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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Loading BOINC onto a RAMDrive? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 11
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8086power
Cruncher Joined: Dec 16, 2014 Post Count: 19 Status: Offline |
Just wondering if anyone has loaded thier BOINC onto a ram drive and how would I go about doing that, would there be a significant performance gain?
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
It's being done AND not only for performance reasons [most effectively on hi I/O sciences like CEP2], but also to get snapshot backups. Even more effective for CEP2 is running BOINC in a VM, then if that's shut down, a resume could take off right where computing was interrupted.
Instructions: Hands-On [dig through forums and Google or a helpful member writes in to give the setup pointers, even a step by step]. A BOINC+VBox is available ready to download, which I think emulates a Linux environment and THAT is favoring much faster FAHV and OET processing. |
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OldChap
Veteran Cruncher UK Joined: Jun 5, 2009 Post Count: 978 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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This subject comes around fairly regularly. try typing "ramdisk" in the search box.
----------------------------------------ypu will find a bunch of posts like https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,32683. I have not seen any definitive performance numbers but maybe someone else has.... I must surely depend on the work selected and the current storage medium you will compare against.  |
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8086power
Cruncher Joined: Dec 16, 2014 Post Count: 19 Status: Offline |
Yep OK thanks for the reply just letting these tasks run down and will try installing and running it from a Ramdrive
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8086power
Cruncher Joined: Dec 16, 2014 Post Count: 19 Status: Offline |
Perfect thanks,in not accepting new task mode now will run down current tasks and try it out.
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8086power
Cruncher Joined: Dec 16, 2014 Post Count: 19 Status: Offline |
Hehe well I got one of my old Dell Towers W/Vista64 set up with a free Dataram RAMDrive, big difference in the crunching speed I noticed it right away. AMD X2 4600 an old 90nm chip with 8Gb's of DDR2-800 ram just flying along now with a 2GB Ramdrive installed, both the program and the data folder in there. Just waiting for my 8 Core beast to finish up one more task then will install a RAMDrive in there too. it's only using 70mb's atm. Just finished my first OET1 task 11834 GFLOPs est time 1:26:09 actual time 1:09:24
----------------------------------------[Edit 4 times, last edit by 8086power at Mar 10, 2015 2:00:26 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Should not do anything to the crunching speed itself... it's as noted the storage I/O that can make the difference in efficiency. Getting 99.8%+ on my 8 year old with Seagate turntable drive, that's the time the task really computes [CPU time] versus the time it's allowed to run [Elapsed], i.e. the system only needs 0.2% to do the housekeeping.
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1684 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I can confirm previous posts I wrote a long time ago about this topic, an SSD is OK for CEP2 even with 4 or 6 WUs simultaneously computed.
----------------------------------------For CEP2, the observed performance difference between HDD and SSD is about 1.0% to 1.5%. I.e. a system can achieve over 99.0% computation efficiency (according to BoincTasks) with CEP2 and an SSD I would not waste time with installing and operating a RAMdrive, especially because you will loose all your current work in case of power failure, if the host is not power secured. Cheers, Yves --- By the way: the major negative impact on performance is to use Windows-based hosts. Linux remains the better (and less expensive) way to contribute efficiently. |
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8086power
Cruncher Joined: Dec 16, 2014 Post Count: 19 Status: Offline |
Great thanks for the replies and info it was fun anyways and a learning lesson for me, I've had this DATARam RAMDrive app kicking around for a while now, compared this old version to their new version and the autosave feature in the old app is included in the free version but when I had a look at the new app it's no longer available for free you have to pay for that feature now. It's set to autosave every 300 seconds. Yea I have not run a Linux Rig since Ubuntu 10.04 might scrounge around for a extra HDD and put the latest Distro on the Dell E521 AMD 4600 X2 and see if that will run quicker, good idea
---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by 8086power at Mar 11, 2015 3:07:20 AM] |
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1684 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Hi 8086power,
----------------------------------------too bad, I missed the auto-save function you mentioned. Regarding Linux/Ubuntu, I am still operating some hosts with 10.04 x64. I apply updates regularly and the hosts run fine and efficient. I should take some free hours for performing a fresh installation of Ubuntu 14.04 x64. Interesting is to notice that currently, with OET1, a Linux-based Phenom II x6 (3.2 GHz) host is significantly more efficient than a Win7-based i7 (4770K, 3.5 GHz) host. Cheers, Yves |
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