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Thread: Minnesota Crunchers |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 6203
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Warpedcow
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Mar 21, 2009 Post Count: 148 Status: Offline |
Starting to wonder if putting boinc on another drive would perform better. Similar to a scratch drive when video editing, boinc can crunch freely while the OS reads/writes on it's own. May have to experiment once I finish getting my blue badge on Clean energy. About 30 days left. Have you tried changing the setting called "write to disk at most this often" or whatever it's called? I would think if you have a slow disk, the less you have to write to it, that faster the WU will crunch... Anyway it's just writing checkpoints to disk. I think it defaults to a few seconds. I've changed it to 10 minutes I think and might go higher. Really though, the WCG folks should run the disk checkpoints asynchronously, then it wouldn't matter how slow your disk is...
Gaming/HTPC: Intel Q9550 @ 3.5ghz, 4GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4850
----------------------------------------Primary Server: Intel Q9550 @ 3.0ghz, 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4830 Backup Server/Gaming: Intel Q9550 @ 3.4ghz, 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4870 My ICF Home Build: http://icfbuild.blogspot.com/ [Edit 1 times, last edit by Warpedcow at Oct 24, 2011 2:27:18 PM] |
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Ever suggest that to WCG? Haven't thought about changing those settings. Am presuming the data is held in memory until it's time to write, correct? If so, would think an large multi core systems, like my 16 thread, would bottleneck after awhile with a full load. Don't know though.
----------------------------------------Just checked my PC that's crunching 10 clean energy per day. About 20 minutes difference between crunch and actual time using ubuntu 64. Ouch! Was hoping all 10 wouldn't crunch the same time but mix with the HCC. Not happening. Be glad when I finish CEP, in about 20 days! Adjusted from 60 to 120 seconds to see what happens. Anyone doing more?
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by Bearcat at Oct 25, 2011 2:30:40 AM] |
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kateiacy
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 23, 2010 Post Count: 1027 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Brink, I remember your commenting on another thread on how much you dislike the Unity user interface in Ubuntu Natty and Oneiric. (Me too!) Anyway, I've been trying out other Ubuntu versions.
----------------------------------------I really like the simple user interface in Lubuntu, but as of right now, Lubuntu 11.10 seems to have a problem with its repositories for 64 bit. So I installed Xubuntu 11.10 yesterday and so far I like it. I had no problem figuring out how to use it, and it's quicker to navigate than Unity (the latter doesn't say much, does it?). Although some of the packages that come with Ubuntu aren't included with Xubuntu, it's easy to install what you need from the regular Ubuntu repositories. I had no problem installing fglrx (from the Ubuntu repository) or the AMD APP SDK (from the AMD website). Installing BOINC from the repository was as usual, although it had to retrieve more auxiliary packages that hadn't come with Xubuntu. If the regular Ubuntu is already installed, it's also possible to download the LXDE or XFCE desktop. The option is then available at login time to choose which desktop to run under. I can't turn up the link for doing that at the moment, but it worked for me in the past. Kate  |
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Warpedcow
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Mar 21, 2009 Post Count: 148 Status: Offline |
Ever suggest that to WCG? Haven't thought about changing those settings. Am presuming the data is held in memory until it's time to write, correct? If so, would think an large multi core systems, like my 16 thread, would bottleneck after awhile with a full load. Don't know though. Just checked my PC that's crunching 10 clean energy per day. About 20 minutes difference between crunch and actual time using ubuntu 64. Ouch! Was hoping all 10 wouldn't crunch the same time but mix with the HCC. Not happening. Be glad when I finish CEP, in about 20 days! Adjusted from 60 to 120 seconds to see what happens. Anyone doing more? I'm assuming that the size of the "checkpoint" written to disk is related only to the % complete of the WU, and not related to how often the checkpoint is written. Could be wrong though of course! I suppose I could set the interval to something stupidly large so that the WU results NEVER get written to disk, they just get created in RAM and then sent off when complete.
