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DC Vault 2

etothe3ric, DIMES is pretty easy to setup up and is non-cpu intensive. Meaning that you can run it alongside BOINC. I have a guide for installing and setting it up using the 0.5.5.3. I don't care for the new version so much. I would turn off UAC and not run as a service though. It is easier to make sure it is doing its job that way.

If you are sticking to just BOINC, make sure to add WUProp. It is non-CPU intensive as well and they have badges now too. They let you run work unit alongside the normal work you would run.
 
CaptainUnlikely said:
My gf's appointment at the hospital is on Thursday so we're hoping it goes well.
Click to expand...

Best of luck to both of you - while not quite as bad, my wife has been having issues with her Fybromyalgia (severe chronic pain) this summer, and just found out from the chronic pain expert at Kaiser that while she needs 3,000 mg minimum to effectively control pain, her regular doctor has been raising her to 2,000, telling her that's all she could take, then switching her to something else and repeating the process. 4 years now of nothing working, just to find out it may have been incorrect dosages! I pray you get resolution faster than we have!

CaptainUnlikely said:
I need to clear out some more stuff, either that or cobble these random parts into a build somehow...currently drowning in random GPUs, bits of RAM, and assorted other things.
Click to expand...

You know, I happen to have a few extra PCI-E slots and a few extra dollars... If you happen to want to part with a good (but extra) GPU down the road... :D

Gilthanis said:
You will also find that nVidia cards are supported at all of the GPU projects where AMD is not. AMD will outperform nVidia when it comes to OpenCL or at least for the time being. As far as the Vault goes, nVidia because then you can support GPUGrid. (and more badges).<snip>
I'm guessing the 7850 would be cheaper to run and will probably outperform the 560 ti. The 560 ti just has more flexibility and probably less headaches.
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing out that first part - for some reason, I thought that there were certain projects that could only be run on AMD cards. Once you said that, I looked up the list and saw that every AMD project can also run on Nvidia, plus some like GPUGrid and DistrRTgen that I've created an account for but won't run on my 9800GTX. That, plus the fact that I'm still pissed with AMD for dropping support for my 4850 in Win 7/8 really pushes me that way to start.

Besides, I could even complete my 10M F@H goal if I wanted to! :cool:
 
Gilthanis said:
I'm guessing the 7850 would be cheaper to run and will probably outperform the 560 ti. The 560 ti just has more flexibility and probably less headaches.
Click to expand...

I would tend to agree with this, the 7850 should outperform the 560Ti in gaming by a decent margin, in DC it might vary depending on the project and what it's optimised for.

Jathanis said:
Best of luck to both of you - while not quite as bad, my wife has been having issues with her Fybromyalgia (severe chronic pain) this summer, and just found out from the chronic pain expert at Kaiser that while she needs 3,000 mg minimum to effectively control pain, her regular doctor has been raising her to 2,000, telling her that's all she could take, then switching her to something else and repeating the process. 4 years now of nothing working, just to find out it may have been incorrect dosages! I pray you get resolution faster than we have!
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Thanks, we're hoping for that too. That sounds like a real mess, sorry to hear that!

You know, I happen to have a few extra PCI-E slots and a few extra dollars... If you happen to want to part with a good (but extra) GPU down the road... :D
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I think shipping might kill any possible deals as I'm in the UK :( but I currently have a GTX 460, GTX 470, 9600GSO, and a HD5850 going spare. I also have spare DDR2 and DDR3 RAM - not much of the former as I think I only have a bunch of 512MB sticks, but I think I have 8GB of the latter spare.
I now have a solid deal on those 7 laptops, all of them need RAM but I picked up a big bag of laptop DDR2 a few months back which I nearly threw out the other day - glad I didn't! That should be enough to get them up and running and see if there's anything else wrong with them, then I can look into picking up HDDs and anything else for them as and when needed.

Side note, I saw you mention above, Gilthanis, that DIMES has a new version out - didn't realise they had updated, I might try out the new version and see what it's like although I saw you said you didn't care for it. I like how they haven't published any notes on the site to say there's a new version other than the download link - no release notes, no forum announcement, no nothing, heh.
 
CaptainUnlikely, when I did a quick viewing of version 1, it put the icon in the task area but did not seem to have a way of changing preferences or seeing what was going on. I may have overlooked something, but I didn't like the lack of control. Needless to say, it didn't stay for very long. Maybe you will have a better impression.

