Solve : BOINC question?

1.	Solve : BOINC question?
Answer» With the massive amounts of computing power out there for BOINC and the many projects that run off of BOINC for data processing. I have some questions that may or may not be able to be answered here, but here they are. Every winter I generally run some systems as a means to share processing power for the benefit of helping out a cause as well as the excess heat that is produced is the benefit to myself for running systems 24/7 for the end of fall to beginning on spring months. When the heat produced doesnt benefit me, I will generally stop running multiples of systems because its now coming at an additional cost to me and the benefit of heating is gone. Currently I have 16 computers capable of running BOINC and I have 8 that have been active with 5 of the 8 running 24 hours a day. 4 out of the 5 are laptops that pump out heat but run on 40 to 50 watts of power each as measured with a kil-a-watt device. The 1 of the 5 is my systems computer that uses about 160 watts when running BOINC. Questions below: 1.) With all the many people donating processing power, is there really a need for people to continue to join and donate processing power? 2.) Are work units redundantly processed to where there is no benefit of you adding to the carbon foot print for processing data that has already been processed? ( * I suppose I am adding to the carbon footprint anyways no matter how I heat my home, but for other months of the year when there is no user benefit of the heat produced from system(s) running it, is it worse for the environment that systems are crunching data that had already been crunched and so its wasted energy and added carbon ) 3.) How many times is a single work unit processed before its no longer issued to the pool of computers running BOINC? Such as 3 times per work unit to ensure that the data processed is accurate and those from say 3 donors in which 2 of the 3 share the same checksum for the data its then assumed to throw out the 3rd and use a single instance of the data from the 2 that matched between 2 donors to be added to the database as actual data. OR does the pool of work units get issued to hundreds or thousands of people to where there is an abundance of excess processing completed per work unit? 4.) Are there any indicators that show which projects need more processing power donated their way vs another which may have an over abundance of processing power donors to make better use of the processing power available and not waste time and energy and add to carbon footprint with a project that has too many donors to work units available where the processing power could best be directed to a project with a processing deficit?Quote from: DaveLembke on December 05, 2015, 10:45:17 AM 1.) With all the many people donating processing power, is there really a need for people to continue to join and donate processing power? Whether there is a need depends on whether you think whatever projects you are donating to are worthwhile. Do they want more CPU power? Mostly, yes - some projects are underfunded and overworked and don't need or want any additional crunchers, they can't keep up with the data they already have. They'll generally throttle down the amount of work they send out or stop sending work if this is the case, either until they catch up or get more funding to continue. The larger projects, such as WCG, can definitely always use more processing power even though they now have a vast pool of resources. Quote 2.) Are work units redundantly processed to where there is no benefit of you adding to the carbon foot print for processing data that has already been processed? ( * I suppose I am adding to the carbon footprint anyways no matter how I heat my home, but for other months of the year when there is no user benefit of the heat produced from system(s) running it, is it worse for the environment that systems are crunching data that had already been crunched and so its wasted energy and added carbon ) Depends on the project. Most use a system where each unit will be crunched at least twice, usually three times, to ensure the results are accurate and that it hasn't been tampered with. This is essential as otherwise the researchers could waste so much time with results generated with a customized app which runs faster but doesn't produce valid results for example. Is this wasted energy? Depends how you look at it, I would say not. Quote 3.) How many times is a single work unit processed before its no longer issued to the pool of computers running BOINC? Such as 3 times per work unit to ensure that the data processed is accurate and those from say 3 donors in which 2 of the 3 share the same checksum for the data its then assumed to throw out the 3rd and use a single instance of the data from the 2 that matched between 2 donors to be added to the database as actual data. OR does the pool of work units get issued to hundreds or thousands of people to where there is an abundance of excess processing completed per work unit? See above, mostly answers this point. Quote 4.) Are there any indicators that show which projects need more processing power donated their way vs another which may have an over abundance of processing power donors to make better use of the processing power available and not waste time and energy and add to carbon footprint with a project that has too many donors to work units available where the processing power could best be directed to a project with a processing deficit? Good