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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: BOINC Energy Conservation |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
On a "turn off at night" comment elsewhere made yesterday, there is now a new pre-defined set-up in the device manager profiles (default, home, school, work) called "Power Saving". If chosen, the default will cause the client to stop computing after 20 minutes none-use of mouse+keyboard. That time option is also available in the Custom Profile to set it longer or shorter. Of course the "Do work while computer is in use?" is Yes, else no work at all would be done.
----------------------------------------What does is facilitate? Well, it allows to set the power saving option of a PC to go into standby/hibernation/off status completely autonomous. In windows those settings can be controlled from the Power Savings control panel and the BIOS, if there are any settings in there. Of course is will only work if other running applications that influence the power saving controls are also permitting the shut down of the computer. Both this added profile and the new 'Standard Settings" have the "Use no more than: 60% of processor time" set. Switching from predefined settings to Custom Profile allows increasing/decreasing this value. Do realize that 60% means that present BOINC 5.8.x/5.10.x will alternate running for 3 seconds at 100% and pause for 2 seconds, to achieve an on average 60% which helps reduce system temperature. Please feel free to ask set up questions pertaining to the technical side and we'll try to answer or point in the right direction to find the needed information for implementation, hardware/operating system permitting.
WCG
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The complete presets for Power Saving are:
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tekennelly
Cruncher Joined: Oct 10, 2005 Post Count: 45 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Here is a related question. There is a setting in the preferences about how often to write to disk called "Write to disk at most every ---- seconds" How high can I set this number and what will be the affect?
I would like to set it to 120 minutes or higher so that I can turn off the hard drives after 10 minutes of inactivity and save power consumption during the night.. What would be the impact on memory and/or disk by delaying writing to 60 or 120 minutes (i.e., 3600 or 7200 seconds)? |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Here is a related question. There is a setting in the preferences about how often to write to disk called "Write to disk at most every ---- seconds" How high can I set this number and what will be the affect? I would like to set it to 120 minutes or higher so that I can turn off the hard drives after 10 minutes of inactivity and save power consumption during the night.. What would be the impact on memory and/or disk by delaying writing to 60 or 120 minutes (i.e., 3600 or 7200 seconds)? WCG allows a max of 999 seconds or 17.5 minutes. It will result in checkpoint writes being delayed until after that time frame, thus if anything happens, you'd loose all the computing time until previous save. I know one project where a value of 3600 seconds is permitted.... they run without checkpoints i think and their jobs are just about an hour. Impact on memory is minor.... the program just skips the checkpoint write, but do realize that if swapfile is needed when the models get large, it will need the disk i/o, else things will stall or break. Spin Up and down of harddisks is murder and just read a report that for laptops its the main cause of failure.... either PC or Laptop, i got them on permanent spin, except if running off battery.
WCG
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Dataman
Ace Cruncher Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 4865 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I would like to set it to 120 minutes or higher so that I can turn off the hard drives after 10 minutes of inactivity and save power consumption during the night.. Spin Up and down of harddisks is murder and just read a report that for laptops its the main cause of failure.... either PC or Laptop, i got them on permanent spin, except if running off battery. Serkerob is absolutely correct. The worst thing you can do to a hard drive (  other than hitting it with a large hammer ) is to repeately spin it up/down. The maximum force on the bearing assembly occurs when it starts from 0 rpm. It will last much longer when you keep it spinning. Also consider comparing the "energy savings" against buying a new drive after a HDA failure and the time it takes to install it, recover everything from your recent backup and fixing all the nasty stuff that usually happens when you do a recovery. But then if you do not have a recent backup, it just gets worse.    |
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tekennelly
Cruncher Joined: Oct 10, 2005 Post Count: 45 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Great advice in this post and the one that follows.
One more question if you please. If I set a checkpoint time of 5 minutes andI must reboot the laptop for some reason is there a checkpoint write when I shutdown BOINC on XP or could I lose a maximum of 4 minutes and 59 seconds worth of work. |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
There is no fixed time of checkpoint, merely the wtd time is a predetermined delay, should one occur. For practical reasons most sciences at WCG do checkpoints when a step or attempt within the science completes, saving an intermediate result. Mid step calculation, models particularly those like AC@H and formally HDC would grow to 1gb. Such large file save would just cause too much user impairment.
----------------------------------------In the Start Here forum is a post on how to record the checkpoints in the message log to minimise lost time on shutdown/resume. Use those to choose your time of close. A wishlist item would be to tell BOINC to suspend computing at exactly that point, rather than the new 20 minute idle suspend.
WCG
----------------------------------------Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! [Edit 1 times, last edit by Sekerob at Nov 3, 2007 7:14:47 PM] |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Here is a related question. There is a setting in the preferences about how often to write to disk called "Write to disk at most every ---- seconds" How high can I set this number and what will be the affect? I would like to set it to 120 minutes or higher so that I can turn off the hard drives after 10 minutes of inactivity and save power consumption during the night.. What would be the impact on memory and/or disk by delaying writing to 60 or 120 minutes (i.e., 3600 or 7200 seconds)? and one more thing, that you have to consider...the HDD uses 12V and from 500-1000mA of current, which equals about 6-12W of power consumption...a little more, 'cause you have to consume to get the DC from IC - so lets say about 15W! so that is not a big chunk of power you will save...and you WILL mess up the HDD! that much power you can save if you put the UPS with voltage correction, so you don't get surges in your computers, so you don't get undervoltages, or over voltages! and it will protect your computer! to go on, there are two main power consumers that are hungry for the power: CPU & RAM...the RAM works only if the current is supplied to it, so more RAM consumption eats more power...and the CPU, we all know about that! also there is a video card which is the GPU & RAM also...but you can power it down with turning OFF monitor after 5min (setting in OS, not the actuall turn off of the monitor), which will shut down the GPU core, but not video RAM... you can also get less power consumtion with: - turning Screensaver OFF, working only in monitor OFF setting...Screensaver gets loaded to RAM, consuming CPU, and then it needs the GPU and video RAM to operate! - not applieing too big resolution, with too big photo that will eat lots of video RAM & GPU, as well as CPU & RAM...it's safer (for your eyes also) if you put the normal resolution with max frequency, not the highest resolution with low frequency... - and lots of other things, like not using the DVD/CD for playing music...using it only when you have to, so that it's in suspended mode...playing the music for HDD, which is ON always! etc. |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
For those who are used to dabble in the global_prefs_override.xml, the new "suspend computing after system is idle for X minutes " function is controlled by the <suspend_if_no_recent_input>20.0</suspend_if_no_recent_input> parm.
----------------------------------------Given it's not yet available in the 5.10.22-5.10.28 BOINC client local preferences interface (advanced menu), use this to set the controls to the heart of the sun. Setting the new parm value to 0.0 disables this control. cheers
WCG
----------------------------------------Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! [Edit 1 times, last edit by Sekerob at Nov 7, 2007 10:31:57 AM] |
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