Captain + Jathanis: I have been talking to Kai a little bit the last few days about the "fund" he had briefly mentioned setting up. We are considering a possible way of helping the Commandos a little more with either having donated funding from members, donated hardware, and/or both. As I was telling him, I have a bunch of legacy hardware and bits all over my PC Graveyard known as my office. I'm not really dealing with empty PCIe slots as much as running GPU's worth the power consumption. I still have a few 8400 and 210's crunching for me. So, as I upgrade those over time I will be finding new homes elsewhere. The bad part as Captain mentions is cost of shipping. I have seen these low end cards go for as low as $5 after rebate with free shipping at Newegg. I can't even ship it that cheap to give it away. Granted those deals aren't around much now, but they did happen.
 
Gilthanis said:
CaptainUnlikely, when I did a quick viewing of version 1, it put the icon in the task area but did not seem to have a way of changing preferences or seeing what was going on. I may have overlooked something, but I didn't like the lack of control. Needless to say, it didn't stay for very long. Maybe you will have a better impression.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just installed it on the gf's laptop at last, and noticed the same thing - very weird. Left clicking on the icon brings up a quick popup with the amount of measurements done, right clicking gives you "about" and "status" - both of which seem to show the same thing, measurements done, in a popup box - and "exit" which just closes it. The only entry in the Start menu is to uninstall DIMES. Really weird huh?

As for the fund that has been mentioned, I'd be happy to donate bits of hardware as and when I can, like I say some of it is just sitting here doing nothing and isn't worth even selling on, but could be useful to another Commando to get something up and running. Like you said, shipping is the main problem, especially for me being halfway across the world from the rest of you guys :p but I would be happy to give away some parts where feasible, obviously some stuff if I wanted to get rid of I would have to sell it due to money being tight but others, like the DDR2 RAM I have lying around, I would be happy to give away. In the UK we don't tend to get so many crazy offers like you mentioned, which I've seen on various forums and wished I could get heh, because rebates aren't really common here.
 
Yeah...that is one of the blessing of being in the States...much cheaper electronics. This just means you need to recruit more local Commandos. :)

I hope you get good news soon about your GF though. That can be very taxing. By the way, what did she say about my idea for staying busy. :p

On brighter news, I hit my 1 million point goal at ABC last night. Just waiting for the stats sites to pick it up.
 
Hah, I'll do my best!

And, she doesn't seem too thrilled by it, but I bring it up every time she complains she's been broed all day with nothing to do. Sure is one way to fill your day!
 
It is very time consuming. I tend to focus on a few at a time and then kinda check in now and again at others. It really is too much to keep up with. I really do wish projects would use the notices function in the manager more often. But then again, that would require them to actually do news updates to begin with.
 
Did they ever fix the Titan bug in gpugrid? I never could get my Titan to run that project.
 
PrimeGrid now has OpenCL apps for AMD on the Genefer work units. Double precision required. You can also choose whether to run CUDA or OpenCL on nVidia cards.
 
Got DIMES running on a server 24x7 and part time on my desktop. My other server (2012) doesn't seem to place nice with the client (0.5.5). Also running WUProps.
 
Did you turn off UAC and did you install on the local account? (talking about server 2012) Since it is based on Win 8 it may have the same problems if you use a MS account. I haven't played with 2012, so I don't know how similar their workings are. I also don't have a copy of Win8 to run through the tests and update the guides. Let me know if you get it figured out so we can update things. You may need to settle for version 1 on Windows 8 platform. Again, I have no way of testing.

Captain... evidently version 1 is service installer only with a graphical version to be had later. http://www.netdimes.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7005
 
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If anyone plans on running RNA's new VirtualBox app, make sure BOINC is NOT running as a service. It has to be ran locally. The account boinc_project is not allowed to use VirtualBox. They are still ironing the app out, so don't expect a smooth running.
 
Also, be sure to disable any AV when installing and even downloading DIMES. Mine immediately deleted it upon downloading.

You're right, that notices tab would be far too easy... Aint nobody got time for that!

CaptainUnlikely: It's unlikely that the visit went poorly, and I'm hoping all is well for you guys. That's some scary stuff. If you need anything, let us know. You're a good man for sticking by her side through all of this. A lesser man would have ran away many moons ago! So kudos to you for being a great guy.

