no less, here is where we are it seems. This is a view from my mind to yours!

This would be nice if it worked all the time: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=teambycpid&team=AMD+Users

IN Case it does not work for you; Collatz conjecture is #1, Milkyway is #2, and FreeHal is #3, after that there are really no serious projects running gargantuan outputs at this time!

As for the GPU competition it seems it is either Collatz Conjecture or Milkyway, no other project has consistency of work units available like these two. Aqua@home and Seti@home and the beta version have work units but they also have times of no work units which leaves one feeling left out or lost with out a paddle! :-(

I have been reading the Distributed.net forums about rc5 and find they are not quite ready for my participation if they can't get there act together it may be a long wait. I hate wasting electrons if I don't have to ! :icon_mrgreen:

[vaughan]

Collatz = points per day from a GPU are amazingly high. Good project for ATI cards. 5850 is the current sweet spot (thanks to mitchellds for the heads-up on this card).

Milkyway = points per day are very good too. You need a high powered nVidia card compute version 1.3 for this project so that means a GTX260 or higher.

Put your 9800/8800GT cards on PrimeGrid AP26 or Seti or SetiBeta. Both the Seti projects have downtimes of over a day occasionally so don't rely on them as your main project.

GPUgrid = quite large downloads, work and points are pretty consistent and pay well.

Aqua does not support GPU cards anymore, CPUs with at least 2 cores only on this project now.

What is the team focussed on? Not sure as we haven't set a target. Collatz and Milkyway are popular.

[Brucifer]

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to answer my questions. :)

I'll have to admit that the distributed.net folks get a bit laggard at times. Like the present read only database stuff, as that stops people from joining teams which isn't a good thing for engendering crunching support.

As for the current state of the boinc world, it isn't that impressive either. Basically you are saying that there are two reliable projects if you have certain gpu cards. I think overall that the whole dc thing is rather in the doldrums as there just doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for stuff like there used to be. Sorta goes hand in hand with the significant slowdown in forum posting across the teams spectrum. A lot of apathy out there in dc land I fear.

[Nflight]

Your Welcome ObiWan..!!! :blob3:

[Brucifer]

So I fired off boinc on collatz. Crunched out a WU on the gpu. However in the process I was reacquainted with why I don't like boinc, ie it decides to talk whenever it wants to... just gives you a bunch of buttons to click, but still only does what it wants to. It loaded up 4 processors, even though the default was set for 2.. Didn't want to send the completed units when the update button was pushed, etc. So I just removed it from the system,.... that showed it who owns the computer. :-) Don't need no steenking boinc....

edit: so aborted, cleaned out, re-installed, sucked new work units, it's following the defaults I wanted now, so it is off and running. Might even get a work unit or two completed at this rate. Have 2 gpu's on it, nothing fast, just the slow ones. Keeping the fast ones on rc5 for now at least anyway.

[vaughan]

...I think overall that the whole dc thing is rather in the doldrums as there just doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for stuff like there used to be. Sorta goes hand in hand with the significant slowdown in forum posting across the teams spectrum. A lot of apathy out there in dc land I fear.
That is true. Recently I put some CPU Ghz on Poem@Home only to have the "inevitable" happen - the project ran out of work. It appeared to be quite reliable until I decided to crunch it :icon_wink: In the official forum for the project when another user and myself posted that there was no work and the server gave http errors the admin eventually replied with words to the effect of "why is there a sudden increase in requests for work"? What two additional users broke his project! Sheesh. :(

I was stunned to say the least. :icon_twisted:

[Brucifer]

heh................ yup, that takes the cake Vaughan. :icon_rolleyes:

Makes you wonder what goes through the heads of these folks that put up a boinc project and then get ticked when they actually have to start holding up their end of the project... That part is the down side to boinc cause there are projects out there that shouldn't be there. Just a waste of everyones time.

[Nflight]

Brucifier, I also have run into the sse CPU driven work units on the Collatz Conjecture project, but with some manual labor I abort these work units and only run the GPU ones. Each time I download the 150 maximum workunits I always get a few CPU Wu's and abort them. Every BOINC project has some flaw to it, every Distributed Project must have flaws too, or we would not be human. Wait wait wait; is mitchell human or is he a god? :icon_razz: :blob3:

[vaughan]

OK whilst we are on the topic of BOINC I have one problem PC. This unit used to behave itself until BOINC Virtual Prairie cam out of hibernation last week. Its an Intel Q6600 running at stock 2.4GHz with Win XP 64 SP2 installed. On startup from booting it runs NPLB (4 instances) which is set for no additional work), Folding@Home on the nVidia 9800GT GPU and FAHSpy with RivaTuner set to make the GPU fan run at 100 percent, as well as Dimes and BOINC. Good old eOn starts but of course there is no work for it anymore :( so I close that application.

BOINC version is 6.10.18 and it persistently displays a message box:
Communicating with BOINC client. Please wait ...
Exit BOINC Manager or Cancel

How do I stop this annoying message from popping up and interrupting anything I try to do?