question. This is quite hard to quantify as you'll generally find newer projects are most in need of crunching capabilities, however they also don't have the resources to handle the HUGE fluctuations or massive increase in power that a few very powerful machines can bring, let alone when an entire team jumps in or even an inter-team competition - it's quite common for various challenges to be used to "stress test" projects which can result in taking these projects offline for varying amounts of time. The way I see it is that there are a vast amount of volunteers donating computing time to all of the BOINC projects, and there are enthusiasts in each area who will maintain that their chosen project is "the best" for various reasons, as well as of course many others who split their time between various projects. I tend to join in when my team does a big push on specific projects to take places, other than that I spread my time amongst projects according to what interests me and reaching my goals, for example 1m points at each project or a certain number of units. Hope this helps, feel free to ask for more clarification if needed though - I'm a heavy BOINC user but not great at explaining each aspect of it.Thanks for the info. Google search didnt turn up much and so i figured asking here might be worth it, and it was. Got some more donor computers given to me in which it seems as though laptops are best at power consumption to work unit generated. Of the laptops I have running which are mostly Core 2 Duo's and a single Core i5, they all use less than 50 watts continuous each, and process the work units in 6 hours or less for the core 2 duos and 4 hours or less for the core i5 2.4Ghz. The Desktop systems that are only to be used for crunching I started removing the hard drives and running them off of 4GB bootable USB drives with Linux Mint 17.2 this way I am able to get rid of the waste of the mechanical hard drive power consumption. I have a baseline of power consumption of the desktop systems prior to the hard drive removal and I just need to connect the kil-a-watt device in line with it and see what the reduction amounts to. But I am getting them down to bare minimum builds for decommissioned computers so that the power is mainly just for the motherboard and nothing else. I have one laptop though that I plan on bringing offline though since it takes 10 hours per work unit with its Celeron M 1.6Ghz Single-Core. 2 work units a day for 43 watts of power adds up to 1032 watts per day ( 1.032 kW ) and the other dual-core laptops are able to process 8 work units per day. I want to get up to averaging 30,000 points per day, and reduce the power consumption some to get rid of unnecessary components like hard drive when a USB stick uses far less power etc, and laptops I have set to display going to sleep when no mouse activity for 1 minute. Will also mix and match some guts I have to bring online some more core 2 duos. I have 2 of them that need power supplies and I can yank the power supplies from last gen Pentium 4 systems I have that are 24 pin PSU plugs. I could be wasteful and throw about 17 computers running it at the project, but I dont want to double my electric bill and have to load balance them throughout the house to avoid tripping circuit breakers.. Two days a week on my days off I will light off my FX-8350 when I am home and let that crunch 8 work units per 3 hours at 4Ghz, but that is one power hungry system and noisy like a server with all the fans and it tops out at 58C with the stock cooler running full bore. The system at 100% for all 8 cores and the video card and drives and fans I have seen it get into the 465 watt range continuous. And at 11.16 kW per day it adds quickly to electric bill when running full bore at 100% for all 8 cores and that system alone heats the room rather well. How many systems do you have running it and what is your average your trying to maintain? Attached a graph of my processing stats. The 2 spikes on there are the days that I had the 8 core FX-8350 running most of those days + the other systems. My average is 15,995 because I started off weak with only 2 or 3 systems for first couple of days. But once I got extra systems online I am holding above 20k now. [attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Quote from: DaveLembke on December 07, 2015, 01:08:54 PM Thanks for the info. Google search didnt turn up much and so i figured asking here might be worth it, and it was. BOINC is a pretty complicated topic because there are so many different projects, all of which are, well, different what project(s) are you currently running? Quote The Desktop systems that are only to be used for crunching I started removing the hard drives and running them off of 4GB bootable USB drives with Linux Mint 17.2 this way I am able to get rid of the waste of the mechanical hard drive power consumption. I have a baseline of power consumption of the desktop systems prior to the hard drive removal and I just need to connect the kil-a-watt device in line with it and see what the reduction amounts to. But I am getting them down to bare minimum builds for decommissioned computers so that the power is mainly just for the motherboard and nothing else. That's a good idea, something that has been done for years with hardcore DCers. Quote I have one laptop though that I plan on bringing offline though since it takes 10 hours per work unit with its Celeron M 1.6Ghz Single-Core. 2 work units a day for 43 watts of power adds up to 1032 watts per day ( 1.032 kW ) and the other dual-core laptops are able to process 8 work units per day. Yeah, when the hardware gets to that sort of age it's definitely not cost efficient to keep it running. Quote Two days a week on my days off I will light off my FX-8350 when I am home and let that crunch 8 work units per 3 hours at 4Ghz, but that is one power hungry system and noisy like a server with all the fans and it tops out at 58C with the stock cooler running full bore. The system at 100% for all 8 cores and the video card and drives and fans I have seen it get into the 465 watt range continuous. And at 11.16 kW per day it adds quickly to electric bill when running full bore at 100% for all 8 cores and that system alone heats the room rather well. That is a heck of a power draw. For reference the system in my spec listing draws ~320W at full load and my dual L5639 Xeon system draws around 220W. Quote How many systems do you have running it and what is your average your trying to maintain? At the minute I have two 24/7 systems - my main PC and the dual Xeon - and my gf's laptop runs part time. I don't have an average I aim for, my current goals are to hit 1m points on WCG which I'm running on my CPUs and 1m points on SETI which I'm only running GPU units for, these aren't always available so sometimes my GPU sits idle. Once I hit that target I'll move onto other projects. I'm currently running about 20k average per day on each of those projects. Bear in mind that scoring is radically different between projects, SETI and WCG are some of the "low" scorers when compared to others, so don't compare work units or points to anything other than the same project and the same sub-project if applicable. To give you an example I was hitting around 250k/day on the DENIS project, mainly due to a blazingly fast optimised app which was available (since made redundant). Collatz and Milkyway score quite highly too especially on decent GPUs, and there have been debates raging for years about various projects which involve Bitcoin as rewards or donations as they score very highly indeed, so the point that most stats sites offer views with and without Bitcoin projects and teams so that the scores aren't "artificially" inflated as you might say.For years I ran SETI. Started running SETI about 15 years ago on Windows 95 and 98 systems. I liked the graphical spectrograph that would crunch the data and show the time slices for the radio data collected. Back then I had 4 systems running it but they were like a 486 DX4 100Mhz, two Pentium 75Mhz systems, and a Pentium 133Mhz. I then lost interest in it until around 2008 when I got into Folding @ Home for a while in which I had 5 systems crunching for a cure for diseases. Then in like 2010 I shut them down. But about 2 weeks ago my brother told me about the Asteroids project and I figured that it is a cool project and might help in tracking down a threat to the planet before it becomes a threat. So I have all my processing power that I wish to donate going into that Asteroids project right now. Out of curiosity I took 10 minutes to disconnect the hard drives extra fans, USB devices, and removed the video card on my FX-8350 system and placed it onto integrated video. Booted with 8GB Flash Drive for Linux Mint 17.2 with BOINC installed and configured to run. 1.5 watts draw in power off state 88-90 watts idle at 1400 Mhz with cool n QUIET enabled 258-261 watts at 4000 Mhz running BOINC at 100% all 8 cores Surprised the video card, 4 hard drives, and extra fans added 200 watts to that. Gonna let this system crunch more often now that I got its power consumption dropped that much. COOL Are you running BOINC on the video card too? If not, dropping 200 watts from those changes seems a heck of a lot. I'd say even half that would be a little high. [emailprotected] is a pretty good project, looks like when I was running it I was doing about 50K/day. I didn't run the GPU app because it's much less power efficient - a mid/high end card will do a unit in about the same time as one core of a modern i5/i7, but of course the i5 or i7 can do 4 or 8 units in the same time for similar or less power draw, so it's at best only 25% as good from a performance per watt perspective. Asteroids is a little annoying though as the units are very variable in size and length but a fixed point value - it averages out over time but it's hard to compare speed at a glance.I was running it on video card too, but stopped that when i stripped it down to bare minimum. This is the video card I had running in it. EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked https://www.evga.com/Products/Specs/GPU.aspx?pn=B828C6BB-988A-4151-B720-092BB920F410Ah, that would explain it then.Perhaps you have already see this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus Quote 80 Plus (trademarked 80 PLUS) is a voluntary certification program intended to promote efficient energy use in computer power supply units (PSUs). Launched in 2004 by Ecos Consulting, it certifies products that have more than 80% energy efficiency at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load, and a power factor of 0.9 or greater at 100% load. Such PSUs waste 20% or less electric energy as heat at the specified load levels, reducing electricity use and bills compared to less efficient PSUs. The point was that some other designs would waster power at lower levels. The certified units would still be Eco-friendly even at reduced loads. This point is sometimes ignored in desktop design. EDIT: Its Theoretical you can go