Hello UK BOINC Members

[chriscambridge]

Hello UK BOINC Members..

** Updated **

Just a quick post to:

1) say hello
2) give you a quick run-down the projects I am supporting
3) let you know computers that I am running 99.9%, 247-365
4) as well to let you know my motives for being involved in BOINC projects.

Motives;

1) to increase processing power for BOINC projects
2) to increase UK Ratings within BOINC projects
3) to increase the UK BOINC team standings within BOINC projects.

Projects:

SETI@Home
Rosetta@Home
World Computing Grid
Climate predication
Asteroids@Home
GPUGrid
PrimeGrid
ColatzConjecture

Computers:

Zoostorm [i7] + Intel HD4300
Dell Precision T5500 [2x Xeon E5620] + GTX 970 + GTX 750 Ti
Workstation [2x Xeon E5-2670] + 2 x GTX 970

Regards,

Chris

[nick]

Hello UK BOINC Members..

Just a quick post to:

1) say hello
2) give you a quick run-down the projects I am supporting
3) let you know computers that I am running 99.9%, 247-365
4) as well to let you know my motives for being involved in BOINC projects.

Motives;

1) to increase processing power for BOINC projects
2) to increase UK Ratings within BOINC projects
3) to increase the UK BOINC team standings within BOINC projects.

Projects:

SETI
Rosetta
World Computing Grid
[Climate predication]

** I am considering leaving Climate predication; I currently only have the project running on my i7 **

Computers:

Amazon Fire Table (4 Core) {SETI only}
Dell Core2 Quad (4 Core / 4 Threads) + GPU
Acer i3M (2 core / 4 Threads)
Dell i5 (4 core / 4 Threads)
Zoostorm i7 (4 core / 8 Threads) + GPU
Dell 2x processor's XEON (8 core / 8 Threads) + GPU ***new today!***

Future:

1) I have also got a Raspberry PI (v2 model B) to add to the list, but no-one bothered to answer my unix question on SETI so it is just gathering dust! (The question was: What is the Unix command to upgrade from v7 to v8, removing the old v7).

2) I am also considering taking out the Amazon Cloud EC3 trial and running some/all of the projects through that; however after the Unix issues with the PI, and not being too sure about Windows server, I have put this option on hold.

3) Make a donation to UK BOINC, as well as the projects that I support!

Help Required?

1) If anyone can help me to get the PI up and running that would help.

2) If anyone can give me advice on using EC2 (trial) via Windows Server that would help. If they could also comment on how much processing power the free trial would give that would also be quite interesting?!

3) If anyone can help explain why Rosetta, today, has stopped communicating with my 4 machines, that would be very helpful? I am guessing there is a problem at Rosetta as all my other projects are communicating just fine.

4) When I signed up to World computing grid, I used my email address that I had used on the other projects, but for some reason it created a new account for me; so now I have 2 accounts (Chris Cambridge on SETI, Rosetta, and Climate predication), and (chriscambridge on World computing grid) - If someone can help me to these merged, or if not possible, give advice so I can have just one account, that would be most helpful.

5) I bought the 2x Xeon processor system today, in the belief that it was 2x 4 core and 2 x 8 threads = 8core/16 threads, but I have ran some diagnostic software and it is showing as only having 8 threads. The specific CPU's are: Intel Xeon ES620 (Westmere-EP) 2.4 GHz; however I definitly read somewhere that some Xeon processors are, I belive it is called, HyperThreaded (like the i3 and i7) eg N cores = N*2 Threads.

Does anyone know which Xeon processors these are?

Help Given?

I will try and keep visiting this forum, and answering any questions that I can; as a newbie there is probably not much I can offer. However I hold a degree in computer science and have good technical skills so perhaps I can be more useful for other non-BOINC questions, if and when they are asked.

Regards,

Chris,
Cambridge, UK.

First of all welcome to the group a good bunch here.

2nd save your fire-tablet the amount of processing vs the wear due to heat and constant charging will fry the thing.

3rd we had a member try the ec3 cloud and did not crunch all that well if i remember.

4th sign up here (on your windows machines you can do it in boinc manager) https://boincstats.com/en/bam/ its an easy way to manage all your computer and have your stats in one place and put all them in the right groups. i have 3 user names but there all counted as me there.

5th the xeon you mentioned it 4 cores 8 threads ( http://ark.intel.com/products/47925/Int ... -Intel-QPI) you will have to go into the bios and turn hyper threading on if your not getting 16 threads.

thats all i able to answer for you chris im sure someone else can field the rest.

[chriscambridge]

Thank you so much Nick, that has been most helpful.

2) To be honest the fire tablet was only doing around 200 units per day; it only cost £35 on black friday, but I will take your advice and pull it off BOINC to stop it frying up.

