TPU's WCG/BOINC Team

[Nordic]

OOOOH. So tski did you get a good deal on that board or full price? What cpu's do you plan on using?

 

[t_ski]

Correction... there were enough letters

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS

Holy Crap! -

Did you ever notice the name of the pic I posted?

OOOOH. So tski did you get a good deal on that board or full price? What cpu's do you plan on using?

Unfortunately, no deal on the board, but I got a deal on a couple ES chips - E5-2680v2's.

 

[Norton]

Did you ever notice the name of the pic I posted?

Unfortunately, no deal on the board, but I got a deal on a couple ES chips - E5-2680v2's.

-

Can't wait to see what that setup can do!

 

[TRWOV]

I was going through some of my stats and noticed this:

None of the CPUs have been overclocked. Running stock speeds with CnQ and Turbo disabled.

- W7 x64 and W8.1 machines have identical hardware (Asrock 970 Extreme 3, 8GB 1600 CL9 RAM)
- W7 x86 and Linux x64 machines have identical hardware (Gigabyte 880GM-USB3, 4GB 1333 CL9 RAM)

Things I can make out of this:
1) Looks like x86 imposes a severe penalty on FX CPUs I think a Phenom II X6 would be a better option for x86 crunching.
2) They perform slightly better on W8.1 than on W7, even with the hotfix applied.
3) The performance delta between Linux and Windows is pretty small with W8.1
4) I sincerely think that MMC uses FP since after it started the ppd of my FX crunchers began to languish extremely. My 3770K part timer managed to match my dedicated 8350 . I was getting 8K on the 8350 and 3K on the 3770K, nowadays I consider myself lucky if I get >3K on the FXs

I really wonder why haven't they released beta GPU WUs by now.


EDIT: Added linux

 

[Norton]

Interesting....

What version of BOINC are the non-Linux systems using?

 

[TRWOV]

7.2.33

 

[Nordic]

That bit about windows 8 vs linux is interesting. I wonder if the same hold true for intel sandy and above.

I am going to estimate that tski's server will be able to do 1300 per core. 1250x20(cores)=25000 25000x1.25(hyperthreading)=31250 ppd.

Does that sound right?

 

[TRWOV]

The x86 thing is what startled me more. I just checked and my XP cruncher sporting a 1090t reports FP at 3.3MIPS. This kind of explains why the x86 8350 can't match my XP cruncher even though it runs for about 2 hours more daily. I think I'll move the 8350 to another machine or keep it as an spare and get another 1090t since I'm stuck with x86 on that machine because the capture card doesn't have 64bit drivers.

 

[librin.so.1]

And then a bunch of FAAH WUs segfault on me one after another over a period of several hours...

 

[t_ski]

-

Can't wait to see what that setup can do!

Right now it's not doing anything. I had trouble getting it to post yesterday, then realized it needed both EPS connectors hooked up. I had to rig a molex to EPS adapter up and then it posted, but it didn't recognize the keyboard. I figured it didn't like the USB one through the KVM, so I hooked it up direct. Nothing. I swapped it for an old & cheap PS2. Nothing. Now I flip the power switch on the PSU and the lights come on like it's running (both power and reset buttons lit, plus another LED and the LEDs on the network jack light up with activity), but the fans spin for a quarter of a second and the light on the keyboard flashes briefly at the same time, then everything stops. I tried different ram, a different PSU, different video card, no drives, one stick of ram, CMOS reset, nothing.

 

[librin.so.1]

Okay, rotten luck. It seems there was a major failure on my university machines (a power outage yesterday, maybe?). I am not sure. Need to go check it out. BUT tomorrow is Sunday, so might not manage until monday. It is tricky to get into the building itself, let alone the computer classes on Sundays and depends greatly on which custodian is going to be on duty that day. It would be just a slight problem if my dad was around, but he's 200km away and won't be back until late Sunday (read: "almost Monday")

Also, I came across such WUs (see the highlighted ones)

Look at the running time.
Been stuck for over a day – absolutely no progress. Not even a 0.001 increase in progress. I aborted these tasks now, as they are clearly hanging in an infinite loop somewhere.
It's nice how the CEP2 WUs have a timer for that – if a WU reaches 12 hours of CPU time, it marks itself as complete and reports, even if not yet 100% done. While these seem to not have such watchdog timers and would go indefinitely. How lame.

 

[Nordic]

Right now it's not doing anything. I had trouble getting it to post yesterday, then realized it needed both EPS connectors hooked up. I had to rig a molex to EPS adapter up and then it posted, but it didn't recognize the keyboard. I figured it didn't like the USB one through the KVM, so I hooked it up direct. Nothing. I swapped it for an old & cheap PS2. Nothing. Now I flip the power switch on the PSU and the lights come on like it's running (both power and reset buttons lit, plus another LED and the LEDs on the network jack light up with activity), but the fans spin for a quarter of a second and the light on the keyboard flashes briefly at the same time, then everything stops. I tried different ram, a different PSU, different video card, no drives, one stick of ram, CMOS reset, nothing.