Gaming/HTPC: Intel Q9550 @ 3.5ghz, 4GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4850
Primary Server: Intel Q9550 @ 3.0ghz, 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4830 Backup Server/Gaming: Intel Q9550 @ 3.4ghz, 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 4870 My ICF Home Build: http://icfbuild.blogspot.com/ |
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Ever suggest that to WCG? Haven't thought about changing those settings. Am presuming the data is held in memory until it's time to write, correct? If so, would think an large multi core systems, like my 16 thread, would bottleneck after awhile with a full load. Don't know though. Just checked my PC that's crunching 10 clean energy per day. About 20 minutes difference between crunch and actual time using ubuntu 64. Ouch! Was hoping all 10 wouldn't crunch the same time but mix with the HCC. Not happening. Be glad when I finish CEP, in about 20 days! Adjusted from 60 to 120 seconds to see what happens. Anyone doing more? I'm assuming that the size of the "checkpoint" written to disk is related only to the % complete of the WU, and not related to how often the checkpoint is written. Could be wrong though of course! I suppose I could set the interval to something stupidly large so that the WU results NEVER get written to disk, they just get created in RAM and then sent off when complete. If your crunching a large amount of CEP2, would think when writing it would choke the drive a bit. Once i am finished with cep2, (20 days worth left), will be adding a second drive and put boinc only on it thinking the OS and boinc not sharing the same disk should help some. Have an older 30gb ssd to try. Probably kill it faster though.
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Brink, I remember your commenting on another thread on how much you dislike the Unity user interface in Ubuntu Natty and Oneiric. (Me too!) Anyway, I've been trying out other Ubuntu versions. I really like the simple user interface in Lubuntu, but as of right now, Lubuntu 11.10 seems to have a problem with its repositories for 64 bit. So I installed Xubuntu 11.10 yesterday and so far I like it. I had no problem figuring out how to use it, and it's quicker to navigate than Unity (the latter doesn't say much, does it?). Although some of the packages that come with Ubuntu aren't included with Xubuntu, it's easy to install what you need from the regular Ubuntu repositories. I had no problem installing fglrx (from the Ubuntu repository) or the AMD APP SDK (from the AMD website). Installing BOINC from the repository was as usual, although it had to retrieve more auxiliary packages that hadn't come with Xubuntu. If the regular Ubuntu is already installed, it's also possible to download the LXDE or XFCE desktop. The option is then available at login time to choose which desktop to run under. I can't turn up the link for doing that at the moment, but it worked for me in the past. Kate I have at least 15 developers workstations at work running 10.10. I will not upgrade them until I'm happy with what I see. So far I don't see continuing with Ubuntu. I will wait to see if a classic branch of Ubuntu is created by the time 12.04 comes out. If not, I will load Xubuntu or Mint. |
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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10.10 not working out for you brink? Seems to be pretty solid. What kind of apps are you running at work under ubuntu?
----------------------------------------Finally got my second hex installed.  Now I need to sell my quads on my other rig to put Hexes in them. Was hoping bulldozer would have came out better to force intel to lower their prices. Not! Prices increased with bulldozer being a dud!
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
10.10 not working out for you brink? Seems to be pretty solid. What kind of apps are you running at work under ubuntu? Finally got my second hex installed. Now I need to sell my quads on my other rig to put Hexes in them. Was hoping bulldozer would have came out better to force intel to lower their prices. Not! Prices increased with bulldozer being a dud!No, 10.10 is great but I'm getting pressure to upgrade from 10.10 and I don't want to. My main app that I run on Linux is VMware workstation. Just got a 25 user upgrade to version VMware 8.0. Since our workstation come with a minimum of 8gig of ram we need a 64bit OS to access all the ram. And since windows is such a gui pig and a toy, we went with Ubuntu. Now they can run windows xp, and 7 and whatever else they want. Other apps are just some open source web dev stuff like apache2... |
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Ever crunch windows under vmware? Figure it wouldn't be like running pure though running as a vm.
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Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Ever crunch windows under vmware? Figure it wouldn't be like running pure though running as a vm. To me it does not make sense. Not only would the cpu be used to run the host os, it would also be used for the guest os. That's before you run boinc. Too much overhead. Personally I think the best way to run boinc is on a linux os without a gui. Run it from the command line. The gui does take a fair amount of cpu cycles. Of course you could not use it for much of anything else.  |
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