KWSN Orbiting Fortress

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

All the fun I was having running a multi-national farm is over, sadly. Even my "regulars" from the recent past are off the farm due to the bad situation this year which included a river invading my house.

I'm left with just a scattering of systems I can't talk about, my two desktops, and my PS3. <sigh> Starting all over is not fun really.

+ HD4870 GPU -

+ 7950GT GPU

Planning on a new i7 920 with massive (~4 GHz) overclock this year. Was going to do an HD4890 GPU in it, but the amazing results from the Nvidia BOINC camp are pushing me quite a bit to rethink that.
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Adam Alexander · Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 5:08 pm Post subject:

That's really too bad about your farm, but there's a lot of fun to be had in rebuilding. Glad to see you back and shrubbing and here's hoping your year improves dramatically and no more rivers come flowing through your house.

You can knock out a lot of shrubs with a pair of machines. My i7 has 2 GTX260's and an 8800GT that keeps me doing well in GPUGrid and I have a Q6700 that has two 4870's onboard (since yesterday and with room for another). Those two machines should be able to get my RAC above 250k. I'm at 222k now and climbing. Just knock on wood that MW holds out. #ni-2

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Currently running:

Active
Intel Core 2 Quad 9550

Reserves
Now down to one Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 that's in a tiny case and overheats if I actually try to use all four cores at the same time. On the other hand, it makes for a very nice home theater PC
Intel Core i7 CPU 920
AMD Athlon(tm) 7850

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Nowhere near as high as it should be, but I'm sure it'll get better once I sort some things out (and that wasn't a full day), but either way, the graph today made me LOL:

(Pushed me over 6m too)
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KWSN imcrazynow · Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 7:47 pm Post subject:

mohrorless · Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 8:17 pm Post subject:

Your day was half my month... Crying or Very sad

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Taunter in Training
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JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Actually I'll be surprised if I see 60k out of it. It's a first pass OEM spec 512MB card, and the CAL isn't overly enthused about it. Despite manually duplicating the default value for 3 work units at a time, and shortening the wait to 90% (I may tweak this lower to see what happens), it's only running 1 WU at a time around 90% of the time. Occasionally it will fire up 2, and I once saw it running 3, but those are the exception instead of the rule.

But I think you're closer to right than I am now that I check. BOINCStats says 33k yesterday, and MilkyWay says 82k right now. It'll take a few days for the stats to normalize and give me a good feel for what it will do a day. As this is my main system there is some downtime when I game, but I've noticed watching movies, even high-def, while MW is running doesn't seem to make any difference which is nice. I did, however, have to kick the fan up even higher since it was creeping up on 74C and it's actually louder than my 133cfm system fans now (but stable at 70C). Shocked

One of many reasons I'm debating water on my next system, and maybe going with the pre-setup water cooled graphics cards too. Expensive though.

I do hope they sort out the scheduling issue soon. Every once in awhile it will run out of MW work, ping the scheduler and get a new batch of work, and not start it. It'll just sit waiting for one of my other projects hour to run out, then spark the MW units on the GPU, and go back to running 4 CPU tasks like it should. But until it fires that first MW unit of the new batch it just idles like it doesn't know they aren't CPU work units. I've set the project to twice the resource share of the others so it doesn't have to wait long for it to get kicked off, but the fact it's waiting at all sucks.
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KWSN imcrazynow · Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 6:45 am Post subject:

What BOINC version are you using? I'm using 6.4.7
Milkyway has a 60% share
Milkyway GPU (suspended, not active yet) has 26.67%
Prime Grid has 13.33%
Cache is set at 1 day
Connect every 0 days
On my quads i'm crunching 3 MW and 4 PG at a time.
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And a few that won't update for some reason.

4870 GPU

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

I was on the latest and went back to .21 while working on MW but this morning MW had completely hosed itself and had 13 running instances for no reason (nothing in options had changed) and was crashing the BOINC manager.

Upgraded back to .36, forcing run-as-admin now, and it appears to have sorted itself (even though I had to kick it off manually). 2 MW units running at once is better than 13!