above 80 % with a modern design. Here is a recent link that makes such a clan. http://www.ti.com/tool/pmp10974 Universal AC Input 5V/10A/50W PSR Flyback Power Supply With Over 89% Avg Efficiency Reference Design Quote Features 85VAC to 265VAC, 50/60Hz input 5V/10A/50W output Over 89% average 4-point efficiency Over 85% efficiency at 10% load (5W) Less than 40mW standby power losses Protected against output short-circuits Just wanted to share that I found an answer to my question #4 that shows stats of all projects: http://boincstats.com/en/page/projectStatusInfo I was poking around the website looking at my stats in which I got 60,960 credit for yesterday throwing as much processing power as I can get to operate at it to see what my ceiling is with everything running. I am then going to shutdown most of the systems to only run better power consumption to credit completion systems and leave the lesser efficient systems offline until I want to boost my credit stats at the cost of additional electricity. I plan on keeping these systems running 24/7 just shy of a constant 500 watt power draw for about 41,760 credits per day: FX-8350 4Ghz = 26,880 credits per day with Asteroids @ 265 watts of power Desktop Core i5 2.4Ghz = 5,280 credits per day with Asteroids @ 49 watts of power draw Laptop Athlon II M300 2.0Ghz = 3,360 credits per day with Asteroids @ 46 watts of power draw Laptop Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz = 3,360 credits per day with Asteroids @ 47 watts of power draw Laptop Core 2 Duo T2500 2.0Ghz = 2,880 credits per day with Asteroids @ 46 watts of power draw Laptop My wifes computer a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz will add to this when its on and not in use by her at around 150 watts and her system has given as much as 4,320 on a day that she leaves it on and isnt using her computer. My desktop I retired my dual-core Athlon 64 x2 4450B 2.3Ghz and installed the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz back into it that was in my newest gaming system prior to getting the FX-8350 for it. And the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz is capable of more than 3,840 that BOINC has gotten from it if I didnt use it for about 8 hours of the day in which the processing is suspended until I walk away for 10 minute in which its allowed 100% for all 4 cores. This months electric bill will be an interesting one with 14 computers running at one point, and 8 of 14 running since just after Thanksgiving. When i get home from work today I am going to slow the meter that is probably spinning quickly like the griswold christmas scene when his house is covered in lights. Depending on your electricity costs, 500W draw shouldn't be so bad. I draw around that with my two 24/7 systems. It offsets my heating costs - I have storage heaters which are inefficient and also on a separate tariff which is more expensive than normal usage, so it's cheaper to use computers for heat and run the heaters on low when I have to. Some people forget that 500W of electricity = 500W of heat, whether that 500W is being drawn from a heater, an oven, a computer or a load of lights it'll heat my flat just the same!With these 14 systems running, my wattage is around 2000 watts ( 2 kW per hour 34 CENTS = 48kW per day $8.16 or $57.12 per week USD). And very true about the 500 watts heat from a PC being same as a 500 watt space heater. At 500 watts I'd be looking at around 12kW per day at 17 cents per kWh for $2.04 per day at $14.28 per week USD. Paying about $57.12 +/- extra on an electric bill per month would be better than $228.48 +/- extra. Winter has been unusually mild where I live in New Hampshire, so I don't need to be drawing 2000 watts 24/7. When Winter finally gets here I will be running all 14 systems or more if I get more systems worth running it. I dont see Pentium 4's or older as worth running BOINC on. I did try out a Pentium 4 HT 3.0Ghz with 2MB Cache but it took almost 12 hours per work unit per physical and HT core. Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz can get a work unit done every 6 hours per core. The Core i5 is getting about 4 done in 5 hours, and the 8-core FX-8350 is completing 8 every 3 hours at 1 per core. There are 7 other USA based teams that are greater than my 60,960 per day, so if everyone stayed at the same output and I did too, I would eventually slip into 8th place out of 288, but I cant burn 2kW per hour on a constant basis. I might switch to a different project when I reach 1 million or so and help out in other fields of study, but at a realistic power consumption rate. [attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Your team is also 50th in points produced today WORLDWIDE, so that's pretty good going Quote Your team is also 50th in points produced today worldwide, so that's pretty good going Thanks Too bad its gonna get expensive for electric bill if I didnt shut down a bunch of systems though Got home from work yesterday and only using around 500 watts now constant, but I will be above the 30k per day goal I set for myself. Was thinking one of my AMD motherboards supports an 8-core that currently just has a Athlon II x2 215 in it. If I get a good deal on a used 8150 or 8350, I could have both of those systems running at around 600 watts with nothing else and get done 16 work units every 3 hours for 128 work units completed per day and maintain about 53,000 credit per day whereas with the group of systems now at 500 watts, I havent done the math YET but its in the 30k range.

