BURP's WUs are COLOSSAL!!

[NeoGen]

I was curious to try out the new Sunflower Blender workunits that BURP had put available for some time, and that very few people had the memory requirements to run...

Since it was about time I upgrade from 2Gb RAM to something more, I decided to purchase a kit of 8Gb (2x4Gb) of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 to get me to a comfortable level of 10Gb and maybe be able to crunch 2 WUs at a time on my Phenom II X3...?

I was so happy when the memories arrived on the mail just about an hour ago... came immediately to the computer, shut it down, install and reboot... everything went well... start up boinc, and open the flood gates for BURP...

...and then I saw on the transfers tab....

file.blablahblah.... 257Mb!!
file.blahblablah2....293Mb!!
file.blablabla3......183Mb!!
(the real file names have been changed to protect their identity )

Plus a few other bits and pieces... I think altogether it comes up to about 1Gb of initial transfer before I can even start to crunch on it... I think I'm only going to be able to see it working tomorrow

[NeoGen]

After crunching a few of them I'm looking at the results... nearly 3 hours to crunch and about 70 credits each.

Not bad... but I think they should be worth more just for the amount of resource hogging... I saw my machine peaking at 8.5Gb on the task manager as it ran 2 WUs at the same time.

[NeoGen]

Also at first glance I didn't notice but the workunits are actually multi-threaded, so I have 1 WU running on 2 cores.
I put a secondary non-boinc project running along with BURP because it seems for some periods of time blender's CPU usage drops to only 1 core, leaving the other one with nothing to do. And I hate cpu cycle waste...


EDIT: And each WU upload seems to be around 18Mb!

[NeoGen]

This project is a major bandwidth hog, the WU uploads are getting as high as 27Mb per WU, and the credits are kinda low... It seems that since the credits are based on the average of 3, and most of the machines crunching with me are octo-cores or greater, I get very little credits with my Phenom X3, because they crunch through them at less than half the time I do and ask for less than half the credits my machine does...

But I am one of the less than 5 people crunching on it for our Team, so I have a chance here to go all the way to the top! I am already ranked 4th on the Team!

[plonk420]

i'm pretty excited about this, actually. we're kinda making history! Big Buck Bunny at 4K, 60fps, and in 3D :O

[NeoGen]

I had never seen this character before, Big Buck Bunny, is it a sort of know cartoon character maybe?

Anyway, I am focusing my X3 with 8Gb RAM (soon to be 16Gb ) on it. Even with 8Gb and running only 1 multithreaded workunit at a time the used memory peaks up to almost 6Gb. If they were not multithreaded workunits I don't know if I'd be able to run 3 in parallel even with 16Gb RAM.

Anyway, I am taking this opportunity and am close to jumping to Team #3.
Plonk420, you are closing the gap between you and vaughan, keep it up!

[plonk420]

according to Anand or some other tech site, it's being shown at many, many tech shows on cutting edge hardware (e.g. low powered stuff like Brazos or Atom+Ion) since it's unencumbered by licensing issues (and available in 1080p). Anand (or whoever) got sick of seeing it so many times. :D

(but the original render was only 1080p24, IIRC)

[vaughan]

Plonk420, you are closing the gap between you and vaughan, keep it up!

OK, I woke up

Good thing I signed up for an unlimited ADSL2+ ISP account hey!

[plonk420]

sadly, i think we're restricted on the host's side :S

[NeoGen]

Yea, I can only have 2 WUs at any given time on my machine, one crunching and a second one ready to start when the first one finishes.