[Nflight]

BOINC version is 6.10.18 and it persistently displays a message box:
Communicating with BOINC client. Please wait ...
Exit BOINC Manager or Cancel

How do I stop this annoying message from popping up and interrupting anything I try to do?

Be patient is all I can say, It takes a few moments and then it will stop. Seems your pushing the page limit with the amount of workunits you have downloaded and have in your queue. When this happens that little popup occurs, Don't Exit BOINC Manager and Don't Cancel.!!! Just hang on while it gets through and it will go back to crunching. For the past 2 years I have endured this troublesome little popup. Only if you are pushing your system to the max does it occur. Having only 2 processors per computer, and only 2 gigs of RAM you can well bet I am struggling... :(

[Brucifer]

Unfortunately Vaughan I can't give you any answer to your question since I'm still trying to figure out the basic stuff here. :-)

And Nflight, there's lots of flaws..... LOL Like one that sorta stands out to me is that you can't assign processors/gpus to specific projects.... Say you are attached to a couple projects, and you want the gpu running collatz for instance, and and you want the cpu's crunching on the second project. Now I may be blind, but it appears that you can only have one computer system w/gpu crunching on one project at a time where the gpu is dedicated to something and the cpu's something else. I know you can direct time percentages to go to multiple projects and have the cpu/gpu cycle through those, but you can't dedicate the cpu/gpu independently to separate dedicated efforts. Now hopefully I'm wrong................................ ?????

[vaughan]

Brucifer you can assign your GPU to one project and the CPU to another by going to the project. Locate the project preferences page eg at Primegrid I wanted to run AP26 tasks on my GPU so I set my preference for HOME as CPU unchecked and GPU checked, further down I only checked the run AP26 project, save and exit.

Then, on your BOINC Manager enable PrimeGrid and it will run the AP26 tasks not other tasks. (I assume you have already downloaded and installed the CUDA driver.)

Now in BOINC Manager select another project, say Rosetta for example and enable it. BOINC will download tasks for that project.

If you want to be very fancy in Primegrid once you have configured the machine to get AP26 tasks for the GPU you can change the computer's location once again from the PG website under youraccount, your computers so that it is now WORK or SCHOOL instead of HOME. You could setup WORK to be one of the Sieving sub-projects and SCHOOL could be one of the LLR sub-projects. Check the use CPU box in the preferences. Now when you download new work on the machine it will grab the CPU tasks. This means you will have two (or more) sub-projects running on the computer - GPU and CPU tasks.

This is one of the reasons that Primegrid is so popular.

[Brucifer]

This is one of the reasons that Primegrid is so popular.

LOL, silly me, and here I was thinking it was popular because people were in love with the *science* of the project. :icon_mrgreen:

Yup, I got to thinking of what you were talking about after I made the earlier posting. It's been several years since I was on the beta testing for boinc so a lot has faded from the brain. I imagine that it will come back though.

At the moment I'm going through another upgrade cycle on another system to get the .NET Framework stuff installed so I can get another box on the Collatz stuff. I had left it crunching rc5. However as I can't get my regular rc5 account moved over to the team, I decided that I'd just crunch collatz until the rc5 folks get their database issues resolved. Unfortunately, if I am not *real* careful, the dark side just might grab me and I might just keep crunching some boinc stuff.

I don't have a bunch of systems online now days though. Twas getting a bit on the expensive side, so a while back I had just knocked it down to a few systems that had gpu's installed in them. And with boinc, I don't really care to use the cpu's any more than I have to as it is just another way to burn more electricity and generate more heat. The spouse-arino is getting ready to retire in the not too distant future so I'm slowing down on my computing billz. The gpu's are cool as it makes a major difference in one's ability to do some serious crunching without having to have a big herd of computers running all the time.

[Brucifer]

So in my newfound mini-interest in a teensy bit of the boinc world, and out there looking at some statz, I see this team out there called Poor Boy's Toyz.... Is that what happened to Poor Boy that used to hang around here in times past????

[vaughan]

So in my newfound mini-interest in a teensy bit of the boinc world, and out there looking at some statz, I see this team out there called Poor Boy's Toyz.... Is that what happened to Poor Boy that used to hang around here in times past????
Yes that's PoorBoy. He has done very well in the stats race in fact he's currently 4th in the world. :icon_thumright:

http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=boincusers

[Brucifer]

Had a bit of a catastrophe as my ISP evidently was having connection problems this afternoon and evening, and that through the boinc manager into having fits cause then I couldn't get it to reconnect to anything. Kept saying to set a default connection, but it wouldn't recognize anything and yet the browzer and all was working fine on the net........ Ended up having to reset the project on all but one of the systems. So after playing with the network and getting stuff switched over to the other ISP connection half of the systems are back crunching collatz. Whata PITA. :-(

[Brucifer]

Yes that's PoorBoy. He has done very well in the stats race in fact he's currently 4th in the world. :icon_thumright:

http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=boincusers


So is he one of the corporate crunchers? Or just a simple little super wealthy boy with a couple barns full of air conditioning and computers??? :) I mean if he is #4 in the world then we are talking some massive horsepower there.

