PSA - DIMES is something everyone can run, no impact on other DC'ing

I haven't noticed any slowdown on my spider web networking setup, but then again I'm not running 50+ VM's. I only have about 2 dozen total devices/VM's going on my network.
 
looks like the team just passed ocforums for 15th, next overtake says 50 days at our current average, but the average is going up, so should be much less time than that :)
 
Just so you know what musky is talking about dimes can be quite a bandwidth hog and yes it can / wil make your rig run slow if you over do it. Below is a screen shot of the bandwidth 15 clients running on a Linux VB with Windows XP will use as you can see it peaks at 6MiB/s and a time period of 1.5 hrs it has recieved a litttle over 1 GB of data and sent 52 MB of data (It tends to recieve allot of data upon start up). It tends to settle down after a couple of hours to peaks of around 80 KiB/s but the first hour or 2 of starting can be a pita.:D


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Yes, there is a limit for most on how many VMs you can run on your network.

No, that should not stop you from installing dimes on a few Windows machines you have running around your house. You will not notice it with any reasonable amount of installs - we are talking ~60 instances before I started running into problems. You don't need 60 instance, but if we could get several people to install a couple instances, that would go a long way.
 
I've got 70 instances on my home network and I have not seen a network slowdown in terms of Web browsing or Netflix. My DSL speed is 7/768. I do see a constant 15-30KB/s upload rate.
 
If everyone that DC'd for [H] ran just one client, that would be pretty awesome :)
That was basically the intention in starting this thread, to encourage widespread adoption as one client has no impact on the system's performance - although farming VMs is hardly a bad thing ;)
I will certainly be spreading DIMES onto any machines I can, have a few potential borging candidates coming up soon. I wonder if they'll develop an Android client...
 
I doubt that they develop an Android application. Though I would try running, I don't know if many would use up the limited device resources for it. Android devices are already finicky about running on multiple cores as it is and most devices still only have 1GB of ram to share across all cores.
 
Gilthanis said:
I doubt that they develop an Android application. Though I would try running, I don't know if many would use up the limited device resources for it. Android devices are already finicky about running on multiple cores as it is and most devices still only have 1GB of ram to share across all cores.
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Not to mention what it would do to data plans of 2GB/month or less...
 
Jathanis said:
Not to mention what it would do to data plans of 2GB/month or less...
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I was thinking more of running it alongside nativeBOINC, which I assume most people run while plugged in at home, and just connect up to wifi. I have unlimited data but prefer to use wifi when possible. I wasn't xpecting anyone would want to use their limited data for it :p
I know it's not a viable option anyway really, it was just a thought.
 
I leave mine on my carriers data (unlimited still as well) for my phone I use as to not burden my wifi any more than necessary. My other phones that are no longer used on the other hand definitely use the wifi. I just don't think they would have the guff to pull it off. :)
 
Wow...bigted almost put up 1 million points yesterday. Grandpa wasn't far behind.
 
seems like most teams were up a ton of points yesterday, probably just another quirk with how the points were reported and the free-dc site :)
 
So I set up Hyper-V last nigh, now I can't find my XP DVD or .iso from Technet... :mad: I was hoping to at least get a few VMs each on my two Win 8 quads and get my sad 15K ppd average up closer to 40-50K! Oh well, back to Technet...
 
Jathanis said:
So I set up Hyper-V last nigh, now I can't find my XP DVD or .iso from Technet... :mad: I was hoping to at least get a few VMs each on my two Win 8 quads and get my sad 15K ppd average up closer to 40-50K! Oh well, back to Technet...
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Do I need to mail you a disk? My job has a ton of the XP Pro SP3 Dell disks in a box. :D
 
At our current place, we should overtake team Rechenkraft.net for 14th place in about a week. Keep up the great work guys.
 
We should pass team Rechenkraft.net in about a day. Good job guys. Keep up the great work.
 
_r2h said:
Has anyone created a linux based VM image for DIMES?

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I didn't, mainly because I didn't see a compelling reason. CentOS with it's GUI worked for DIMES, but ended up taking up more room and using more memory than Windows XP.
 
What are you guys using for your VM environment? Using Virtual box at the moment for experimentation, but would like to move to a bare metal install of VMware or such.
 
I'm using Virtualbox. I have never used VMware. I should give it a whirl some time but I'm really restricted on time with the baby and all. So, it is just easier to clone one multiple times then it is to play with new software. I too am running XP installs because the RAM is pretty minimal unless I want BOINC on them as well. Then it just depends on the projects I want on it. For DIMES, hard drive can be as low as 3GB, but if you let windows updates run you will constantly be bugged about virtual memory. 10GB seems fine if you plan on doing anything but DIMES.
 
_r2h said:
What are you guys using for your VM environment? Using Virtual box at the moment for experimentation, but would like to move to a bare metal install of VMware or such.
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i am running ESXi on 2 machines for my VMs. IF your NIC is supported, you just install to bare metal (5 minutes max) then install the vmware vshpere software on a separate pc. you can then set up an xp vm on it and then clone over and over from there. except in vmsphere, you have to deploy ovf templates, it's not called cloning.

if you do go the ESXi route, i recommend 192mb ram, 4gb hdd space provisioned thick (not dynamic, will carve out the 4gb for that vm to use).

i used to have 69 of these VMs on one 250gb hard drive, but i did not thick provision, i have to delete a VM about once a week since i run out of space. i am now down to 60 VMs using a little over 14gb of ram.

i would also like to note that there has been a fair bit of discussion regarding internet/network usage with so many VMs running dimes. i had an extra machine that is older laying around, so i smacked a 4 port NIC into it, installed pfSense and put my dimes VM boxes behind it. doing this allows me to limit the upload rate that all of those VMs can use all at once (i have issues when my upload rate is maxed). i also had to raise the limit of IPs my dhcp server would hand out.

