BOINC - November [Prep Month]

M

metallicafan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - May 2010
Joined
Mar 30, 2005
Messages
2,205
Its been a little quiet around the BOINC crowd lately but thats all about to change. :D

As many of you know, December is usually when many of the big WCG teams participate in the Christmas Race. Now its a little early for too many details but I just wanted to get the ball rolling. If you are interested in participating go here for more details about WCG and the great projects they run on the grid. A very worth cause for sure.

Feel free to ask questions, etc. I will be posting some more info on last years race, etc as it gets closer. If you are new to BOINC, or WCG there is a awesome thread over at XS that talks about setting up the client, the points system, stats, etc.

If you do decide to help our team name is: HardOCP

To get started, just click join today on the homepage, setup an account, and install the software. I will try and get some more precise instructions this weekend for anyone not familiar with BOINC who might want to help. Thanks for considering, and crunch [H]ard!

EDIT1: Here is the system requirements page, which might help when deciding what projects to do: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/help/viewTopic.do?shortName=minimumreq
Quorums:
Computing for Clean Water Project - 1
Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 - 15
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2 - 2
Help Conquer Cancer - 2
Help Fight Childhood Cancer - 1

I'll post more as I crunch more units. Explanation: A quorum is basically how many people have to crunch an individual work unit before credit is granted. So in other words when you finish a C4CW unit you will get credit right away whereas after finishing a HPF2 unit might have to be crunched by other users before you are granted credit for your finished unit.
 
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Great start up thread for this month.

It has been quiet around the forum lately for the Commandos but everyone is still crunching away. I am currently working on some WCG but, im thinking of spliting it with another project and then focus on WCG during Decemeber.

Any recommendations for another project to run (preferably BOINC)?

metallicafan, possibly to add a list of the like 10 lowest scored projects for the DC-Vault or something similar? Just an idea for trying to see for a focus for later.
 
It seemed that the general feeling with the Commandos was that we needed to do some work in GIMPS, ORG-27, SoB and more Muon1 in order to increase our DC Vault ranking. I thought it might be tough to do a team effort on these for only a partial month though (specially since I got a late jump on this thread). Good ideas for January and beyond though for sure.

kenlo and I have been running some QMC@home pretty hard for the past few days. I figured I would try to keep us in the Top 100 as we have been slipping there a bit lately. With some Hard crunching from kenlo we even moved up a spot today. :) So if you wanted to help a little there we would welcome the help. :) Too many projects and not enough processors!
 
DC-vault and all is great but WCG is far more important science then the other projects so in my opinion a WCG Challenger trumps anything else in DC-vault. rather try for first place in WCG then worry about gaining 1 or 2 dc-vault points which really means nothing since all it takes is them deciding to remove a project to make that point gain meaningless.. so ill definitely be in on the christmas challenge if i can ever figure out this lag issue with boinc.
 
Just got a new 120mm fan that doesn't rattle so I am going to have my other c2d up and running 24/7. Right now its gonna run QMC until December than I'll switch it over for the Christmas race.
 
Good to hear Eric! I need to get a new 120mm fan myself. One of them is starting to squeak a lot (at least its in the basement).

Briliu - Did you get a chance to one again use a dual hex box (IIRC)? Looks like you are doing some great work in Muon!

not to be outdone i see that Razor is putting up over 500K BOINC PPD! Looks like hes back to full strength! Nice work all!
 
That is a nice push into Moun1 Briliu!:eek:

Speaking of stats, has anyone looked at PSP-PRP lately?
I bet I have 14 cores that say 357 points in the DC-Vault will be nice in 5 or 6 days!:eek:
 
Thats great work on PRP Razor! I just remembered something I wanted to do a while ago but, didn't have time. I am going to create a walkthrough for the [H]orde for the more difficult projects to join such as Muon, GIMPS, OGR-27, PRP, RC5-72, SoB, and Wieferich@home basically all of the non-Boinc projects.
 
Razor_FX_II said:
That is a nice push into Moun1 Briliu!:eek:
Click to expand...

Thanks :)

metallicafan said:
Briliu - Did you get a chance to one again use a dual hex box (IIRC)? Looks like you are doing some great work in Muon!
Click to expand...

Yup! I got access to the Dual hex and the Single hex again from work this weekend. Probably my last time using the dual hex as it is now a co-workers workstation. Which is SAD because when he's not solving FEA on it he's using excel and Unigraphics :confused:. All of that computing power gone to waste!!

That said I've also got my home computer (Q6600 in sig) and 2 Quad core xeons (I'm 90% sure they're E5450s) chugging along.

One thing weird about those hexs is that neither of the workstations appears to have hyperthreading. Which is odd because all of the hex cores that I can find on intels website are hyperthreaded. Maybe Dell shut it off in the bios to create another price bracket? Oh well, it wouldnt help us at work anyway because in order to use more threading you actually have to buy more HPC licenses from ANSYS. It's such racketeering.

Regardless, Glad to help out with some powerful stuff :D
 
etothe3ric said:
Great start up thread for this month.

It has been quiet around the forum lately for the Commandos but everyone is still crunching away. I am currently working on some WCG but, im thinking of spliting it with another project and then focus on WCG during Decemeber.

Any recommendations for another project to run (preferably BOINC)?

metallicafan, possibly to add a list of the like 10 lowest scored projects for the DC-Vault or something similar? Just an idea for trying to see for a focus for later.
Click to expand...

If you are badge hunting on top of points, YoYo@Home and Primegrid both have badge systems that you could push if you decide to split projects.

WCG badges are CPU time, so old computers are worth just as much per core for badges.

Primegrid and YoYo are both point based, so newer systems obviously get more badges.
 