3) I am really sorry to hear that EC3 did not achieve that much, I really thought it would offer excellent processing power; if I remember rightly you could choose 12 core processors! (which may have been hyper threaded). Okay well I will keep my free trial credit until someone works out how to get some good results from there.

4) I shall sign up at BAM; that sounds very useful, saves having to re-set up accounts and lose credits.

5) Yeah that makes sense; however why on earth you would turn off hyper-threading god knows. I shall update the BIOS setting shortly.

Do you/anyone know are all Xeon processors Hyper Threaded? (Required information for future purchases).

Thanks again.

[chriscambridge]

Okay I have just seen your link for the number of threads for the Xeon processor.

So before I buy anymore multi-processor Xeon's I need to check to makes sure they can HyperThead.

--

I Just turned on HyperThreading within the BIOS.

I now have 17 tasks running within BOINC; 16 CPU tasks, and 1 GPU task.

I think it's time to get rid of the i5 and Core2 quad machines and swap them for a 2x Xeon..

--

I setup an account at Boincstats/BAM, used the username I used at WCG, and the email that I used at all projects.

However my 'main account page' at Boincstats/BAM says:

**

CPID: (nothing)

I click CPID Refresh but nothing happend?

**

Member of Team (nothing)

I clicked Edit (team) button, and got:

"When a number is showing instead of a team name then BAM! was unable to retrieve the team name from the project."

**

Projects (empty)

**

--

Any idea's?

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi Chris

Welcome to the Team.

You've asked a lot of questions and some have been answered already, so hopefully, you will get the answers you need to carry on crunching BOINC projects...

I'll try and resolve some the remaining questions:

a) The various stats websites do not update themselves immediately...so it might take a day or three for your various accounts to "merge"...so, as long as you use the SAME email address for every project, then eventually, all the stats websites and back-office connections will all join up and you'll have a single CPID which will be the same across every project you crunch for.

b) The Xeon CPU is Intel's "top end" device and as such it usually has all the tick boxes ticked in terms of its capabilities...with HyperThreading being one of the main advantages...but as you might have seen, HT is not always turned "on" by default in the BIOS..hence why you weren't getting enough tasks crunching concurrently.

c) On the Pi front, it is useful for only a couple of non-intensive tasks, such as GoofyGrid or if used with an outboard Bitcoin miner (such as BFL, or R-Boxes). Other more intensive tasks (such as SETI, Rosetta etc) take too much time and hence they are not worth the effort of getting these to work.

d) I recall one of our members, (also called Chris) who experimented with running BOINC on a cloud based service...he got it working, but I think that after the free trial ended, he didn't have the money available to keep it going (IIRC).

e) As far as Rosetta goes, many of the projects have outages, whether they are planned or unplanned...the key thing is to be patient and let BOINC Manager crunch the work units and if the website goes down (or you lose your broadband connection for a time) then don't worry about it and once everything works again, the results will be sent back and you'll get credit. For instance, SETI shuts its website down most Tuesdays for a short time, so that they can do some weekly back-ups and maintenance. Once the website is re-activated, connections will happen and all will be well.

Hope this helps
regards
Tim
(A former resident of Cambridge !!)

[chriscambridge]

Hi Tim,

Good to speak to another Silcon-Fen (ex) resident! :}

Thank you for all those answers, they have been most helpful.

--

I shall wait for BAM to do some updates and see if it merges.

After seeing the 17 tasks from the Xeon, I have now decided to sell the i5 and Core2 Quad and buy another..

I shall not bother running BOINC with the PI, or Fire Tablet, for the reasons given.
Is it worth or possible running BOINC on a Playstation 3; I think I read somewhere it is possible, or perhaps that might have been Folding@home?

I am still undecided on the EC3 trial; If anyone has, or is, running Boinc on EC3 your comments would be greatly appreciated.

--

I just tweeted about UKBOINC from a twitter account with 29K followers! And followed your twitter account :}

Hopefully this will bring in more UKBOINC members.

[Woodles]

Hi Chris, I'm a little late to the party but you still get my two pence worth

Skimming through your questions and the answers so far:

1) Hello Are you in Cambridge itself or just near by? I'm from St Ives just to the North so it's good to have someone else local.

2) A good choice of projects, if you'd like to take a look at the Formula Boinc thread, you'll see that Rosetta and Climate prediction are two of our more successful projects.

3) Like Nick said, ditch the Amazon Fire, you'll end up spending all your time replacing the batteries or charger for it. However, all of the other processors are perfectly capable of crunching Boinc to various levels, I assume the ACER is a laptop? In which case, be careful about leaving it crunching continuously with a full complement of WUs as they're generally not designed to run flat out 24/7 and overheat.