This pot o' gold idea seems to be a bit more complicated than I originally thought. I already have a proper (though dirty named) Paypal account for donations, though I think it's best if there are a group of people that share control over that account, and a board of people who can vote on who gets what money or what donated hardware. As a nonprofit, it's a bad idea, though my own company is looking at setting up a non-profit specifically to donate hardware resources (time mostly) to BOINC, though that's a long time in the making, but we can sponsor the [H]ard DC Commandos when it gets to that point. Thoughts?
 
Kai: Ultimately a not for profit would be awesome because of potential tax write offs. However, as we have discussed, that is a hairy mess to set up. I like the idea of a fund that supports the team. I'm glad we are up for discussion on a checks and balances system for it. I would like others to chime in on their ideas though. We need to consider a few things like who would qualify, own, manage, maintain, power, etc... as well as how reliable that person is to not just grab and go or pawn it on eBay. Such an account could even be used for cloud computing if a reasonable service was worth paying for. Another thing to consider is possibly setting up a chain of fulfillment of sorts. For example, if someone needed a socket 775 processor (yes very outdated) and found one cheap online. Instead of requesting funds, they should ask the team if anyone has a spare. Many of us have parts just collecting dust. I wouldn't want to add more legacy to the pile when someone could just ship one over.

Kai, what antivirus did you have that disliked DIMES? MS Sec. Essentials works perfect for me so far. Also, which installer did you have troubles with?

Commandos, also please note my post here on our progress with WCG. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1781012
 
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Thanks for the info on DIMES Gilthanis, I must've missed that post on their forum. I don't think anything needs to be changed on this install anyway so it's not a huge deal, but I'll steer clear of v1 for new installs from now on. Also, I too use MSSE on every PC I have DIMES on and haven't had a problem with it, so I would be interested to see which AV deleted it on sight.

The hospital visit went, well, it went ok, but that's about all I can say. We were under the impression it would be more of an in depth appointment with some tests but it was really just a consultation with a neurologist. They've put through for some more tests, namely an EEG and an MRI scan, to determine if the seizures are epileptic or psychological in origin. If the former, they'll prescribe some medication, if the latter, they'll recommend psychotherapy or behaviour therapy or a range of other things. It's actually quite likely to be psychological in nature due to some traumatic events in her past, which she's already had therapy for, and it would be better if that was the case as apparently the longer seizures she has on occasion could be damaging to her brain if they are epileptic. The neurologist was really great and helped lay some fears to rest, they said it's very treatable either way it's just a case of finding the right drug or the right kind of therapy. So, now it's fingers crossed the tests come up soon, could be 1-4 weeks, and we'll go from there. The good news is her blood tests came back clear.

Kai, I'm following along the discussions over the fund to support the team, just not contributing much to the talks as I'm obviously distracted elsewhere. As I briefly mentioned I would be happy to donate hardware although shipping would be a pain to most members unless I/we manage to recruit more UK-based Commandos. I may from time to time be able to donate a little cash, although I'm fairly sure Paypal does levy a small fee on currency conversion but that's not a huge deal. As has already been mentioned, some kind of board to vote on what goes where and ultimately sharing control of it sounds like a good idea if it's going to potentially involve hardware and money from more than one person, to make sure resources are going where they should be. As Gilthanis says, if it's hardware people need, I think it would always be best to check within the team to see if anyone has something spare before buying, perhaps we could set up a thread for requesting/offering hardware between ourselves, then if nobody has anything we could also check around for the best deal on whatever is needed if it needs to be bought? Sometimes a few sets of eyes are better than one.
 
CaptainUnlikely - That sounds like excellent news, really relieving in fact. At least now they have a plan of action and it's just a matter of time before the cause is found and a treatment plan put into place. Really excellent news!

It was Symantec Endpoint that caught it and deleted it upon downloading, saying it was a threat of some kind. Weird stuff. I'm wary of anything caught and deleted, though this is obviously some sort of mistake. Either way, I've sent off a support ticket to them for evaluation. So, for now, I'm still chugging along on my way to 10M in Einstein while I wait to hear back. Hurray Symantec!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
PrimeGrid now has CPU apps for Genefer. Looks like 3 different ones depending on type of processor.
 
Well, thought I had a lead on a GTX 570 for $130 in the FS/FT forum, but it got sold out from under me today when I didn't answer in 5 hours... Grrr! :mad:
 
Well, it's now officially cold where I am, time for computer-heating! Need to get those servers running at last, things just seem to get bumped down the list all the time :( spent the weekend fixing my car up. At least the weather means my phone should be able to run NativeBOINC without getting ridiculously hot, we'll see what happens tonight.
Gf's laptop has been running SIMAP just fine on all 4 cores/8 threads, temps around 70C under full load which is more than fine for an i7. I think it'd be tempting fate a little to get the GT550m crunching on it too, though.
 