Answer»

With the massive amounts of computing power out there for BOINC and the many projects that run off of BOINC for data processing. I have some questions that may or may not be able to be answered here, but here they are.

Every winter I generally run some systems as a means to share processing power for the benefit of helping out a cause as well as the excess heat that is produced is the benefit to myself for running systems 24/7 for the end of fall to beginning on spring months. When the heat produced doesnt benefit me, I will generally stop running multiples of systems because its now coming at an additional cost to me and the benefit of heating is gone.

Currently I have 16 computers capable of running BOINC and I have 8 that have been active with 5 of the 8 running 24 hours a day. 4 out of the 5 are laptops that pump out heat but run on 40 to 50 watts of power each as measured with a kil-a-watt device. The 1 of the 5 is my systems computer that uses about 160 watts when running BOINC.

Questions below:

1.) With all the many people donating processing power, is there really a need for people to continue to join and donate processing power?

2.) Are work units redundantly processed to where there is no benefit of you adding to the carbon foot print for processing data that has already been processed? ( * I suppose I am adding to the carbon footprint anyways no matter how I heat my home, but for other months of the year when there is no user benefit of the heat produced from system(s) running it, is it worse for the environment that systems are crunching data that had already been crunched and so its wasted energy and added carbon )

3.) How many times is a single work unit processed before its no longer issued to the pool of computers running BOINC? Such as 3 times per work unit to ensure that the data processed is accurate and those from say 3 donors in which 2 of the 3 share the same checksum for the data its then assumed to throw out the 3rd and use a single instance of the data from the 2 that matched between 2 donors to be added to the database as actual data. OR does the pool of work units get issued to hundreds or thousands of people to where there is an abundance of excess processing completed per work unit?

4.) Are there any indicators that show which projects need more processing power donated their way vs another which may have an over abundance of processing power donors to make better use of the processing power available and not waste time and energy and add to carbon footprint with a project that has too many donors to work units available where the processing power could best be directed to a project with a processing deficit?Quote from: DaveLembke on December 05, 2015, 10:45:17 AM

1.) With all the many people donating processing power, is there really a need for people to continue to join and donate processing power?

Whether there is a need depends on whether you think whatever projects you are donating to are worthwhile. Do they want more CPU power? Mostly, yes - some projects are underfunded and overworked and don't need or want any additional crunchers, they can't keep up with the data they already have. They'll generally throttle down the amount of work they send out or stop sending work if this is the case, either until they catch up or get more funding to continue. The larger projects, such as WCG, can definitely always use more processing power even though they now have a vast pool of resources.

Quote

2.) Are work units redundantly processed to where there is no benefit of you adding to the carbon foot print for processing data that has already been processed? ( * I suppose I am adding to the carbon footprint anyways no matter how I heat my home, but for other months of the year when there is no user benefit of the heat produced from system(s) running it, is it worse for the environment that systems are crunching data that had already been crunched and so its wasted energy and added carbon )

Depends on the project. Most use a system where each unit will be crunched at least twice, usually three times, to ensure the results are accurate and that it hasn't been tampered with. This is essential as otherwise the researchers could waste so much time with results generated with a customized app which runs faster but doesn't produce valid results for example. Is this wasted energy? Depends how you look at it, I would say not.

Quote

3.) How many times is a single work unit processed before its no longer issued to the pool of computers running BOINC? Such as 3 times per work unit to ensure that the data processed is accurate and those from say 3 donors in which 2 of the 3 share the same checksum for the data its then assumed to throw out the 3rd and use a single instance of the data from the 2 that matched between 2 donors to be added to the database as actual data. OR does the pool of work units get issued to hundreds or thousands of people to where there is an abundance of excess processing completed per work unit?

See above, mostly answers this point.

Quote

4.) Are there any indicators that show which projects need more processing power donated their way vs another which may have an over abundance of processing power donors to make better use of the processing power available and not waste time and energy and add to carbon footprint with a project that has too many donors to work units available where the processing power could best be directed to a project with a processing deficit?

Good question. This is quite hard to quantify as you'll generally find newer projects are most in need of crunching capabilities, however they also don't have the resources to handle the HUGE fluctuations or massive increase in power that a few very powerful machines can bring, let alone when an entire team jumps in or even an inter-team competition - it's quite common for various challenges to be used to "stress test" projects which can result in taking these projects offline for varying amounts of time. The way I see it is that there are a vast amount of volunteers donating computing time to all of the BOINC projects, and there are enthusiasts in each area who will maintain that their chosen project is "the best" for various reasons, as well as of course many others who split their time between various projects. I tend to join in when my team does a big push on specific projects to take places, other than that I spread my time amongst projects according to what interests me and reaching my goals, for example 1m points at each project or a certain number of units.

