Windows8, GPU's, & RC5

[Brucifer]

So has anyone had a chance to dink around with Win8 and gpu's running rc5??? What I'm looking down the road at is the big bad date in2014 when XP support goes away, and then along with that sad event will be the discontinuance of anti-virus softare vendor's support for XP, ad nauseum. The last time I messed with linux and the rc5 clients, they were not optimised to the same point that the windows gpu driver clients were. Has that changed any?? What to do, what to do..........

[Dirk Broer]

Run rc5 in a virtual winxp box under win8?
Darn virtual boxes have to be taught to see the actual GPU by then.

Run Moo! in Boinc then? Moo! Wrapper brings together BOINC volunteer computing network resources and the Distributed.net projects. It allows a BOINC Client to participate in the RC5-72 challenge.

[Brucifer]

Win8 isn't an improvement there............. what you are suggesting is nothing more than taking a step or ten backwards to run rc5 in spite of win8., and having to spend more money in the process to do it. To be totally blunt about it, it is easier to just say pizz on it and hang it up. just sayin.... :-)

The only thing moving forward in this instance is money out of people's pockets into Ballmer's. His product hasn't improved on anything in the PC world.

[Dirk Broer]

WinXP also brought money into the likes of Gates and Balmer, so I don't exactly see your point?
If and when your hardware is capable of running a BOINC client -and they are there for almost any OS (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/DownloadOther)- you can run RC5-72 through the Moo! Wrapper

[AMDave]

I did some DC client tests on Win8 Developer Edition for a couple of weeks when it became available, with mixed results.
I expect many to fall back to prior experience and await Win8 (SP1) and greater uptake before dedicating greater effort to migrating their clients.
ITMT nothing has to change in blazing a hurry.
It's just a matter of time before Dnet re-compile the clients for Win8.

[Dirk Broer]

There's a world of difference between the developer preview (build 8102), the consumer preview (build 8250) and the release preview (build 8400).
They keep improving. In build 8400 BOINC even starts and detects your GPU automatically (unlike the developer preview). Just tapping/clicking the desktop tile brings your 'old desktop', so see the startup screen as a giant 'Start' menu. And the version you can buy as from today is hopefully even better.

[NeoGen]

I can't speak for Windows 8 because I'm a bit negatively biased... I never liked Windows 8 from the moment I saw the first snapshots long ago where they proudly presented the Metro interface.
But to be fair I convinced myself to give it a chance, I have an MSI Windpad tablet (AMD powered! :icon_mrgreen: ) and I decided to try windows 8 on it because in all honesty, no matter how you slice it and dice it, the truth is Metro interface was designed for tablet devices and/or touch panels, not regular monitors. So I gave it a fair shot and tried it for a couple of weeks just to see how it would fare...
My conclusion was... as bad as it to handle Windows 7 on a tablet (it came pre-loaded with it), Windows 8 wasn't much better. I'm even ashamed to say that for the first time in my life I had to go online to search google for "how to shutdown windows 8" because it just isn't intuitive at all.

Well, this is just me, but I will stick to Windows 7 for as long as I can, or until they give the users an option to remove the Metro interface. As it is tradition with every version of Windows, only after the second service pack the system will be perfected enough and actually good and reliable to use. Windows 7 doesn't have a Service Pack 2 yet but it should come out anytime now. It has broad compatibility with all current applications and support should last for a good number of years.

But then again, like I said in the beggining, I'm negatively biased... :icon_razz:

[Dirk Broer]

Have I got news for you: There won't be a service pack 2 for Win7 (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-7-SP2-Service-Pack-Release-Date-Patches,18685.html)

[Brucifer]

WinXP also brought money into the likes of Gates and Balmer, so I don't exactly see your point?
If and when your hardware is capable of running a BOINC client -and they are there for almost any OS (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/DownloadOther)- you can run RC5-72 through the Moo! Wrapper

Point one wasn't about windows previously putting money into M$ pocket. It is about win8 specifically trying to redefine the whole win concept and cause a massive change, when it isn't needed other than for tablets. PC's are running just fine, businesses are running just fine. Time will tell whether the business world buys into this at all. Win8 is going to cost business a massive amount in switching over.... lots of retraining.

Point two is fine you are one of those that like BOINC. Fact remains there are folks out there that detest it, I'm one of them.

Actually, I don't like windows either! lol I use it only because I can get a bit more production out of the rc5 clients under win than linux. For OGR, it's hard to beat linux, although the win64 ogr client has decent output.

I'll just most likely keep my XP stuff running as long as I can. Once the hardware croaks, and/or support falls off, then I'll either just go to linux for rc5, or just go over to many-cored linux systems for ogr and drop the rc5 effort. Crunching takes bux as everyone knows. Being retired, the bux just aren't there to play the MS software upgrade game. Lots of folks have already left this "hobby", and I don't see much of the horizon that is going to reverse that trend. Just my .01 cents worth is all. :-)

[vaughan]

Adding to Brucifer's observations, I think its about time BOINC matured a bit. It annoys me that there are some projects that can "hog" your PC by somehow tricking BOINC in running one particular project in front of tasks that have a sooner deadline from another project.

Also a reason some people have stopped crunching is the exhorbitant cost of electricity caused by the "greenies". I still reckon this greenhouse gas stuff is a load of hooey. Maybe when some of the 3rd world countries stop polluting so much I may make an effort. In the meantime I follow Le Chatelier's principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle) - from Wikipedia "If a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration, temperature, volume, or partial pressure, then the equilibrium shifts to counteract the imposed change and a new equilibrium is established".

Don't forget one of the most popular non-BOINC projects Folding@Home.