The Raspberry Pi is not all that powerful but it can run a limited range of projects (When I checked - Enigma@Home, GoofyxGrid@Home, WUProp@Home, yoyo@home, Asteroids@home, FiND@Home, Universe@Home and possibly WEP-M+2 Project (wanless) although the last one's a bit unclear whether they have an application or not) I've only tried the first three and currently have three model B's clocking away at Enigma, Goofy and WUProp with no problems. They return about 750/450/55 credits per project per day for ~3W each so not powerful but not power hungry either. I'm not too sure what the command is to upgrade Unix 7 to 8 (if that's what you meant?) I have Ubuntu 14 installed and it's "apt-get dist-upgrade" to get the latest version.

I don't know about the Amazon cloud but there's pretty clear instructions here https://www.reddit.com/r/BOINC/comments ... mpute_for/ for setting up a Googlecloud instance. I assume they'd be pretty similar.

There's a thread on Rosetta http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum ... true#80490 where other posters have been unable to contact the server today so you're not alone. Looks like they're having server problems (and their website is extremely slow at the moment)

It's quite common to have more than one user account id, I've always found that if you have at least one host with projects from both 'account groups' active (they don't have to be running WUs) then in time, they sort themselves out.

There are some single core applications that run significantly faster on a non-hyperthreaded core than when it's being split into two. One of our very old compilers takes nearly 30% longer if the core is hyperthreaded and as it only uses one of the cores, the others are just idle anyway. Fast and three idle cores or slow and seven idle cores means that machine has hyperthreading turned off.

Xeons were introduced in 1998 and have all been hyperthread capable since 2002 so anything you get today should be suitable even if it's secondhand and very old! To check, Intel have a list of all hyperthread capable processors here http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?Hy ... ading=true

Regards,

Mark

[nick]

Is it worth or possible running BOINC on a Playstation 3; I think I read somewhere it is possible, or perhaps that might have been Folding@home?

if you have one of the original fat ps3's (the first batch on release) you were able to run unix on it. check this site out to see if your system version can be jailbroken.http://www.ps3hax.net/forumdisplay.php?f=127 They probably have threads on there to load an os onto it too.

[UBT - Timbo]

if you have one of the original fat ps3's (the first batch on release) you were able to run unix on it. check this site out to see if your system version can be jailbroken.http://www.ps3hax.net/forumdisplay.php?f=127 They probably have threads on there to load an os onto it too.

Hi

I seem to remember that Sony released a firmware revision for the PS3 that killed the option to run Linux on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStati ... m_software

So, make sure the PS3 is running firmware <= v3.15. At the time, I recall the "Cell" CPU's in the PS3 were very good when running BOINC but nowadays, a multi-threaded CPU might do better.

Alternatively, check this (and other sources) and find some jailbreak software to downgrade/remove the PS3 firmware and load something else:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Jailbreak

regards
Tim

[chriscambridge]

Thanks for the information on the PS3 Nick and Tim; I will take a look at all this at a later date.

Hi Mark,

1) I am from central Cambridge, based in Town.

Its good to meet another silicon-fen resident :}

2) I agree; I choose projects that would have a dramatic effect when achieved.

3) Done! The fire tablet is now on sale on Gumtree, along with the i5 and Core2Quad!

4) Thanks for the info on Linux and PI, EC3, and Xeon processors.

Rosetta came back online yesterday, so also thanks for the heads up.

Chris

[nick]

3) Done! The fire tablet is now on sale on Gumtree, along with the i5 and Core2Quad!

the i5 is a still good cruncher but graphics cards are where the real computer power is these days. you can find old gtx580's for cheap that will out crunch your dual xeons if the project has graphics modules. might want to keep that in mind and save a few pennies my best pc is a 3570k with a r9 270x in it for daily totals puts out more than double my dual xeons with gtx 750's.

[chriscambridge]

The problem I have with the i5 is that it is a Dell 790 Optiplex, and this has an issue with the amount of power it can pull through the PCI (I think that is the explanation I read). Most graphic cards need more power than this 790 can give. Also the PSU is only 250 watt so I would need to change that too.

I just read it again, it says: x16 PCI-e slot is only rated for 35watts

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/350 ... phics-card

I had a look at PSU but could not find one that was the same size as the Dell one so in the end I gave up! to be honest I am more software than hardware.

If anyone has a Dell Optiplex 790 small factor desktop running with a 250 watt PSU and a dedicated graphics card - do please know what it is so I can buy one.

My current thoughts are to sell the i5 and Core2Quad (which only cost £100 each), and then buy another (second hand cheap) dual-processor Xeon.

The i5 and Core2Quad only have 8 cores and 8 threads, but the Xeon have 8 cores and 16 threads. Plus it comes with a half decent AMD GPU.

[chriscambridge]

"gtx580's will out crunch your dual xeons" - wow. To be honest I would upgrade both the Core2Quad and i5 with GPUs like the one you mentioned, its just difficult to understand (a) will fit, (b) can I get a replacement PSU, (c) will the PCI wattage handle it, (d) do I have the right PCI, :{

--

Talking about GPU projects; so far the only project that will run on the 3 GPU's I have is SETI?