It will be worth the effort once it starts putting out massive ppd.

 

[Norton]

It will be worth the effort once it starts putting out massive ppd.

^^^ This!

Hope you get it all figured out and cranked up w/o much more trouble.

Question- Anyone have any info regarding renting virtual cpu's? I may look into trying it out for a little while....

 

[Nordic]

^^^ This!

Hope you get it all figured out and cranked up w/o much more trouble.

Question- Anyone have any info regarding renting virtual cpu's? I may look into trying it out for a little while....

You can in fact get free cpu time from amazons cloud services. It is practically nothing in ppd though, but free! I bet you could rent by core at some places. That might be nice. I do not know where one would go about getting this though.

 

[TRWOV]

Stats from my Amazon AWS instance (you get one free instance just for signing up):

http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=host&proj=bwcg&hostid=2416744

RAC = 86

 

[Nordic]

^^^ This!

Hope you get it all figured out and cranked up w/o much more trouble.

Question- Anyone have any info regarding renting virtual cpu's? I may look into trying it out for a little while....

I see what this is! Norton wants to compete with tski and the only way he can do that quickly enough is by renting a server! Oh Norton.

 

[librin.so.1]

I see what this is! Norton wants to compete with tski and the only way he can do that quickly enough is by renting a server! Oh Norton.

OR maybe our Captain is being considerate about the upcoming challenge? Haven't thought of that?

 

[TRWOV]

I got this email from AWS a few weeks ago with prices for their new I2 instances (I1 runs on Sandy).

Dear AmazonEC2 Customer,

We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of the I2 instance type - the next generation of AmazonEC2 High I/O instances. I2 instances feature the latest generation of Intel Ivy Bridge processors - each virtual CPU (vCPU) is a hardware hyperthread from an Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 (Ivy Bridge) processor. I2 instances are available in four sizes as listed in the table below.

Instance Type|vCPUs|ECU Rating|Memory (GiB)|Instance Storage SSD (GB)|Linux On-Demand Price* ($/hr)
i2.xlarge|4|14|30.5|1 x 800|$ 0.85
i2.2xlarge|8|27|61|2 x 800|$ 1.71
i2.4xlarge|16|53|122|4 x 800|$ 3.41
i2.8xlarge|32|104|244|8 x 800|$ 6.82

* Pricing for US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon). I2 instances currently support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only. For more information see I2 documentation.

Free instances are 1 vCPU, 600MB RAM, 8GB storage.

 

[Norton]

I see what this is! Norton wants to compete with tski and the only way he can do that quickly enough is by renting a server! Oh Norton.

-
Got plenty of stuff to take on Mr T.... should have most of it up and running by Challenge time

OR maybe our Captain is being considerate about the upcoming challenge? Haven't thought of that?

^^^ This!
Want to check on short-term costs of running some vCPU's*
* note- not seeing this as cost-effective atm

 

[Peter1986C]

I decided this weekend to get "Edison" up and running on a box using the cardboard-and-screws method. It is a bit early to scale up, but maybe I can leave the heating off and see timely whether there are any issues. Plus it helps me to get used to having to plug the internet cable into Edison instead of Darwin about once in a day (I may not forget that during the challenge after all).

 

[t_ski]

^^^ This!

Hope you get it all figured out and cranked up w/o much more trouble.

Well, I took the cables from my AX1200 and hooked them up to the board. I pressed the power button and too my surprise I saw both CPU fans spinning!!! Then I heard crackling, saw smoke, then a small fireball appeared under the heatpipe on the board.
Going to have to RMA for sure. Not sure if I can RMA through Newegg now or if it will have to go through Asus.

 

[Nordic]

Small fireball? Oh no. I hope it gets resolved quickly.

 

[t_ski]

Small fireball? Oh no. I hope it gets resolved quickly.

Wait for Asus to respond, jump through many hoops, ship board back to Asus, wait for a replacement to arrive, cross fingers and try again? probably a couple weeks.



Not sure if I should try this now (got a few things going on to prevent an attempt), but I flashed my P9X79 Pro to the latest BIOS, and somewhere along the line it brought in support for the Xeon chips like the ones I was going to put in the WS. I'm a little afraid one of the chips might take out that board, too.

 

[Nordic]

Why would the chip take it out? 10 cores is nice even if one board.

 

[t_ski]

ES chips. I'm (hopefully) just being paranoid...