Nice work in QMC guys! And great work in PSP-PRP Razor. Looking good.

Im still working on some more detailed BOINC setup instructions but I'll get more details on setting up WCG soon.
 
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PSP PRP has added 357 DC -Vault points last update.
This is just the first of more to come. In the next couple weeks I can see about another 800 DC-Vault points that we will gain.:)
 
Nice job, Razor.

As of last night I've stopped running BOINC and Muon to try to resolve some issues with my farm, but hopefully I'll get everything straightened out over the weekend.
 
Great work Razor! Is it hard to setup the PSP PRP client? If not maybe we can form a group effort after the WCG race.

Anyone running the new Windows CEP2 work units for WCG? Are they really as resource intensive as the system requirements makes it sound? :)
 
metallicafan said:
Anyone running the new Windows CEP2 work units for WCG? Are they really as resource intensive as the system requirements makes it sound? :)
Click to expand...

I'm not having any problems with the Windows CEP2 units. The files sizes are higher than normal and there is a one-time download that is quite large. Memory usage is a bit higher than other projects. Hard drive will thrash for a minute before work units start processing. I was running two units at a time with no issues. Right now I'm running single units to make sure they are stable. I may go back to double units when I get closer to a gold badge.
 
metallicafan said:
Great work Razor! Is it hard to setup the PSP PRP client? If not maybe we can form a group effort after the WCG race.
Click to expand...

PSP-PRP is more difficult to set up however I made a nice little guide for doing so!

I am creating a guide for other harder to join projects but, ill add the PSP one here.

PRP-PSP
Joining the Team
To join you must go to the forum (http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=2692) and properly post a request in the forum thread and send a PM to ltd. Once you see your name on the list or the PM replied to then you are properly on the team. In the post/PM you must say your username and the team you would like to join.

Running the Project
In the forum there is a thread (http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=12239) which has the newest program for the project. At the link (http://tools.1up.no/psp/prpclient/) download and unzip the proper client. First you must update the master_prpclient.txt with your email address and your username. Enter the username provided on the forum that you posted on. For windows in the folder it give you many options of how many cores you have. Choose the correct amount of cores (I choose 8 cores) and run the install-prpclient once. Then run the start-prpclient. This will create the correct amount of command prompts running for the project. To send stats or update the client manually use the update-prpclient-ini.

And your up and running.
 
so we are half way though November, are we doing the December challenge?

I think we should try and make a good showing as a team :)
 
I'm throwing my 3 hex cores in for the December challenge. Just let me know what to do when the time comes.
 
I will probably also throw in 3 hex cores :)

does WCG play nice with the F@H GPU client?
 
I've been running WCG on a quad-core while running F@H on one or two GTX 295s, and haven't had any problems. Then again I don't obsess over small changes in PPD.
 
FLECOM said:
so we are half way though November, are we doing the December challenge?

I think we should try and make a good showing as a team :)
Click to expand...

The Christmas Challenge? Oh . . its on like Donkey Kong. I noticed that the Christmas Challenge this year is scored by % Points increased instead of total points so we should be able to do pretty well. Now I just need to get a hold of hito (our team captain) to get us entered in the competition. I'll go send him another PM. :)

PM sent.
 
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AgrFan said:
I'm not having any problems with the Windows CEP2 units. The files sizes are higher than normal and there is a one-time download that is quite large. Memory usage is a bit higher than other projects. Hard drive will thrash for a minute before work units start processing. I was running two units at a time with no issues. Right now I'm running single units to make sure they are stable. I may go back to double units when I get closer to a gold badge.
Click to expand...

Good to hear these new units are running well. Argfan - What are the quorums on these new CEP2 units? How long is each one taking? thanks for the info man. :)

DooKey, FrEaKy, and FLECOM - Good to have you guys aboard! Sounds like there is some serious horsepower ready!
 
Ah! You have to enable the "Run CEP2 without restrictions?" option under your device profiles.
 
Hahaha, CEP2 trying to eat my disk:

disk.jpg


:p
 
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Quick question on WCG...is it advisable to select all projects or just a couple? I would assume this only runs a single work unit at a time, and not one from each project at a time, but thought I ask first.
 
Just joined HardOcp for the Christmas challenge. I will hopefully have these machines on as much as possible.

1055T @3.6GHZ
i3 Laptop - On and off because of the heat and wear of the fan
Atom D525 server
 
Quick question on WCG...is it advisable to select all projects or just a couple? I would assume this only runs a single work unit at a time, and not one from each project at a time, but thought I ask first.
Click to expand...
Since each of the tasks are single-threaded, it runs a task for every thread you have. The distribution across projects is roughly equal, as far as I can tell; there are small, temporary variations, of course, but it seems to balance out over the long run. It's advised to run as many of the projects as you can, to safeguard against when one or more projects has no work to give out. However, the Clean Energy and Dengue projects use quite a bit of internet bandwidth, so if you're short, you should probably opt out of those two.
 
metallicafan said:
Good to hear these new units are running well. Argfan - What are the quorums on these new CEP2 units? How long is each one taking? thanks for the info man. :)
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The quorum is 2 for CEP2. They are running 7-8 hours on my stock E5200 box. The cutoff time is 12 hours.
 
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well i think i finally figured out the lag issue. guess the client didn't like my overclock which is kinda surprising because its the same overclock ive done 130 SMP WU's on and 1000's of hours of gaming without a single issue.
 
Tobit said:
Ahh, I remember the early days of Lattice. Is it still a memory whore?
Click to expand...

At the 1:00 mark, it's using ~100 megs. Can't complain, all my running CEP2s are using nearly 13 gigs of disk space. I've got 12 gigs of RAM, and I'd love for it to be used over crazy slow I/O.
 
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