Hope this helps, feel free to ask for more clarification if needed though - I'm a heavy BOINC user but not great at explaining each aspect of it.Thanks for the info. Google search didnt turn up much and so i figured asking here might be worth it, and it was.

Got some more donor computers given to me in which it seems as though laptops are best at power consumption to work unit generated. Of the laptops I have running which are mostly Core 2 Duo's and a single Core i5, they all use less than 50 watts continuous each, and process the work units in 6 hours or less for the core 2 duos and 4 hours or less for the core i5 2.4Ghz.

The Desktop systems that are only to be used for crunching I started removing the hard drives and running them off of 4GB bootable USB drives with Linux Mint 17.2 this way I am able to get rid of the waste of the mechanical hard drive power consumption. I have a baseline of power consumption of the desktop systems prior to the hard drive removal and I just need to connect the kil-a-watt device in line with it and see what the reduction amounts to. But I am getting them down to bare minimum builds for decommissioned computers so that the power is mainly just for the motherboard and nothing else.

I have one laptop though that I plan on bringing offline though since it takes 10 hours per work unit with its Celeron M 1.6Ghz Single-Core. 2 work units a day for 43 watts of power adds up to 1032 watts per day ( 1.032 kW ) and the other dual-core laptops are able to process 8 work units per day.

I want to get up to averaging 30,000 points per day, and reduce the power consumption some to get rid of unnecessary components like hard drive when a USB stick uses far less power etc, and laptops I have set to display going to sleep when no mouse activity for 1 minute. Will also mix and match some guts I have to bring online some more core 2 duos. I have 2 of them that need power supplies and I can yank the power supplies from last gen Pentium 4 systems I have that are 24 pin PSU plugs. I could be wasteful and throw about 17 computers running it at the project, but I dont want to double my electric bill and have to load balance them throughout the house to avoid tripping circuit breakers..

Two days a week on my days off I will light off my FX-8350 when I am home and let that crunch 8 work units per 3 hours at 4Ghz, but that is one power hungry system and noisy like a server with all the fans and it tops out at 58C with the stock cooler running full bore. The system at 100% for all 8 cores and the video card and drives and fans I have seen it get into the 465 watt range continuous. And at 11.16 kW per day it adds quickly to electric bill when running full bore at 100% for all 8 cores and that system alone heats the room rather well.

How many systems do you have running it and what is your average your trying to maintain?

Attached a graph of my processing stats. The 2 spikes on there are the days that I had the 8 core FX-8350 running most of those days + the other systems. My average is 15,995 because I started off weak with only 2 or 3 systems for first couple of days. But once I got extra systems online I am holding above 20k now.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Quote from: DaveLembke on December 07, 2015, 01:08:54 PM

Thanks for the info. Google search didnt turn up much and so i figured asking here might be worth it, and it was.

BOINC is a pretty complicated topic because there are so many different projects, all of which are, well, different what project(s) are you currently running?

Quote

The Desktop systems that are only to be used for crunching I started removing the hard drives and running them off of 4GB bootable USB drives with Linux Mint 17.2 this way I am able to get rid of the waste of the mechanical hard drive power consumption. I have a baseline of power consumption of the desktop systems prior to the hard drive removal and I just need to connect the kil-a-watt device in line with it and see what the reduction amounts to. But I am getting them down to bare minimum builds for decommissioned computers so that the power is mainly just for the motherboard and nothing else.

That's a good idea, something that has been done for years with hardcore DCers.

Quote

I have one laptop though that I plan on bringing offline though since it takes 10 hours per work unit with its Celeron M 1.6Ghz Single-Core. 2 work units a day for 43 watts of power adds up to 1032 watts per day ( 1.032 kW ) and the other dual-core laptops are able to process 8 work units per day.

Yeah, when the hardware gets to that sort of age it's definitely not cost efficient to keep it running.

Quote

Two days a week on my days off I will light off my FX-8350 when I am home and let that crunch 8 work units per 3 hours at 4Ghz, but that is one power hungry system and noisy like a server with all the fans and it tops out at 58C with the stock cooler running full bore. The system at 100% for all 8 cores and the video card and drives and fans I have seen it get into the 465 watt range continuous. And at 11.16 kW per day it adds quickly to electric bill when running full bore at 100% for all 8 cores and that system alone heats the room rather well.