Does this sound correct, out of SETI, Rosetta, World community grid, and Climate predication?

The Xeon came with a Nvidia Quadpro 4000 2GB, and that is crunching through SETI tasks in an amazing speed.

[nick]

I just read it again, it says: x16 PCI-e slot is only rated for 35watts

thats the standard for PCI-e (newer/gaming MB's can pull more like 75 watts though them)thats why graphics cards that use more than that have a 6,8, or 12 pin power connector on the top of them.

unless your putting gtx750, 950 or 1060 in it you will want to change the PSU or just sell them since they were cheap .

seti is the only one your crunching that has gpu. Have you thought about using the gpu's for another noble project Asteroids@home helps study the physical properties of Asteroids (will help us move or blow up one when they fine on that is going to hit us) they have nvidia gpu tasks

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

PCI power
The PCIe specification calls for any slot to deliver 75 watts (3V3 @ 3 amps + 12V @ 5.5 amps) so it's a limit introduced by Dell on that particular motherboard. Most higher end GPUs have a second (and sometimes a third) power connector to allow more than 75 watts to be used but they still use power from the motherboard slot and I would imagine the limiting factor for you would be the 250W PSU anyway.

Several old Dells that I've owned used their own design of PSU and a standard one wouldn't fit. I think you'll have the same problems ... unless you're handy with a saw and file?

Threads
More threads isn't always better. for example, on SRBase, my dual Xeon system with 16 threads (2 * X5570s) produces ~24K a day whilst my 4790K with only 8 threads produces ~53K a day (even my i5 with only 4 threads produces ~11K) Sometimes it depends on the capabilities of the core (AVX, SSE etc) Having said that, I'm currently toying with the idea of getting another dual Xeon system anyway

CPU V GPU
A very high end CPU may well run 32 cores at 5GHz but even a low to mid range GPU has several hundred 'cores' running at a GHz. A GPU will always produce more credits if the application is well written.

A quick check on SETI finds a WU crunched on both a GPU and a CPU http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit ... 2233223037 The GPU was almost 14 times faster for the same credits.

The problem, as you've discovered, is that there is a limited number of projects with a GPU application. Of the four you mention, SETI has a GPU application, Rosetta and Climate prediction don't, WCG did in the past but doesn't now and no immediate plans to re-introduce one. There are other projects that you haven't mentioned that do have GPU applications, the easiest way to find them is to look on any stats site for the projects that produce the most credits a day.

Your questions
a) Yes. GPUs come in all different sizes, you should be able to find one that fits but it might take a bit of searching
b) Probably not
c) Yes ... but not in a DELL Optiplex apparently.
d) PCIe is PCIe. The only real differences are the data width and bus speeds. I have a GTX970 running in a PCIe 2.0, 4 bit slot in one host and it performs the same as one in a PCIe 3.0, 16 bit slot in a different host. Most of the work done by a GPU is internal, the PCIe bus speed and slot width only affect getting the data into the card and the results out.

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Thank you so much for all that information, most of it makes complete sense.

I agree; no point predicting future climate, analyzing human genome, looking for intelligent life, looking for cures for serious diseases- if we get destroyed by Asteroids! I will add this project to some of the machines with GPUs.

I am going to go with the plan to sell the i5 and Core2Quad, basically as the new (2nd hand cheap) Xeon I buy will have a dedicated GPU so that saves the hassle out of having to upgrade the PSU and GPU.

Although I do hear what you are saying about Cores/Threads not being the only factor.

I could upgrade the Intel HD 4300 (onboard) GPU on the Zoostorm i7 but to be honest that would also need a PSU upgrade (which is far more simple as I bought it new from ebuyer) but at the moment the HD 4300 seems to be processing data fairly fast - although no where near as fast as a newer GPU would.

I thought I would have had some offers on the Gumtree ad I placed, Personally I thought it was quite a good deal, but no offers yet.

Fire Tablet 9" very new + Fire Tablet faux Leather case new + i5 incl 19" dell flatscreen + Core2Quad incl 19" dell flatscreen = £250?!
(The Fire Tablet and Case cost £60, the machines cost £240 inc p&p + monitors)

If they don't sell fairly quickly I will probably reduce the price to £200 for a quick sale. That is the lowest price I will go to as I don't want to lose too much money.

[However, If any UK BOINC Team member's wanted these, I would reduce the price to £150; Collection only]

[nick]

you might be better selling 1pc with 1 monitor in 1 listing and the tablet in another. smaller market for someone who wants all three than just 1. id buy them but your 3+ hours drive away I'm in the north

[chriscambridge]

Yeah that may make more sense; although I thought someone would just buy them as a job lot and then just resell them on.

