Project - "Gridcoin Finance"

[UBT - Chris]

Hi all,

I know we've slated Gridcoin a fair bit recently (for making you leave your team to crunch for them), but they do have an NCI project available.

The project is called "Gridcoin Finance" (http://finance.gridcoin.us/finance/) and the WUs (allegedly) take 24 hours, however I've had a few that have run for 3 hours. The credits aren't huge, but they're still something , plus you'll get some hours on WUProp!

I hope everyone will look into this one, as it is basically free credits (NCI)

Chris

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi Chris

Good call

The Team was set up on GF, a couple of months ago, but initially, any tasks I crunched simply errored and no credits gained. So I simply suspended the project and left it, thinking it would sort itself out.

After your prompt, I restarted and sure enough, tasks now complete, - my first one took just under 3 hours also...and a nifty 80+ credits in the bank - not bad for an NCI task

regards
Tim

[UBT - Chris]

Hi Tim,

Thanks I was just browsing BS and looked to see if there were any new projects and sure enough, I wasn't a member of Gridcoin. I was planning on suspending Enigma temporarily to let Gridcoin run, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was an NCI project

I've completed about 5 tasks, with 222 credits in the bank at the mo

Chris

[NaRyan]

Err it's not exactly NCI when it is using a full core...
Taskmanager shows it using 19.2% CPU.

[Woodles]

Taskmanger here shows it using between 0.1 - 0.6%?

Only 0.15 credits per WU but they're only lasting 22 seconds so can't complain.

Mark

[NaRyan]

Well it has settled down now.
Jumping between 0.1% & 0.5% . but mine has been running for 40 minutes says 1.9% done and 1 Day 10 Hours left to complete.
But I don't know how accurate that is.

And if it is accurate then neither of my 2 PCs running the workunit with it's 24 hour deadline would finish in time.
As one system would finish on 31st and the other would finish it on the 1st April.
And the deadline for both workunits is 30\03\2016 @ 17:06

[UBT - Mikee]

Good find!

So in an effort to see how many simulanteous tasks I can get runnng on my old dual core PC, I've just started this one and am now up to 11!

Though early indications are not looking as good as the rest of you - BOINC Manager reports it running at 5% per hour

Mike

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all,

Based on returning just 3 GF tasks, I can report that:

1) Each one takes about 10,000 seconds on my i7 (@ 3.6GHz).
2) Using BOINCTasks as my BOINC Manager, each task "claims" to use about 3.5% of a CPU - but I have seen this vary across each task and depending on how far into the task it has got.
3) I get 80 credits per returned and validated task.
4) Like BU, don't suspend the task as it starts from zero again !!

I would assume from the different reports, that "generating" the GridCoins must vary depending on some external factors.

regards
Tim

[Woodles]

It seems a little hit and miss, somehow I'm managed to return 156 tasks on one 2.8GHz i7 PC since lunchtime!

All but one took between 21 and 22 seconds for 0.15 - 0.17 points. The odd one took 34 seconds for 0.25 points.

[UBT - Chris]

Err it's not exactly NCI when it is using a full core...
Taskmanager shows it using 19.2% CPU.

Hi NaRyan - it's showing up as 0.1 - 0.4% of a core for me...

Taskmanger here shows it using between 0.1 - 0.6%?

Only 0.15 credits per WU but they're only lasting 22 seconds so can't complain.

Mark

Hi Mark,

I wonder why your WUs are so short when mine are lasting 10 - 12 thousand seconds each... Seems like credit is directly proportional though - what you get for 22 seconds seems equal per second to what I get per second...

Good find!

So in an effort to see how many simulanteous tasks I can get runnng on my old dual core PC, I've just started this one and am now up to 11!

Though early indications are not looking as good as the rest of you - BOINC Manager reports it running at 5% per hour

Mike

Hi Mike,

I'm up to 16 simultaneous tasks (including WUProp) on my 4 core machine and on my 8 core VM I'm on 21 (inc. WUProp) - I run Radioactive@Home just for some hours because I'm not spending money on a senser for so few credits (not yet anyway).

My BOINC Manager shows slow progress too, but I very much doubt that is accurate, as I have returned 3 tasks within 24 hours...