Edit: Nope, stand corrected. .36 is running them all at once as well. Grrr.
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Adam Alexander · Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 11:41 am Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Well .36 is treating it as a CPU app and only running 3 normal apps while running all of the MW apps at once. They really need to fix the stupid scheduler.

Only 3 are actually being worked, the rest just say running but are in a wait state. And after the batch I watched it fired up a 4th normal app. I dunno what to do, but MW is playing havoc on everything. Sad

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JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Tried 6.6.21 and it did bad things:
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e33/BlueC2/Computers/MWgonecrazy.png

13 "running" units, timer incrementing on all of them which totally hosed predictions and queuing. It also crashed BOINC Manager shortly after I got that screenshot.

6.2.19 would run 1 WU and then idle the project.

Trying 6.4.7 now, and so far it's the best behaved. Aside from occasionally panicing and high-priority running a MW WU (and nothing else is using GPU time so what do I care if it high pris one?) it's working well. Updates the project way more often than 6.6.x which is bad for them but good for me as it always keeps work queued. So far has always had 3 MW units marked running and only 1 going (I'm using n1 so that's expected) and the timers showing 0 until they actually get to run, so it doesn't mess up queuing. I'll let it run and we'll see what it does when debt starts to rack up which I think is what fubar'd 6.6.21.

On the plus side:

And PacMan is eating my stats!

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Adam Alexander · Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 1:52 pm Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Well 6.4.7 is digging itself a hole so it'll be interesting to see what it's going to do about it. Currently 1 running and 21 MW WUs queued. Like I said, I think 6.6.21 was ok until the project debt starting going wonky, so it'll be interesting to see if 6.4.7 has the same issue.

It's already changed one thing. Now instead of 3 WUs being marked running it's only got 2. That's good, it keeps one "ready" so it never idles the project, but I'm afraid that if it drops to 1 (likely due to "negative" debt) it will fall into the same loop you're seeing where it idles the project.

On a related side-note, boinccmd allows you to tamper with project debts. If 6.4.7 starts freaking out I may start dabbling with a timed script resetting debt values to find where it's happy.
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KWSN - Sir Brian C....... · Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 4:54 pm Post subject:

Welcome back.....

you can get reaaly ggod primegrid scores a 50% increase ... (that our Project Of The Month) if you install ubuntu via WUBI...

Now if memory serves me rightly, you worked for a certain Software company from the Seattle area..... so are you up for linux on your PC?
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Oh, it's blessed are the meek!, Well I'm glad they'll get something as they have a hell of a time!

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Linux on my PC? Nope. I'm a PC gamer, so it's not even a choice.

I've got YellowDog on my PS3 running Yoyo though. Smile

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KWSN - Sir Brian C....... · Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 5:50 pm Post subject:

Adam Alexander · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 8:34 pm Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

So far mine seems to be running like a champ on 6.4.7 with twice the project weight. Only thing I've changed is n1 to let just 1 run at a time, but the manager tries to run 2, so 1 just waits patiently and then fires when the first finishes. Because the manager always has 2 marked the app never stops. I got 100 points less today than yesterday, so maybe the scheduler freaking out isn't that big of a deal. I'll let it run another day and see how it goes.

It could also be that I gamed a lot yesterday (todays stats) so the benefit was eaten by that. We'll see tomorrow, since tonight I'll only get to play for a few hours tops as I'm working again finally.

Credit/day: 59,314 - 59,426 - 33,083
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KWSN Im Not Dead · Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 5:01 am Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

3rd day stats are in, that's the first full day with 6.4.7 and relatively little (~3 hours) of me suspending comps and MW set a new record at just over 61k. I'd say 6.4.7 is definitely doing the best job so far. I've noticed that it does every once in awhile panic on the debt imbalance and drop to 3 CPU apps + the MW GPU app but I've never seen it it wait longer than 10 minutes before firing up the 4th CPU app again.

It only appears to do this when I suspend it for a long time. Like tonight, 3 hours suspended and it didn't freak out, so it looks like 4+ hours before it even cares and even then takes ~10 minutes to sort.
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