I am kind of dreading selling these to a 'home user' as we all know what a complete nightmare they can.

At least a technical person will check them, and understands what they are buying, - unlike the 'home user'.

Well if dropping the price even lower could convince you to travel, let me know and we can work out a deal.

I also have, what I believe to be a AMD Radeon HD 6350 512mb which I am happy to throw into the deal (for UK BOINC Team members only).

I say, I believe, because I can't get it to fit in the Dell so I cannot check what it is or that it works 100%; but it came from the same person as the Dell so I have no reason to doubt this. I did a quick check and it is my understanding that this GPU has the correct wattage from the PCI that we talked about earlier.

Typically, I am even eager to get some money back on these machines, as I just agree to buy another Dell T5500 2 x Xeon (8C) with FirePro V8700 1GB.

Also I just got a Linx 10 inch Windows 10 Tablet so the Amazon Fire 7 inch Tablet is just gathering dust; in truth its a good little tablet and the case is great.

Anyway, in case anyone is interested in this deal, you can view full specification including pictures here:

https://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/amaz ... 1181995599

Its advertised for £250 but I am willing to negotiate around £150 to any members for a quick sale :}

[nick]

you get your new toys delivered yet?

[chriscambridge]

Well I have decided to keep the Dell Precision (dual core) and upgrade it with a new PSU and GTX 580.

The Dell 790 i5 I have reduced to £99 and have thrown in the Graphics card for free; it fit the 790 but BOINC could not use it for processing. I have had 2 contacts so far about this.

The Dell T5500 2 x Xeon (8C) with FirePro V8700 will be bought on Friday and should arrive early next week.

--

Just to add, the i7 was not a toy; I actually bought this new to do Artificial Intelligence training for a project that I am/was working on.

However I have been advised by some senior AI people that 'detecting different types of animals of the same breed' is one of the most difficult things you can do in AI as the differences are not that great; therefore I have now put this project onto the back burner and have decided instead to concentrate on Data processing via BOINC.

At some point I will change the website as well as my user account at BOINC to reflect this more non-profit, commerical interest in BOINC processing.

--

I am now ranked #35 with UK BOINC Team for Average Credit, #34 for Daily Credit, and #822 for total credit.

Obviously my rank for Total Credit is not so good yet as I have not been crunching for long - it is just 652K which is very low to others!

[nick]

hey nice work so far its hard to get the high daily numbers without some beefy graphics cards but those are respectable figures for mostly cpu work.

[chriscambridge]

Thanks. I am a little bit poor at the moment, but when things improve I will get some decent GPUs and do some upgrades.

I have also got another twin Xeon with Quadro 4000 GPU coming next week so that should add more credit.

Additionally I have now setup 4 processors crunching Asteroids@home via Google Cloud on the $300 free credit!

I am going to do a post on it, and include the link, as well as report back when the credit runs out and say how many credits it generated so others can perhaps gain some extra credits this way.

Next stop will be the free credits at Amazon EC3 and Microsoft Cloud (think its called Azure).

[nick]

Oh BTW if you don't already run them do you mind adding GoofyxGrid@Home and WUprop@home to your rigs they use no cpu or gpu time and help us rank up. they search the web or something like that.

[chriscambridge]

I initially did add them but they do not provide enough information about what they actually do; additionally I am only committed to projects that 'change things substantially', like asteroid detection, fighting illness etc.

Also, I only crunch for UK/US/EU academic institutions and research projects.

When I get more computers in the future I may consider expanding the scope of crunching.

[Woodles]

I am now ranked #35 with UK BOINC Team for Average Credit, #34 for Daily Credit, and #822 for total credit.

Obviously my rank for Total Credit is not so good yet as I have not been crunching for long - it is just 652K which is very low to others!

I remember the struggle I had when I first started BOINC to generate 1,000 credits a day! You're doing much better than that.

I initially did add them but they do not provide enough information about what they actually do; additionally I am only committed to projects that 'change things substantially', like asteroid detection, fighting illness etc.

Also, I only crunch for UK/US/EU academic institutions and research projects.

When I get more computers in the future I may consider expanding the scope of crunching.

Neither of them "change things substantially", GoofyxGrid uses a random number generator to simulate an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters to see how often parts of a specified phrase occur - not really much benefit to mankind, while WUProp captures the characteristics of every work unit you crunch (project, time spent, amount crunched etc) - again, not exactly beneficial to the rest of the world.

[chriscambridge]

** A compromise **

On the basis I now confident that I can get the Raspberry Pi up and running, after setting up BOINC on Linux via Google Cloud - what I shall do is set this up tomorrow, and add the projects:

GoofyxGrid@Home and WUprop@home

It obviously won't generate a massive amount of credit, but some credit is better than no credit :} Also it saves having the Pi just sitting here gathering dust.