Chris

[NaRyan]

Yeah the estimated time is way off.
It reported 1 day 12 hours on 1 PC & 2 days 11 hours on the other.
Both workunits finished in around 2 hours 50 minutes.

And looking at the results info it seems the project has a coded max runtime of 9999 seconds (so you get over 10K seconds, probably due to when it next checks the runtime and sees it is over 9999 seconds)

[UBT - Chris]

Ah well, as long as credits are awarded, I don't mind how it gets there my one problem with this project is that we are supporting Gridcoin running it. Normally, I'd be all for helping an altcoin grow, but not when it's one of our rival BOINC Teams! Again - oh well, they're giving us effectively free credits!

Chris

[NaRyan]

Welp I will not be running this.
It's supposed to be NCI, but when running it kills CPU based work.
Enigma and POGS both ran at 55% CPU usage when this was running.

Also not recommended to run this on a SSD. It hammers writes to your drive and in the 3 hours it runs for it writes around 2.5GB
And if running for 24 hours that is 20GB. and an SSD will have it's life shortened by quite a bit with that high writes per day.

[UBT - Timbo]

Welp I will not be running this.
It's supposed to be NCI, but when running it kills CPU based work.
Enigma and POGS both ran at 55% CPU usage when this was running.

Hi

Strange - in my case (an 8-core i7, of which only 7 cores are active - 1 not used as it's kept for GPU work) I have 7 CPU tasks each running at 100%, 2 Goofy NCI's running at 0.23% and 0.01%, a WU-Prop running at 0.01% and the GF app running at 3.5%. GF is only using about 2Mb of RAM too, so it's effect on my PC is minimal.

Also not recommended to run this on a SSD. It hammers writes to your drive and in the 3 hours it runs for it writes around 2.5GB
And if running for 24 hours that is 20GB. and an SSD will have it's life shortened by quite a bit with that high writes per day.

Silly question - how do you measure the disk writes ? (Am not being contentious - just asking as I didn't think Windows had a program to do this...).

Obviously, if GF does this, then that's not good news for SSD's

regards
Tim

[Woodles]

Hi Mark,

I wonder why your WUs are so short when mine are lasting 10 - 12 thousand seconds each... Seems like credit is directly proportional though - what you get for 22 seconds seems equal per second to what I get per second...

I've now got it running on two systems, the i7 always takes ~22 seconds, the i3 always takes ~10,300 seconds even though they get work at the same time Points per second works out about the same though.

[Woodles]

Silly question - how do you measure the disk writes ? (Am not being contentious - just asking as I didn't think Windows had a program to do this...).

Good old Task Manager. 'View', 'Select columns' + 'I/O Writes' or 'I/O Write Bytes'

[UBT - Chris]

Hmm... My disk write isn't extreme, however it is using A LOT of storage for a BOINC Project (about 700Mb so far on each of my 2 machines running it)...

Other than that, I'm not having any problems with the project...

Chris

[UBT - Chris]

I've now got it running on two systems, the i7 always takes ~22 seconds, the i3 always takes ~10,300 seconds even though they get work at the same time Points per second works out about the same though.

Hmmm... 'Tis a mystery... Oh well - as long as you're getting the credits, I suppose it doesn't matter

Chris

[UBT - Timbo]

Good old Task Manager. 'View', 'Select columns' + 'I/O Writes' or 'I/O Write Bytes'

Hi Mark

Aha - thanks for that. Another set of "stats" to keep an eye on then

regards
Tim

[UBT - Timbo]

Also not recommended to run this on a SSD. It hammers writes to your drive and in the 3 hours it runs for it writes around 2.5GB
And if running for 24 hours that is 20GB. and an SSD will have it's life shortened by quite a bit with that high writes per day.

I've used Task Manager to see the I/O Writes that GF is doing and I get figures of 1,936 Writes and 47,338 Write Bytes (that's after 3% is done on an approx 3 hour task).

By comparison, WU-Prop (at 99% done) 1,605 Writes and 28,860,155 Write Bytes (and bear in mind this task takes 6 hours) and Collatz (at 82% done) is 1,265 Writes and 4,150,276 Write Bytes for an approx 10 minute task).

regards
Tim