That is a heck of a power draw. For reference the system in my spec listing draws ~320W at full load and my dual L5639 Xeon system draws around 220W.

Quote

How many systems do you have running it and what is your average your trying to maintain?

At the minute I have two 24/7 systems - my main PC and the dual Xeon - and my gf's laptop runs part time. I don't have an average I aim for, my current goals are to hit 1m points on WCG which I'm running on my CPUs and 1m points on SETI which I'm only running GPU units for, these aren't always available so sometimes my GPU sits idle. Once I hit that target I'll move onto other projects. I'm currently running about 20k average per day on each of those projects.

Bear in mind that scoring is radically different between projects, SETI and WCG are some of the "low" scorers when compared to others, so don't compare work units or points to anything other than the same project and the same sub-project if applicable. To give you an example I was hitting around 250k/day on the DENIS project, mainly due to a blazingly fast optimised app which was available (since made redundant). Collatz and Milkyway score quite highly too especially on decent GPUs, and there have been debates raging for years about various projects which involve Bitcoin as rewards or donations as they score very highly indeed, so the point that most stats sites offer views with and without Bitcoin projects and teams so that the scores aren't "artificially" inflated as you might say.For years I ran SETI. Started running SETI about 15 years ago on Windows 95 and 98 systems. I liked the graphical spectrograph that would crunch the data and show the time slices for the radio data collected. Back then I had 4 systems running it but they were like a 486 DX4 100Mhz, two Pentium 75Mhz systems, and a Pentium 133Mhz. I then lost interest in it until around 2008 when I got into Folding @ Home for a while in which I had 5 systems crunching for a cure for diseases. Then in like 2010 I shut them down. But about 2 weeks ago my brother told me about the Asteroids project and I figured that it is a cool project and might help in tracking down a threat to the planet before it becomes a threat. So I have all my processing power that I wish to donate going into that Asteroids project right now.

Out of curiosity I took 10 minutes to disconnect the hard drives extra fans, USB devices, and removed the video card on my FX-8350 system and placed it onto integrated video. Booted with 8GB Flash Drive for Linux Mint 17.2 with BOINC installed and configured to run.

1.5 watts draw in power off state
88-90 watts idle at 1400 Mhz with cool n QUIET enabled
258-261 watts at 4000 Mhz running BOINC at 100% all 8 cores

Surprised the video card, 4 hard drives, and extra fans added 200 watts to that. Gonna let this system crunch more often now that I got its power consumption dropped that much. COOL Are you running BOINC on the video card too? If not, dropping 200 watts from those changes seems a heck of a lot. I'd say even half that would be a little high.

[emailprotected] is a pretty good project, looks like when I was running it I was doing about 50K/day. I didn't run the GPU app because it's much less power efficient - a mid/high end card will do a unit in about the same time as one core of a modern i5/i7, but of course the i5 or i7 can do 4 or 8 units in the same time for similar or less power draw, so it's at best only 25% as good from a performance per watt perspective. Asteroids is a little annoying though as the units are very variable in size and length but a fixed point value - it averages out over time but it's hard to compare speed at a glance.I was running it on video card too, but stopped that when i stripped it down to bare minimum.

This is the video card I had running in it. EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked

https://www.evga.com/Products/Specs/GPU.aspx?pn=B828C6BB-988A-4151-B720-092BB920F410Ah, that would explain it then.Perhaps you have already see this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus
Quote

80 Plus (trademarked 80 PLUS) is a voluntary certification program intended to promote efficient energy use in computer power supply units (PSUs). Launched in 2004 by Ecos Consulting, it certifies products that have more than 80% energy efficiency at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load, and a power factor of 0.9 or greater at 100% load. Such PSUs waste 20% or less electric energy as heat at the specified load levels, reducing electricity use and bills compared to less efficient PSUs.

The point was that some other designs would waster power at lower levels. The certified units would still be Eco-friendly even at reduced loads. This point is sometimes ignored in desktop design.

EDIT: Its Theoretical you can go above 80 % with a modern design.
Here is a recent link that makes such a clan.
http://www.ti.com/tool/pmp10974
Universal AC Input 5V/10A/50W PSR Flyback Power Supply With Over 89% Avg Efficiency Reference Design
Quote

Features

85VAC to 265VAC, 50/60Hz input 5V/10A/50W output
Over 89% average 4-point efficiency
Over 85% efficiency at 10% load (5W)
Less than 40mW standby power losses
Protected against output short-circuits

Just wanted to share that I found an answer to my question #4 that shows stats of all projects:

http://boincstats.com/en/page/projectStatusInfo

I was poking around the website looking at my stats in which I got 60,960 credit for yesterday throwing as much processing power as I can get to operate at it to see what my ceiling is with everything running. I am then going to shutdown most of the systems to only run better power consumption to credit completion systems and leave the lesser efficient systems offline until I want to boost my credit stats at the cost of additional electricity.