--

Yeah I guess everyone remembers trying hit that first 1M credit mark.. Today has been a good day though, 51K daily credits. On Tuesday I had around 200K daily credits. To be honest its pretty impossible trying to work out which host machine and project are generating what, as not all the host machines are showing, WCG still seems to be playing by itself, and as ClimiatePredication showed, some projects issue credit when they feel like at some point in the future - not too mention each project issue credits based on their own judgments rather than balanced across projects.

"an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters" - Got to love these academics! Although it does remind me of an experiment where they randomly created machine code and then randomly put it together to see what would happen. If I remember right it ended creating some interesting "patterns of code". I guess there is a bit more going on than they are letting on.

[Woodles]

I have three PIs running BOINC under Linux and they all run Goofy and Wuprop. I also run Enigma on them as they also have a "Linux on Pi" application (actually Raspbian on Pi but it works) About 200 credits a day per core.

Regards, Mark

[chriscambridge]

Thanks, I'll try and update when done tomorrow.

[nick]

To be honest its pretty impossible trying to work out which host machine and project are generating what

When you log into bam.boincstats.com click the host list tab and should show all your connected hosts there totals and daily returns when you click the graph icon after the group column. once that page is loaded click project list to see what i am talking about.

If you do not see all your hosts there check there connected in the manager. if they show no data you will need to click "my account page" on the side bar and click the renew icon next to cpid and in a day or so should fix it.

[chriscambridge]

The problem I have is that within hosts, it either shows the i5 or Core2Quad but not both.

If from the machine, in boinc software I click tools/synchonise with boinc bam stats - then the machine I do this on appears, but the other one then disappears, and vice versa.

1) You say, "if you do not see all your host then check they are connected in the manager" - which manager? Project page 'manager' eg asteroids/accont/hosts?, a manager part at boincbam, or a manager part within the client application? Sorry I am unsure which you mean.

2) Also, the two accounts I added at Google cloud are showing at Asteroids/account/hosts, but not in BamStats/hosts.

and 3) World community Grid got added to my list of my projects at Boinc Bam, is generating credit at wcg/account/, but never shows on the combined credit. eg Projects within the last 24 hours.

It all seems a bit of a mess really :[

[nick]

the manager on the host. make sure you have unique names for each pc and then use the cpid renew thing should fix it.

[chriscambridge]

Do you mean:

boincstats.com/en/bam/account/ -> Renew CPID ??

[nick]

yep

[chriscambridge]

Done! I guess it will take a few hours/days for it to propagate across its network?

[nick]

yeah about a day or so

[chriscambridge]

Hey Nick,.. et al,

I just bought the following new two GPU's so hopefully these will add to the numbers that I am producing.

They should arrive tomorrow so I shall fit them tomorrow and start crunching..

ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048 MB)- [640 Cuda Cores]

and

Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU II OC Strix (4096 MB) - [1664 Cuda Cores]


These are slightly better than my existing cards!

GeoForce 210 [16 Cuda Cores]

Quadro 4000 [256 Cuda Cores]

Although I think I read somewhere that 'shaders' are more or as, important as Cuda Cores..

[chriscambridge]

I just came across this link which has excellent advice on GPU's (graphic cards for BOINC processing) from this forum..

viewtopic.php?t=5772

[Woodles]

Hey Nick,.. et al,

I just bought the following new two GPU's so hopefully these will add to the numbers that I am producing.

They should arrive tomorrow so I shall fit them tomorrow and start crunching..

ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048 MB)- [640 Cuda Cores]

and

Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU II OC Strix (4096 MB) - [1664 Cuda Cores]


These are slightly better than my existing cards!

GeoForce 210 [16 Cuda Cores]

Quadro 4000 [256 Cuda Cores]

Although I think I read somewhere that 'shaders' are more or as, important as Cuda Cores..

Hi Chris,

Very nice selection there, a little improvement on what you had before

The 750Ti is a popular choice and often performs as well or even better than the supposedly next level up cards, you should find it's quite a lot more productive than both your earlier ones combined!

I have 970s myself (although not an Asus variant) and they're quite impressive cards, never had any problem with them.

Cores/shaders/stream processers are all pretty much the same sort of thing - the basic computing part of the graphics card. More is nearly always better but they only give a rough idea for performance comparisons as there may be fewer cores than shaders but they might be individually more powerful. Similarly, there may be fewer stream processors but they could be clocked faster. A useful comparison is finding the two cards you're trying to compare on a project website and see what sort of daily numbers they return.

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Thanks for coming back to me Mark.

I bought the GTX 750 TI OC off Ebay, but then when I checked the top GPU specs on Seti and GPUGrid, the GTX 750 Ti did not seem to rank as high as I thought it would, hence why I bought the 970 as that seemed to rank quite well across projects, like you said; I bought the 790 new as I thought that would be best.