[Steve Lux]

You could also join us in Einstein@home. The team has about 20 actively crunching there, and I've yet to run out of work to do.

[PoorBoy]

So is he one of the corporate crunchers? Or just a simple little super wealthy boy with a couple barns full of air conditioning and computers??? :) I mean if he is #4 in the world then we are talking some massive horsepower there.

Hi all, I'm neither Wealth nor Corporate, I've run BOINC for the last 7.5 years out of my home as a Hobby. With the advent of GPU Crunching it has allowed me to assemble an impressive arsenal of 14 GPU Crunching Box's that's able to Rival & even Surpass the Mega Corporate & Collage Crunchers.

I was a Member of the BOINCstats Team for awhile (1 Year) after leaving the AMD User's Team. But after some dissension on the BS Team over the use of GPU's for BOINC Processing & with the urging of some of the Former BS Team Members I made the decision to leave their Team after lifting them from a High 20's Team to a Top 10 Team.

When I left the BOINCstats Team 4 of the other Top 6 Members of the Team went with me and we Created the PBToyz Team which is very GPU Active and it has done quite well in it's 3.5 Month existence. We are already in the Top 25 in Combined Teams and moving up.

Oh and by the way I'm in 3'rd Combined now with my eyes set on 2'nd in 3-4 Weeks or less and then onward and upward to 1'st someday maybe ... :icon_mrgreen:

[Brucifer]

@PoorBoy -- Lol, Good to hear from you!! I thought about dropping by and posting a note. However your flyer on the boinc thing makes it sound like you guys are just the big time. :icon_mrgreen:

Too bad about the travails with some of the BS team members. I don't know what it is that makes some people lose their common sense about teams and points. They carry on like a member's points are their own and the team's points and forget that they truly belong to the person that crunched them, who pays the electrical billz and buys the hardware. The other item is how some of them get ticked because someone gives someone else some points and crunches for them ---- saying that those points don't belong to the other person, meanwhile those same people will gladly take ownership of the points they crunch on corporate computers that aren't "their" machines. Or they get really incensed when someone crunchez stuff for another team, failing to realize that anything anyone does for any team is a gift. But maybe then I'm just an old fashioned old fart.

Yes, the GPU's are in a totally different league than the cpu's. And things are progressing at the point with them that now (ATI at least) some serious improvements are_being/have_been made in the power consumption arena. I have just finished changing out my cuda gpu's and am now 100% ATI. And while performance was definitely a consideration, the main issue was the lower power consumption and heat generation. Like you, I keep a number of systems going in one room, and have a/c issues to take into account as how it all impacts my monthly electrical bill. I have even gotten to the point that I don't like to run anything that uses the cpu's, rather just concentrating on capitalizing on the far superior crunching of the gpu. Those quads suck up a lot of power at full load.

But it's good to see that you are doing well and happy and now have a place to crunch where you feel comfortable and have team mates in the same category.

The crunching world has definitely changed since the beginning of the classic seti project years ago. My interest in it now has grown to the point that I'm no longer a total team maven that I was in the earlier days. There have been enough years at it now that I have accumulated a good number of friends on different teams. And that's what drives my crunching anymore. I've done considerable crunching for multiple teams. In the beginning I caught a lot of heat over it, and some folks really got upset with me. However as time has marched on most of the places I crunch for have realized that I have friends on several teams, and try to help all of them. It's more of a friend thing now days than the early days of just total team competition. LOL So in my long story here, basically I guess what I'm saying is that I totally understand your reasons behind your PB Toyz Team, and am glad that you are having fun in the crunching world. Who knows, maybe I'll even add yours to my list of crunching efforts at some point in time. :-)

[Steve Lux]

To me it's all about the science - the progress. If a GPU can do it and do it +10x better than a CPU, well then, all the better. If we help save lives by understanding protein folding, if we learn more about our universe, if we get a better understanding of materials science and other topics by the shared power of distributed computing - well silly virtual points are basically meaningless aren't they?

I moved one of my projects over to FreeDC because I was basically the only one on The AMD-Users team crawling for MJ-12. If it's to be a team effort, then in my mind it should be an effort of multiple members of the team. As long as team members are consistantly helping with a project that I care to crunch for I'll stick. If I'm doing a project solo, then I'm moving project resources to a team that is active. I'm not losing any sleep over who gets the virtual points though. It's the results that matter.

[Jason1478963]

Congrats on that #3 spot...that is very impressive. I can only imagine the electric bills to get to that spot. I've been able to use my water cooling to dump heat in a storage tank thus avoiding a dedicated a/c unit. I feel that my bills a large enough without dedicated a/c part. I can really appreciate what you guys are doing for science even if it is just a hobby. Congrats again and good luck guys