I plan on keeping these systems running 24/7 just shy of a constant 500 watt power draw for about 41,760 credits per day:

FX-8350 4Ghz = 26,880 credits per day with Asteroids @ 265 watts of power Desktop
Core i5 2.4Ghz = 5,280 credits per day with Asteroids @ 49 watts of power draw Laptop
Athlon II M300 2.0Ghz = 3,360 credits per day with Asteroids @ 46 watts of power draw Laptop
Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz = 3,360 credits per day with Asteroids @ 47 watts of power draw Laptop
Core 2 Duo T2500 2.0Ghz = 2,880 credits per day with Asteroids @ 46 watts of power draw Laptop

My wifes computer a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz will add to this when its on and not in use by her at around 150 watts and her system has given as much as 4,320 on a day that she leaves it on and isnt using her computer.

My desktop I retired my dual-core Athlon 64 x2 4450B 2.3Ghz and installed the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz back into it that was in my newest gaming system prior to getting the FX-8350 for it. And the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz is capable of more than 3,840 that BOINC has gotten from it if I didnt use it for about 8 hours of the day in which the processing is suspended until I walk away for 10 minute in which its allowed 100% for all 4 cores.

This months electric bill will be an interesting one with 14 computers running at one point, and 8 of 14 running since just after Thanksgiving. When i get home from work today I am going to slow the meter that is probably spinning quickly like the griswold christmas scene when his house is covered in lights. Depending on your electricity costs, 500W draw shouldn't be so bad. I draw around that with my two 24/7 systems. It offsets my heating costs - I have storage heaters which are inefficient and also on a separate tariff which is more expensive than normal usage, so it's cheaper to use computers for heat and run the heaters on low when I have to. Some people forget that 500W of electricity = 500W of heat, whether that 500W is being drawn from a heater, an oven, a computer or a load of lights it'll heat my flat just the same!With these 14 systems running, my wattage is around 2000 watts ( 2 kW per hour 34 CENTS = 48kW per day $8.16 or $57.12 per week USD). And very true about the 500 watts heat from a PC being same as a 500 watt space heater. At 500 watts I'd be looking at around 12kW per day at 17 cents per kWh for $2.04 per day at $14.28 per week USD. Paying about $57.12 +/- extra on an electric bill per month would be better than $228.48 +/- extra.

Winter has been unusually mild where I live in New Hampshire, so I don't need to be drawing 2000 watts 24/7. When Winter finally gets here I will be running all 14 systems or more if I get more systems worth running it. I dont see Pentium 4's or older as worth running BOINC on. I did try out a Pentium 4 HT 3.0Ghz with 2MB Cache but it took almost 12 hours per work unit per physical and HT core. Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz can get a work unit done every 6 hours per core. The Core i5 is getting about 4 done in 5 hours, and the 8-core FX-8350 is completing 8 every 3 hours at 1 per core.

There are 7 other USA based teams that are greater than my 60,960 per day, so if everyone stayed at the same output and I did too, I would eventually slip into 8th place out of 288, but I cant burn 2kW per hour on a constant basis. I might switch to a different project when I reach 1 million or so and help out in other fields of study, but at a realistic power consumption rate.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Your team is also 50th in points produced today WORLDWIDE, so that's pretty good going Quote

Your team is also 50th in points produced today worldwide, so that's pretty good going

Thanks

Too bad its gonna get expensive for electric bill if I didnt shut down a bunch of systems though

Got home from work yesterday and only using around 500 watts now constant, but I will be above the 30k per day goal I set for myself. Was thinking one of my AMD motherboards supports an 8-core that currently just has a Athlon II x2 215 in it. If I get a good deal on a used 8150 or 8350, I could have both of those systems running at around 600 watts with nothing else and get done 16 work units every 3 hours for 128 work units completed per day and maintain about 53,000 credit per day whereas with the group of systems now at 500 watts, I havent done the math YET but its in the 30k range.

Solve : BOINC question?

Discussion

No Comment Found

Related InterviewSolutions

Reply to Comment