Off the Leading Edge ($--)

[Dirk Broer]

£350/annum? Now I understand why my girlfriend asked to close down "1 or 2 of those Boinc machines". If my 5 machines run as expensive as yours they should be costing roughly 2275 euro/annum...Next time Boinc comes asking for money from me I will return the favour.

[Tamaster]

After getting this card rolling in stock configuration, it is able to earn around 50k credits/day from PrimeGrid Sieving with this 2.8 Ghz dual-core on 230 watts of power ($0.33/day) which I've invested about $250 in parts.

I'd rather be crunchin' computational biology type work, but until more projects get ported to OpenCL (which is supported by *_BOTH_* Nvidia and AMD) this will have to do...

[vaughan]

Tamaster I agree we are favoring the Math projects with the GPU projects. I have put some of my CPU cores on the Biology / Medical projects to try to redress the balance a bit.

[AMDave]

/ed -
half an hour later I remember it all now
the proof was that
1) the Bio projects would not achieve the same speed-up as the maths projects
2) the GPGPU capable GPU's do not have the same proliferation as CPUs yet and won't have for a long time (if ever)
3) so investing in fine-tuning the CPU apps was going to bring bigger net-gains in the short AND medium term
the point was that GPGPU does not bring all things to everyone
there was also some factual and sensible evidence behind the conjecture and it, sadly, made good sense.
- ed/


Actually, in spite of DA's stance on waiting longer before developing GPU clients for SETI, I am very surprised that IBM have not forwarded GPU client development on WCG.
(Don't forget the December run on WCG is about to start!!!)
Until WCG catch up (and they will) we will be crunching mostly math on the GPU, I think.

[vaughan]

Until WCG catch up (and they will) we will be crunching mostly math on the GPU, I think.

Don't forget Folding at Home, its a shame its not BOINC.

[Tamaster]

Well... Folding@home is getting the benefit of my crossfire pair of HD2600XT adapters on my main computer to good effect. And I'm running WCG on *_ALL_* my computers, including the one that I just added PrimeGrid GPU crunchin' to. Right now it's mostly Cancer research (which I have a personal stake in), Muscular Distrophy (which I also have a personal stake in) and Clean Water and Energy (which we *_ALL_* have a stake in). I'm not knocking the math, cosmology or climate research arenas (I've contributed to all in the past, and will again) It's just the lack of common platform support (both sides are at fault in my not so humble opinion) driven by a desire to glean every last bit of performance. Hardware Abstraction Layers cost MIPS/FLOPS. Fact of Life. But the benefits *_FAR_* outweigh the cost in distributed computing (also IMNSHO). Granted, there are various hardware limitations to overcome, which you can adapt by software (CPU) emulation to fill in the gaps. No one has done this. Yet. It's on my wish list...

[Tamaster]

One of the reasons that I've been MIA is that my place suffered a massive electrical surge that took out some electronics.
(and two computers, one of which was running GPU work for PrimeGrid)

I'm still sorting out this mess and it might be a while before I get to the bottom of it.

[Dirk Broer]

Hi Tamaster,

That is bad news. I hope you can claim your damage with the involved power company.
Does not get you your lost credits back, but something is better than nothing.

[NeoGen]

Sorry to hear Tamaster

I've been fortunate that over here we only have a power outage 2 or 3 times a year and its usually just that, power goes down but no electronics is affected.
Best of luck sorting it out, and like Dirk said I hope you can claim the damage with the power company.