Could you offer me some advice on this potential problem that I have please Mark? as I am not sure what is going?!

The GTX 750 Ti OC arrived today so I fitted it in the Dell Precision T5500 workstation using the Dell 875w PSU and the attached (1 of 2) 6 pins from PSU.

It all installed fine and Boinc GPUGrid assigned a GPU task; at first it seemed to allocate a remaining time of 1 day whereas normal my Quadro 4000 would take 2 days (even though the remaining would say 4 days), which is quite an improvement as using that logic it should actually take around 1/2 day.

So I decided to install to GPU-Z (as I had previously with my other GPUs) and what I noticed is that the GPU load refused to go over 72%. Also I noticed that the PerfCap (performance cap) turned orange and was saying vOP eg Limited by Operating voltage.

Also I then noticed that the GPUGrid task had only done 1.5% in an hour, meaning it would probably actually take over 3 days to complete - longer than the Quadro was actually taking!

So can you offer any advice on what "limited by operating voltage means". The PSU is 875w and the GPU is connected with a 6pin from the PSU.

I have take a photo of the PSU in case I have not spotted something?

[chriscambridge]

Just to add, I have a swapped the 6 pins incase one was faulty but it made no difference.

Also, this is the information from GPU-Z

GPU Core Clock: 1215.0 Ghz
GPU Memory Clock: 1350.0 Ghz
Memory Used load: 715 Mb
GPU Load: 72%
Memory Controller load: 24%
Video Engine Load: 0%
Bus Interface load: 20%
Power consumption: 50-80% TDP
Perfcap Reason: vOP
VDDC: 1.1430V

Thanks for any help you can offer..

[Woodles]

Just to add, I have a swapped the 6 pins incase one was faulty but it made no difference.

Also, this is the information from GPU-Z

GPU Core Clock: 1215.0 Ghz
GPU Memory Clock: 1350.0 Ghz
Memory Used load: 715 Mb
GPU Load: 72%
Memory Controller load: 24%
Video Engine Load: 0%
Bus Interface load: 20%
Power consumption: 50-80% TDP
Perfcap Reason: vOP
VDDC: 1.1430V

Thanks for any help you can offer..

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, our internet was offline for most of the afternoon.

From what I can find out, everything is fine with both the card and the PSU. 875W is plenty, I have two 970s running off a 750W PSU.

The normal GPU core clock for that card is specified as 1072 MHz going up to 1150 MHz under boost (I'd like to think your card is operating at 1215 GHz but I doubt it

What the message means is that the boost logic is trying to increase the clock speed even further but the voltage controller won't let it. As it's already over the specified maximum speed, I wouldn't class it as a fault

GPU load is a measure of how much work the GPU cores are doing. The workload depends on how efficiently the application has been written and inversely on how powerful the card is. I think that the card is processing the work as fast as it is being supplied to it but it's just too powerful to need to run flat out. One other thing, the GPU doesn't crunch all by itself, it needs some CPU time to transfer data to/from it and to keep it supplied whilst it's working. If all the CPU cores are committed elsewhere, the GPU will sit and wait for attention, limiting the work that it appears to be doing. A rule of thumb is to leave a core free to support the GPU (The GPUGrid WUs should list themselves as "x.xx CPUs + 1 NVIDIA GPU" to give some idea of how much CPU core they need) If it's being supported correctly and is just too powerful for the work needed, there is a way of running more than one task at a time to fully utilise the rest of the cards capability, shout if you want to try that.

As for the 1.5% after an hour, I haven't ran GPUGrid so I don't know if the estimate from them is linear or accurate. I do know that estimating the completion percentage is very hit and miss on most projects and it's even worse when the hardware has been changed as BOINC has no historical data to go on. I've had projects reach 90% after an hour and take a further five hours to finish, I've also had projects that took an hour to get to 10% and then finish ten minutes later. About all you can do is let it finish and see how long it takes. The estimates should get more accurate as more tasks are finished.

I'm off to the coast in about an hour and won't be back until Tuesday night so I won't be any help until then if you need it. I'm sure there's others around that can help out though.

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

I believe your right, ll monitor it for a few days and report back in full on Tuesday.

Thank you so much for your help.

Have fun at the coast, I hope the weather's nice

[chriscambridge]

Hi Mark,

I think i have now tracked down the problem to one of two things..

Either GPUGrid is constraining GPU load which seems unlikely as i guess there would be a lot of people complaining, or more likely it is being caused in GPUGrid on my systems due to a lack of RAM. All the other GPU projects run at 100% load just fine.

I will know tomorrow when I install from 8GB to 32GB. I will report back then.

Just as a side note, I hit a personal best today of 708k credits per day!

Chris

[Woodles]

Hi Mark,

I think i have now tracked down the problem to one of two things..

