Hi everyone. @hchc (not sure if he will get the alert with that tag) asked me to describe my setup since I have about 2300 years of WCG crunching.

I would like to start off that I have been with the project 13+ years (maybe longer with an older, accidentally deleted account) and have always been Cancer-centric with my crunching other than some long periods of time when there was no Cancer work and I attached to some other projects.

There are a lot of ways that people can "donate" in this world and for me, donating to Cancer research has never been about donating cash, it's always been about computer time and actual research. I would rather use my cash to buy machines and actually see results and feel part of a community. But everyone has their way of giving and I totally respect those ways.

For a long time I worked for a great company that gave fantastic discounts on brand new machines as well as pretty good discounts on used, older employee machines. So I spent, to my wife's rolling eyes, a lot of my time and money looking for machines to buy over a period of 10+ years.

Now on to the hardware. For the past 4-5 years, I've basically been running dozens of machines in my house:

• 10 Lenovo P330 desktops with Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores)
• 10 Lenovo M710 desktops with Intel Core i7-7700 Processor ( 8 Threads 3.6GHz )
• A handful of random Wintel laptops running 8 or 16 cores
• 2 Intel iMacs from 2019 I believe
• 1 Mac Mini M1
• 4 Mac Mini M2
• 2 Macbook Air M1
• 1 Macbook Air M2
• A handful of older i7 machines from ~2018 that I have given to family and WCG is still running on them.

Outside my home:
• 1 Macbook Air M2 that I bought for my dad
• A handful of Wintel desktops and laptops that I donated to friends that still run WCG


I would have to guesstimate my home electric bill is about $150/month just to run all these computers. While IBM/Krembil took a year to migrate the project, I powered everything off. But yes, I think about $150/month (I live in New England and electricity is very expensive if you ask me!). The nice thing is that 1)I run these devices in the basement where the temp is still 67 at the highest with them all running and 2)for ~6 months of the year I can open the window and let in plenty of cold air ranging from 10 degrees (F) in the cold winter to 40 (F) in Fall/Winter months. I certainly do not mind the heat these machines generate for our winter season!

What I am finding is that the new Mac Mini M1 and M2 machines are about 80% the crunching power of the P330 machines HOWEVER use far less electricity, generate far less heat, and are dead silent. I love my P330s but man do these Mac Minis rock.

I bought the P330s for about $720 each with my steep discount but these days the Mac Mini M2s are $500 on everyday sale (I buy the base) so I think I may lean more towards Macs going forward. I also am hopes in that as the years pass, I will recoup some of my money by selling the machines in bulk to local schools or similar. For example, if I bought the P300s for $720 with my steep discount (they were valued over $1100 at the time), that means right now they should be valued at about $500 (and sounds about right with CPU comparison to Mac Mini M2)...the new owner shouldn't know/care what I paid for them...just what they are valued at now. And boy do these machines scream as well as have fantastic upgrade ability.

I will add that although I am no way a Mac Fanboy, the Macs are sooo much easier to maintain because they don't harass me every 3-4 weeks to upgrade or complete some stupid Windows 10 reboot wizard. That's really, really, really annoying and it began with Win10. If and when the Macs reboot (power outage or if it does apply a patch) never ever ever does it prevent BOINC from running while it waits for me to click OK or Skip for some dumb option. I have no idea how or why Microsoft thinks it's ok to reboot my machine AND prevent it from doing a normal startup/login so it can harass me to check out/setup some seemingly cool new feature that's about as hip as Clippy (if you remember that horrific thing).

At this point people may be wondering about how much money I've spent on devices just in my basement and crunch 24x7. I would say probably $7500 every 4 years beginning in 2014 I think. I am currently buying about 10 more Mac Mini M2 machines. I really want to stress that I am not at all trying to brag about spending this kind of money for machines that do nothing but crunch data. I am super passionate about helping to find some kind of cure(s), medication for Cancer. I'm also a very, very techie person (yet I have given up on following GPU technology since about 1999) and believe so much good can come from distributed computing and even brute force computing. Again, I don't think it's worth my money to donate $7500 in cold cash to <name one of 10,000 Cancer foundations>. Nor would I have any actual real world understanding of where my donation went if I did.

There are folks on non-BOINC projects that have awesome GPU-based machines and some of those rigs are $3500+ due to their GPU cards. I wish WCG would leverage the GPUs to some extent. Even if the GPUs can only crunch at 10% efficiency, it's still better than 0! Maybe there are too many variables with GPU programming but it just seems like a missed opportunity...especially with my setup with so many flavors of Wintel and Mac machines...NO GPUs can be used at all to any extent? Really? A machine sitting running for 24 hours can't let the GPU complete 8 WUs? The GPUs just need to sit there and stare at the motherboard? :) On average my 30 Wintel and Mac desktops are completing ~150 WUs a day EACH. They can't EACH add 8 more WUs that were processed on the GPU? I find that hard to believe that a desktop CPU (CPUs have been very generic for 30+ years now while GPUs are extremely focused) could process 150 but it's so inefficient for a GPU to even crunch 8 so the programmers don't bother to write the code.

On a side note, I am finding the Mac Mini M2 is only about 10% faster than the Mac Mini M1. I wish I could find the Mac Mini M1 for like $400 (M2 is $500) in bulk but I can't find a better price than $489 which is nuts. Why would I buy a 3+ year old (technology) machine to literally save $10? I'll buy the M2 version and let it hold its value.

I know I rambled a bit but hope this was useful and maybe even helpful information.

If you have any questions I would be happy to answer...whether technical, simply about me and my background, or my approach.