So you want to run the Clean Energy Project Phase 2 (aka CEP2) but find your disk thrashing too much? Here's how you can get around it. As shown here the Clean Energy Project needs our help. This is an idea I came up with on my own to try to help others that believe in the CEP2 project to donate more of their resources. With a little luck someone else can post a detailed screenshot guide or PDF of instructions on how to do this setup.
This guide assumes that you are fairly knowledgeable with BOINC and WCG. You also want to maximize your CEP2 WUs for your machine.
The key is using block level caching with an extremely long time delay for writing data to the drive. The intent is that the WUs will thrash the heck out of the block level cache and thereby minimize the hard drive thrashing. Of course, data will still get written to the drive, but hopefully the writes will be more sequential.
System specs for what I used: Dual CPU, Quad Core(8 thread) with 16GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive. I used Windows 7 x64 Home Premium, the latest version of BOINC(6.12.34 x64 version) along with Supercache 5.0.524.0. Supercache can be purchased for $79.95 at
www.superspeed.com. A fully functional 14 day trial version is also available at their website.
1. First, you want to set up world community grid to give you CEP2 WUs. I recommend you create a device profile. For me, I created the new "school profile". Set up a custom profile and uncheck all projects except CEP2. Set up the other characteristics of the profile as you see fit. Make sure that for project specifics you choose the number of work units for CEP2. I chose unlimited since I want 100% crunching for CEP2. Don't forget to change your device to use the new profile you created. I also set the profile to cache only 0.25 days of work because I want to cache the projects in use without caching files that are not.
Josh1980: The machine I tested this on has 8 cores(2 CPUs) and I found that I could achieve 100% utilization using just 7 of the 8 cores. The machine also handles other low CPU usage programs for me, so I can only expect that the caching program I used utilized the 8th core. Feel free to experiment and figure out how many cores work best for you.
2. Now that WCG is setup to give you all the CEP2 WUs you want it's time to setup your computer to receive these units. Install Supercache 5. After rebooting if necessary it is time to setup a partition for your BOINC data. I resized my C partition to make about 40GB of space available for BOINC. The partition for BOINC needs to be dedicated to BOINC data(you don't want other data being cached) and it needs to be big enough to not end up filling up. CEP2 uses alot more drive space than other projects. My opinion based on using a RAM drive previously is to create a partition between 2 and 4 times the number of threads you will create in GB. If you intend to run 16 threads simultaneously, I would recommend between 32 and 64GB for the BOINC partition. I'd recommend 32GB because you don't want to partition too big for the cache. Format the partition to 4k sector size NTFS.
3. Next I installed BOINC, pointing the data directory to the E drive. I do not know how you can change the data directory if BOINC is already installed. If someone posts this information I will update this post. After BOINC is installed reboot if necessary.
4. Next it is time to setup the cache. Install supercache and on installation when it asks you to setup the cache for the windows partition uncheck the box.
I determined that I wanted 80% of my RAM utilized. I've seen CEP2 WUs use as much as 300MB per thread. Since I was expecting 8 threads I figured 3GB would be utilized at the most for CEP2. The WUs use more RAM as the WUs nears completion, typically starting at 60-80MB.
Josh1980: So I setup a cache of 5GB to see how it would perform. The size of the cache can play a part in how well this performs. I setup the granularity as 4kb and set the total allocation of 5GB. I also enabled the deferred-Write Mode and set the latency to infinite. This means that the cache shouldn't try to write data to the drive until the cache is full, a manual flush command is initiated, or something else triggers it by supercache?
For a 5GB cache I found that 2GB of data was written about every 10 minutes. The hard drive would sit idle for about 10 minutes, then for about 30 seconds it would write data at 20-70MB/sec(total was typically 1-2GB). Then go idle again for approximately 10 minutes. For a 10GB cache I got about 20 minutes of idle time.
5. Now that the cache is setup, it is time to download those WUs. Using BOINC, I added the WCG project and began downloading WUs. I ended up with all CEP2 WUs. The computer then ramped up to 100% CPU utilization as the WUs were downloaded. Watching the temperatures, CPU usage, and cache I was able to determine that the cache that I setup worked very well for this project. Even during the times of hard drive activity the CPU stayed at 100% utilization and the CPU temps showed that the CPU was still being stressed by the work.
If all went well, you should see similar results to what I saw. CPU will sit at 100% utilization for about 10 minutes+, then the hard drive will write a bunch of data, then idle again.
If you use a SSD, you MAY find that the total amount of data written to the SSD will be lower using the supercache.
So why does all this stuff work? I believe that the CEP2 project continually concatenates the files on the hard drive with new data as the CEP2 WUs are completed. Because we have a large block cache we are writing all this data that is continually updated to the cache instead of thrashing the hard drive. The built-in Windows cache has a finite time before data is written to the hard drive. Being able to set up a cache that theoretically, might not write to the hard drive for a very very long time is a big bonus for us.
Special thanks to Josh1980 over at XtremeSystems
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?277686-Want-to-run-100-CEP2-WUs-Here-s-how...
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