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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Active Research
Forum: OpenPandemics - COVID-19 Project
Thread: One terabyte written to my SSD since the stress test began |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 81
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gibbcorp
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 29, 2005 Post Count: 77 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Thank you
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Etul
Cruncher Australia Joined: Sep 12, 2014 Post Count: 38 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Thanks Goben! I have just set up Imdisk running on my computer. Was also initially confused by the empty folder thing but managed to figure it out with trial and error, I see you have updated your post now though. :)
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Andyman
Cruncher Joined: Apr 9, 2021 Post Count: 17 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi Goben. I have tried this but I get the error "no empty folder selected". Did you make another BOINC folder? c: BOINC and c: BOINC.imdisk seperately? thanks Hi gibbcorp. I must have missed a step when I typed it up. My apologies. A line like this should have been between what was 2. and 3. Create new directory named BOINC in the same location where the old one was. edit: I edited the post above to add that step. Thanks for sharing how to do it. Is there some way to see that it is working? |
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highCon
Cruncher Joined: Jul 19, 2009 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks goben for your instructions and pointing to this great (open source!) RAM disk tool. I'm using it as well.
----------------------------------------Btw: It should be sufficient to only put the 'slots' folder in the BOINC directory into RAM. This is where most of the disk writes occur. The files located under 'projects' barely change over time like downloaded files (binaries, tasks, extra data) and uploads. In this way, you save some RAM (especially if you have other projects that downloaded larger files, like rosetta). [edit:] I set the size to 512MB. I had tried 'allocate memory dynamically' and 256MB, but in both cases, it resulted in errors in the stderr.txt: "autogrid4: WARNING: Problems writing grid maps - there may not be enough disk space.". (of course, the minimum size depends on how many other tasks you are running on your machine in parallel). Ah, and for a similar discussion on RAMdisks see posts before and after this one: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=654658 [Edit 1 times, last edit by highCon at Apr 30, 2021 4:05:14 PM] |
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highCon
Cruncher Joined: Jul 19, 2009 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Constant checkpoint writing needs to be corrected. There should be no need to have to create RAM drives and separate directories on secondary drives. No one wants to burn out an SSD running this, myself included. So to the programmers - REDUCE CHECKPOINTING in these GPU tasks. Thanks. I believe it's not about checkpointing, but saving the final result of each job. If you watch the activity of the GPU task/process closely (in combination with the logs in stderr.txt under the slots folder), you'll notice that it simply writes the results to disk after finishing each job (and each GPU tasks contains tens, if not hundreds of jobs). The higher overall disk activity results from jobs being finished muuuuch faster by a GPU than a CPU. I think GPU tasks don't even need checkpointing for that reason. [edit: okay, the files being written are called *checkpoint*.chk, but this relates to the whole GPU task, but not to the jobs; I guess they use these file names out of tradition / for consistency with the CPU tasks] [Edit 1 times, last edit by highCon at Apr 30, 2021 4:44:05 PM] |
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goben_2003
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Jun 16, 2006 Post Count: 145 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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You're welcome! :)
----------------------------------------Andyman: It should have an arrow on the BOINC folder icon just like a shortcut has. highCon: It is true. I think I did the whole thing since I only run WCG and have plenty of RAM. The uploads and downloads for the tasks is a lot less than the temp slot files, but it still adds up when you are running 10 nvidia units at a time and I have enough RAM to not care about having all of it in RAM. edit: I added a note to the post about just doing the slots directory.  [Edit 1 times, last edit by goben_2003 at Apr 30, 2021 3:53:08 PM] |
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highCon
Cruncher Joined: Jul 19, 2009 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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@goben: Ah, in this case I understand your choice :-)
----------------------------------------You may also add two additional notes to your instructions:
[Edit 1 times, last edit by highCon at Apr 30, 2021 4:36:23 PM] |
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Andyman
Cruncher Joined: Apr 9, 2021 Post Count: 17 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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You're welcome! :) Andyman: It should have an arrow on the BOINC folder icon just like a shortcut has. highCon: It is true. I think I did the whole thing since I only run WCG and have plenty of RAM. The uploads and downloads for the tasks is a lot less than the temp slot files, but it still adds up when you are running 10 nvidia units at a time and I have enough RAM to not care about having all of it in RAM. edit: I added a note to the post about just doing the slots directory. Thanks. A problem, when i restarted the computer the folder with the arrow said "no valid file system". I had checked the autostart and auto synchronize. I had to manually unmount the folder and then remount it. What did i do wrong? |
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goben_2003
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Jun 16, 2006 Post Count: 145 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks. A problem, when i restarted the computer the folder with the arrow said "no valid file system". I had checked the autostart and auto synchronize. I had to manually unmount the folder and then remount it. What did i do wrong? That is hard to say without seeing anything. Could you post screenshots of each page of the settings for it in the RamDisk Configuration on an image hosting site and put the links here please? Something like imgbb or similar. If you have the windows "Snipping Tool", select Mode->Window Snip to just grab the window with the configuration. What version of Windows are you running? |
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Andyman
Cruncher Joined: Apr 9, 2021 Post Count: 17 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks. A problem, when i restarted the computer the folder with the arrow said "no valid file system". I had checked the autostart and auto synchronize. I had to manually unmount the folder and then remount it. What did i do wrong? That is hard to say without seeing anything. Could you post screenshots of each page of the settings for it in the RamDisk Configuration on an image hosting site and put the links here please? Something like imgbb or similar. If you have the windows "Snipping Tool", select Mode->Window Snip to just grab the window with the configuration. What version of Windows are you running? Windows 10 Pro. I already uninstalled it, thought i would wait until someone else ran into the same thing ;). One setting i did uncheck though was the temp folder setting as i did not think that was needed but mayby it was? All other settings were default except the settings mentiond in this thread. [Edit 2 times, last edit by Andyman at Apr 30, 2021 5:25:25 PM] |
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