[Dirk Broer]

PC's are running just fine, businesses are running just fine. Time will tell whether the business world buys into this at all.
Is it because I'm old (53)? I've heard the exact same arguments against the Apple MacIntosh, The DOS-shell, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows XP...
(and Vista, but that still has the be adopted by businesses, if it ever will. If the business does not want Win8 they are free to do so as well.)


Point two is fine you are one of those that like BOINC
Yes, I like the idea of one interface for all my projects. One thing to rule them all so to speak. But as Vaughan pointed out, I'd like to be more in control myself because the BOINC task manager has sometimes stupid ideas of its own.


I'll just most likely keep my XP stuff running as long as I can

Crunching takes bux as everyone knows
So does operating old hardware! I am the for opposite approach: try to phase out all that's not efficient anymore. Sometimes you have to spend before you can earn “De cost gaet voor de baet uyt” (old Dutch saying), you reap what you sow, etc.
WinXP only supports up to 3GB of memory (unless you have the driver-restricted 64-bit edition),
anything under a triple core CPUs is power inefficient, has a too limited instruction set and costs too much to operate in Credits/KWh (and they are really expensive here in the Netherlands, those KWhs!)
All my nVidia cards below their latest 600-series have to go as soon as possible, because they don't have a GFlop/Watt ratio higher than 5.49
My AGP HD 3850 will have to go as the mobo's it can fit into do not fall in the efficient category and because it is my weakest Ati/AMD card. My PCIe HD 3870 is already retired with it's GFlop/Watt ratio of 4.68 -the lowest for a Ati/AMD card I've encountered.

Long live the HD 6670 and HD 7770: decent performance, both in credits and KWh. Long live Llano and Trinity: decent performance, both in credits and KWh.

If there is any truth in "this greenhouse gas stuff", I'd be one of the first to know as the surf of the North Sea will be against my window (at some 10 feet above current ground level)

[Brucifer]

Dirk, you are a whippersnapper yet........... As my dad told me when I hit 50 and commented that I was old, he said old is when your kid turns fifty. :-) Well I'm closing in on that as I turned 69 this summer past.

As for the business world, Win8 is trying to shift the playing field much much more than anything MS has put out in a long time. The retraining expenses are going to be very high. Sure some places will go for it, others won't until absolutely forced into it. Some are very large like where I worked where it involved thousands and thousands of licenses, even just doing an incremental upgrade. These are the companies that really eyeball the dickens out of these MS upgrades. And MS has to listen to them because the upgrades cost the companies many millions just in licensing expenses, let alone training and revamping of internally designed software, so it isn't just an easy thing for them to upgrade. Upgrades keep the MS cash flow running, but remember software and hardware is a huge expense to companies not in the software/hardware business. Going to Win8 isn't like going from W2K to XP for instance. Because of this many companies are still on XP. Others went to terminal server running clients, both win and apple. So for MS, they *are* putting a lot on the line here, and Ballmer has acknowledged this. John Q Public buys a lot of tables, but the real money is in the commercial business accounts. You can bet many hours of midnight oil are being burned keeping the lamps on at night while this is being hashed over in the IT departments around the planet.

Once upon a horse we used to have a bunch of folks crunching. We don't now for various reasons, but a major one is the cost, both in terms of hardware/software and sadly the rising costs of electricity as Vaughan has mentioned. Besides the hobby cruncher, this has also severely impacted the corporate related crunchers that were fortunate enough to work for an employer that would allow them to utilize unused corporate computer time/cycles/whatever. With the demise of the PC's, and the upsurge of the tablets we are going to see further erosion of the number of crunchers and also the amount of "horsepower" that the hobby crunchers can bring to distributed computing. Sure, limited crunching can be accomplished on low power platforms, but we aren't going to realistically see much coming forth from the tablet world.

My opinion, and it's just my opinion, is that the win8 thing is going to impact further the erosion of the old desktop computer world and reduce the number of PC's out there. That will slow PC chip development. We will end up with some multi core server chips in the game, for those that are fortunate enough to be able to afford one or more of them to crunch with. The net effect I fear is that our already dwindling hobby is going to dwindle even more.

So while things do evolve, I fear that time is showing that our hobby is evolving into a slow death. I think that win8 is going to accelerate that to some extent. Again, just my opinion.

[Dirk Broer]

Whippersnapper (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whipper%20snapper), yes all still working there yet.

I think it will all blow over, like any other upgrade to existing software. It would be nice if the MicroSoft certification circus would be exposed for the scam it is,
as the basis of things has hardly been changed since the days of WindowsNT and skills learned then can still be applied now.
And it might very well be that Balmer has put his stakes too high, MicroSoft hasn't always been the dominant payer and surely won't continue to be forever.
Just as OS/2, Dr-DOS, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBAse suddenly lost their share of the market, so can Microsoft. This might just be the opportunity for either Linus Thorvalds or some now still unknown Chinese or Russian software entrepeneur.

Smart business people will wait some years to see whether Win8 will catch on. Around 2001 I worked for a company still on DOS 6.23, when I left AT&T in 2008 they were still on Win2K (and the servers still ran WinNT and AIX).

And as for the hardware, both the business and John Q Public have to buy something new over time. That new can be of the same general performance and consuming far less energy, or using as much energy but performing a lot better. John Q's tablets can be used for crunching, just as his PS3.
Handy system administrators/tier1 crunchers will still be able to gather crunching farms. Dedicated hobby crunchers -like the most of us- can build relatively cheap
crunching monsters by combining multi-core CPUs/APUs with as many low-powered HD 6670s/HD 7750s as the mobo supports.