Either GPUGrid is constraining GPU load which seems unlikely as i guess there would be a lot of people complaining, or more likely it is being caused in GPUGrid on my systems due to a lack of RAM. All the other GPU projects run at 100% load just fine.

I will know tomorrow when I install from 8GB to 32GB. I will report back then.

Just as a side note, I hit a personal best today of 708k credits per day!

Chris

Hi Chris,

I've had a quick poke around and going by this thread https://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.ph ... true#43098 on GPUGrid, you're only likely to see 70% - 80% GPU usage unless you run more than one task at a time. It is indeed GPUGrid limiting the GPU load. You could have a play around with bus clocks and memory clocks on the card and see if it increases any but it looks like that's how it's meant to work.

The GPU tasks use the RAM onboard the GPU itself so increasing the system RAM won't have any affect on GPUGrid ... but it's always nice to have more memory

Congratulations on your personal best

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

I can confirm that it made..... no difference!

But like you said adding extra RAM can never hurt, and future proofs the system to last longer.

Can I ask Mark, do you have 2 GPUs running in the same box? If so, does it not cause an issue with the second GPU being so close the first and having 2/3 fans blasting hot air into the back of the second GPU?

Or am right in remembering the GTX970 had a metal plate on the back of it that was perhaps exactly for this problem?

Just thinking about future upgrades...

Anyway thank so much for your, and everyones, help so far.

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

No problem, ask away. I have one box with two GTX970's in it but most of the air is not exhausted from one to the other.

For direction naming conventions, picture the motherboard as horizontal, the GPUs mounted vertically and being viewed from the end furthest from the connectors. For the right most card, the air is sucked in by the fans on the right and blown horizontally left onto the heatsink, exiting out of the top, bottom and both ends. Air flow towards the other card is blocked by the PCB.

The biggest problem is getting cool air INTO the leftmost cards fan as there's only one slot between them. I selected the cards such that the rightmost card is the shortest one I had and the leftmost card only has a single fan at the furthest edge from the backplate. It's also directly in front of one of the case intake fans so there's a good air supply. There's a side fan directly above them to get rid of the hot air that's produced.

The GTX970s do have a metal plate along the back and this is a heatsink for the onboard memory. It gets reasonably hot but there's no fan on that side so it's all convection.

To date, they've run at stock speed 24/7 with no problems (even though they're both vendor overclocked gaming versions)

Have fun upgrading, it can become addictive

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Hi Mark,

I kind of get what you saying but it is hard to visualize how you have your box setup; Any chance you post an image of the GPUS in the box, not just for me but anyone else who may be curious how to best setup multiple graphic cards?

So just to clarify,..

Are you saying the fans on Graphic cards are actually there to pull in air rather than to dispel hot air? (as like you said that goes out the sides, front and bottom).

Also, just to confirm, what your are saying is that the real problem is one of getting air in when you have cards stacked next to each other, rather than getting hot air out?

If it is, then that would make sense why the GPU Box I saw, had 7 or 9 Titan X Pascal cards stacked next to each other in a row eg the hot air is not being removed by the large fans but instead out of the side (where the DVI etc ports are) etc.

Also, it would also answer another question why some 990 Ti's have a fan attached to them, I am guessing to solve the problem of pulling in air when they is little space around the graphics card.

--

The problem when you assign things like credits, or rather receipts for work done, and then rank people next to each other on these credits, is a I guess one of human nature - everyone wants to be the best they can and get ranked as high as possible! Hence the addiction of upgrades!! :}

In truth I have spent many months of the donations I would normally give and hence I will have to wait a few to do anymore upgrades; Right now the boxes and cards that I have are already hitting already 1 KWh which is quite a lot in electricity cost for my current income so I will need to address that first! :{

And, I have a commitment to non-gpu projects, hence I will need to get my cpu-threads upgraded - so probably my next spend will be to try and build this project...

... A self-build 32 core workstation using 2x E5-2670 xeon chips (@2.6Ghz - 3.3Ghz turbo, with 20 MB L3 Cache) for less than $1000!



"Building a 32-Thread Xeon Monster PC for Less Than the Price of a Haswell-E Core i7" - Image copyright (c) TechSpot

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-aff ... l-xeon-pc/

Which after viewing higher end workstations at Broadberry, Scan X3S, PC Specialist, Dell, and HP etc - and viewing their prices of £8-25K per box, would clearly hence make this a worthwhile project to increase CPU processing via more threads and higher specification Xeons.

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi Chris

Just chipping in here with a few opinions.

1) GPU's seem to be more "efficient" to me, compared to CPU tasks. So, if you just want to earn high credits a newer, less power hungry GPU can actually earn more credits (in a given amount of time) than a multi-core CPU on the same project.

eg: SETI@home supports both CPU and GPU's and in the recent past, the exact same WU has been crunched by both CPU and GPU's, with the following results:

Task Computer Status Run time(sec) CPU time(sec) