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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Beta Testing
Forum: Beta Test Support Forum
Thread: Participation in WCG Beta Testing within a virtual environment a disservice to the testing? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 4
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello!
 Firstly, apologies if this is a FAQ that I missed from the documentation, Googling, etc. I have a new low power Supermicro server at home with an 8 core Atom, 32GB ECC RAM and 4x 240GB Intel SSD's in RAID10. I have ESXi 6 installed on it for home VM servers, testing new systems with snapshotting and rollback, my ongoing education, etc. I've decided that since it is always on, to make best use of the idle cycles I would make a BOINC VM with 8 virtual CPU's and give it a low compute priority, so that I could crunch for WCG in between all the idle time of my other VM's. This appears to be working great, as my BOINC VM is using 19GHz total when other VM's are idle, which at home is most of the time. I was considering signing up for the WCG Beta Testing for this system, however I wonder if I might actually be doing the beta testing a disservice due to the variable nature of the performance of this cruncher, since it's PPD may become quite variable and not adhere to that expected from the built-in benchmark and so potentially cause confusion about the performance discrepancy. Is it okay for me to sign this machine up to the Beta Testing with this in mind?  Thank you! Shane |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Sure you can though there is one but: Currently no betas are in progress. They usually run a few days when a updated science app or new science is ready to test. This is though maybe every 3 or 4 months, often with longer intervals. The work itself is usually gone within the day as the volume is very limited, so having a machine just waiting for beta is a waste of time.
----------------------------------------How slow or fast a task is processed is not of importance for an individual machine. The pool average is, as that is often used to tune the size of the production tasks [if they can be sized]. So Join, and get lucky... they are rarities. Edit: Recent beta history giving indication of the volumes per test: http://bit.ly/WCGBTA [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Jun 4, 2015 8:21:32 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
This is good to hear! Thanks Rob, I'll be sure to sign up for the beta testing also.
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widdershins
Veteran Cruncher Scotland Joined: Apr 30, 2007 Post Count: 674 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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In addition, there are people who, for various reasons, need to run WCG within a VM. For example I have a home file server running FreeNAS. The only way I could get WCG running on this was in an VM running Ubuntu as it seems FreeBSD and Boinc aren't the best of pals.
So VM's of differing types would also need checking out with Beta units to ensure there were no nasty surprises just like the various other processors and OS'es. |
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