Gilthanis said:
I'm using Virtualbox. I have never used VMware. I should give it a whirl some time but I'm really restricted on time with the baby and all. So, it is just easier to clone one multiple times then it is to play with new software. I too am running XP installs because the RAM is pretty minimal unless I want BOINC on them as well. Then it just depends on the projects I want on it. For DIMES, hard drive can be as low as 3GB, but if you let windows updates run you will constantly be bugged about virtual memory. 10GB seems fine if you plan on doing anything but DIMES.
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regarding virtualbox, i use this to run a few machines on a laptop, i check this laptop once every day or two. i usually have at least one virtualbox vm that has crashed, i bet VMWare would work better, i think musky uses that.
 
I believe the NICs on my supermicro are supported. I know for sure they are in 3.0. When I last attempted an install of the latest ESXi on that supermicro board all went well till the installer realized the CPU doesn't support virtualization extensions. I'm going to go back a version and try again. I have to order a new atom 1u system to replace the supermicro board as it is currently being used for pfsense duty. I love pfsense.

Side note: I just spun up 10 dimes machines.
 
Yeah..I have to check the Virtualbox VM's every day. They do seem to crash rather easy. I use it though because there are 3 BOINC projects that use Virtualbox. Since it is already installed, I just learned it. I would agree that the ESXi would be the better way to go. I just don't have the hardware nor the experience with the related software.

Oh ... and congrats guys on taking 14th place. That was 5.9 Vault points!
 
Gilthanis said:
Yeah..I have to check the Virtualbox VM's every day. They do seem to crash rather easy. I use it though because there are 3 BOINC projects that use Virtualbox. Since it is already installed, I just learned it. I would agree that the ESXi would be the better way to go. I just don't have the hardware nor the experience with the related software.

Oh ... and congrats guys on taking 14th place. That was 5.9 Vault points!
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The DIMES clients crash or the VM's themselves?
 
The DIMES client will sometimes terminate itself as well. And that happens even when not in a VM. But, to confirm... bigted is correct. Virtualbox doesn't seem very stable for having multiple clients on the same disk. I haven't experimented yet with having multiple VBox VM's in the same machine on different disks.
 
I have a feeling it is a VB problem the memory usage slowly creeps up and along with it cpu usage can also go up. I believe VB itself has a memory leak when running multiple VM's with dimes the other day after shutting all of the VM's down and only having the manager running it was using 3GB of memory and 30% of the CPU's on a 980X @ 4.2Ghz

Normally it uses almost nothing but after letting it run for a week with 20 VM's running dimes, it was using allot of resources with nothing running on it.
 
I see we are now up to 12 active members on this project. Glad to see a rekindling of interest.

Also to note on the info I provided above, I'm not running any server grade hardware if that matters to people contemplating what route to go with their equipment. My experiences may be completely different than some of yours for this reason. I also only plan on running the hand full of VM's I have until the end of the year. At that point, I will probably go back down to just standard hosts. My personal goal was to get the team in the top 10 by end of the year. With our current production, we should make it now or come pretty darn close. :)
 
Production has tanked over the last few days, but we should still take 13th place today. Good job guys.
 
Gilthanis said:
Production has tanked over the last few days, but we should still take 13th place today. Good job guys.
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yes, my esxi box with 60 vms keeps tanking, i'm guessing the hdd is boned, i have a 1tb drive i just got in that i will be installing this weekend
 
I have that issue kinda regular. I was using recycled drives that had known bad sectors for the VM's as a spare drive and BOINC data directory. That way all the I/O and thrashing would be on an unimportant disk. However, when the disk fails, sometimes the whole system BSOD's. I have a few that have that happen. I just need to quit using those disks and stick to the spare 40-80GB drives just sitting on my shelf. It just sucks that most new boards don't have IDE ports or only have the one. Many of my spare drives were all IDE from back in the day. I try to add one old drive to every PC that I can for this purpose.
 
Gilthanis said:
Production has tanked over the last few days, but we should still take 13th place today. Good job guys.
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I have had to shut down my 20VM's on my off days. Only have 8GB ram in my primary box and it makes my computer unbelievably slow hah. Just built a pfsense box to replace my spare opteron 175 box i was using for pfsense. Gonna see about putting an old version of ESXi on it and hopefully spinning up some more VMs.

Still a strong showing for the top 20 users, holding 9 of 20 today at the moment. :cool:
 
I could go around and see if I could farm the 200+ computers here at the school. I doubt it but I do have administrative rights and am second in line to the IT guy here. It's always good to cover your own ass.

What does DIMES do though? Network Mapping - what worries me is that what fundamentals does this research gives us?
 
Jon855, I would make sure to get that permission in writing in some way. There have been numerous people who got permission and then executive management disagreed and you know what they say about rolling down hill...

Here is a good resource to start with for better understanding what they are doing. Their forums don't get a lot of chatter, so you may need to contact them for more specifics. But mostly you are doing Trace Routes. http://www.netdimes.org/new/?q=node/13
 
Gilthanis said:
Jon855, I would make sure to get that permission in writing in some way.
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I am more than aware of this. Thanks though for your other explanation and I may send them an email asking for more details.
 
That would be awesome if you got them approved. You should also look to see if you could add BOINC to them. It has the ability to designate times of the day to do work and to also pause when the computer is in use.
 
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