Though I have a few laptops that run GPU from time to time, I would advise against it. Unless you got a lot of heat controls and ventilation, you got to be very careful. Most laptops have the GPU and CPU on the same heatsink and so if one gets really hot, so does the other. GPU's can usually tolerate a little more heat. The CPU on the other hand...
 
Yeah, that's mainly what I'm thinking, the cooling setup seems pretty good as it keeps the CPU and GPU at decent temperatures even after a few hours' gaming, but perhaps running them both to 100% under BOINC isn't the best idea. If it was still in warranty I might be inclined to push it anyway, but as it's not, I won't.
 
Even under warranty, I wouldn't unless it was for sure getting cycled out/off at the end of the warranty. Most systems can handle a years worth of wear and tear, but it is the few years after that the aches and pains start to come out. Also, it is typically recommended to only run laptops at 60% load to help reduce heat. On some models, there is a huge difference. On others, I can run 100% and not notice it at all. YMMV Also, consider running Efmer's tthrotlle program. You can set it up to throttle the CPU and/or GPU when they reach certain temps. This is supposedly more efficient and easier on the CPU/GPU then just using 6 of 10 cycles. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1768577
 
Well, I resurrected an OptiPlex GX280 for a friend today with an NVidia 8400 GS 512MB video card and 2.75GB Ram. Not a powerhouse, but is another borged PC with a usable GPU.
 
Gilthanis said:
Well, I resurrected an OptiPlex GX280 for a friend today with an NVidia 8400 GS 512MB video card and 2.75GB Ram. Not a powerhouse, but is another borged PC with a usable GPU.
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Okay, I've been dying to ask - exactly HOW many borged systems do you have out there?!

Unfortunately, most of my family and friends I'd be able to borg run laptops or desktops with Pentium 3's or older... My mom is still running a Pentium II 866MHz with Windows ME on it - I told her about 6 years ago that until she got at least XP, I refused to do any tech support... :rolleyes:
 
~40'ish part time some times full time borgs. :) Some are laptops some are single cores all the way up to a couple hex cores and an octocore. Then, in my home is about a dozen computers. 2 P3 laptops (1GHz, 1.2GHz), 3 single core laptops, 1 single core netbook, 1 dual core netbook, i7 920, Q8200, 1 triple core, 2 dual core, 2 single core Android phones, and 1 dual core Android that runs part time. Those are all that I have that I can afford to run anyways. I still have 4 dual core Dell Optiplex 330/360's sitting on the floor and many others random systems that could be brought to life if a need presented itself. More then likely I will scrap those for metal/recycling.
 
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That's an incredible amount of Borged systems! I can just imagine you going door to door selling the idea of science to people in your neighborhood... "Hello sir, have you ever wanted to cure diseases, find aliens or map the cosmos?"

Oh, the 7970 is working perfectly in a system with a 7990 as a primary. No issues with it thus far, but I'm just waiting for the lock-up/fire when I come home from work one day.
 
Glad it is working for you. I just had the two systems that it would FIT in. One didn't work due to the power connector issue and the other just evidently didn't like it. Too bad because that would have been a huge increase in my output. The GT 650 is running fine though. :)
 
It appears that LHC@home Classic is preparing for future GPU work. http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/forum_thread.php?id=3758

Also, here in the near future I am gonna try and dedicate a machine or two to RNA. We have good position to move up one spot, but there are others who could catch us pretty quick as well. phoenicis is holding most of our points there. The problem is that RNA is a tough project to support. They have very long running work units that don't typically checkpoint and tend to consume a lot of RAM. So, running multiple work units on a single system requires some serious hardware. Since there typically isn't checkpointing (or at least from what I have seen) restarting the computer or exiting BOINC pretty much wastes the time and effort put into the work unit. They are experimenting with Virtualbox. Hopefully this will help with checkpointing. Some people get around the checkpointing by running the work in VM's and activate snapshots so that the work units will continue from the snapshot point.

I would also like people to start thinking about October project pushes. phoenicis had mentioned this site in the past for reference: http://digik-oz.nl/dcVaultStats.aspx?team=[H]ardOCP Obviously the non-BOINC projects would bring the greatest rewards. However, I will probably just stick to DIMES and BOINC. I will let the other Commandos work on those.
 
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That sure is a lot of borgs! I must try harder...
I don't think RNA is something I could commit to myself, because out of the 3 main systems I have crunching, 2 are laptops and one is my parents' PC, all of which get turned off or rebooted. My main rig also won't run 24/7, it'll only crunch overnight. Running in a VM sounds like a good idea, I could potentially commit something to that. Can snapshots be done automatically? Been a while since I used any VM software.

As for a push, I don't know too much about the various projects and how stable they typically are in terms of units being available and so forth, and I may not interpret the info on that page properly. But, from a quick look, looks like we could maybe do some good work on Leiden, Yoyo, or maybe POEM. Feel free to tell me why they're not good ideas though, and I will learn from it :)
 
Captain, what that page doesn't really show is how far you have to go to get to the next position. For example: In RNA, our team is in 14th place. The next spot is only about 100K points away. In POEM, our team is in 40th place. The next spot is 4.5 million points. RNA is worth 20.88 Vault points right now. POEM is worth 6.64 Vault points. Depending on what each project awards for points and what hardware someone has to throw at it, you have to look at those numbers to see if the resources are worth sending somewhere that will move us up more efficiently. You also have to factor in whether or not the project is CPU only. In this case, RNA is CPU only with really tough resource requirements. POEM runs on both CPU and GPU (nVidia and AMD anyways). GPU crunching at POEM can spit out points rather quickly. Now, I'm not that excited about math to really break it all down. But, that is the basic concept. If one were a purist trying to advance our teams over all position in the Vault, they would crunch where we get the most bang for our buck. So, in order to equal the same amount of Vault points in POEM, you would need to basically jump about three spots. That would be ~ 40million BOINC points at POEM between us now and the spot we would need.

It would probably be better to hit something like Correlizer where we only need about ~60k for 34.85 Vault points. And that is just looking at the BOINC projects. Someone else would have to compare the non-boinc projects.
 
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I had a quick glance at the different project pages on there showing the scores and rankings for the teams, but I obviously misread those somewhat, I evidently either thought we were closer than that in POEM or that it was easier to earn the points - my bad!

In other news, my gf's EEG is Monday and her MRI is Wednesday, so they came back to us on those really quickly, which we're happy about :) just hoping I can take both days off work now. Technically I can't as my opposite number is also off but the other guy at this site is pretty cool so hopefully he'll cover for me, he and my actual manager have been really understanding so far.
 
That's great news Captain.

Yes, POEM would be terribly easier to acquire compared to RNA since more people could participate and they use GPU's. Not to mention that they tend to be generous with point awards. However, Correlizer could have 1 position also easily obtained. Possibly doing a double push since it wouldn't take Correlizer long. RNA certainly requires time, patience, and reliable non-restarting hardware. :(
 
I see. Well, I have no GPUs at present, though I expect that to change in early October when I book a few days off to build my PC, so could get 2 x 7970s on POEM fairly quickly. Happy to push ahead with Correlizer on CPUs, if we do push POEM/Correlizer together. I like Correlizer because the units are really quick to complete so even if a machine's not on long there's a good chance it'll get through a few.

For RNA, do you know if sleeping the machine would lose all progress? I would assume not, ditto suspending BOINC as opposed to closing it?
 
Suspending BOINC is fine as long as you have LAIM checked. (leave applications in memory)

Sleep mode may work as well as hybernate, but you would have to experiment. Not all systems function as intended in those states. If going to those lengths, I would just recommend VM's. However, that would take a few extra steps when done each time.

As far as the push goes, I will probably have a split going for my GPU's. I still have the SETI goals to hit. SETI/BETA are the last of the current GPU projects that I haven't hit 1 million points in. They also tend to be the toughest of the GPU capable projects to get points in.

If you do run POEM GPU work, make sure to use an app_config file so that you can run multiple work units at a time on your card. A 7970 could probably handle around 5 tasks at a time on the card. An example of the app_config would be:
<app_config>
<app>
<name>poemcl</name>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>0.20</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>1.0</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>
</app_config>

Just open notepad and paste that in there. Save it as app_config.xml into the POEM data directory. If you have two cards, that would also allow you to run 10 total for the system. You can change those numbers to experiment with how many you could push your system for.

Oh..and be prepared for potential outtages at POEM. They tend to have a habit of running out of GPU work units. So, I would definitely setup a backup project by possibly assigning it the backup project share priority 0. That way if POEM does run out of work, your cards aren't sitting idle.
 
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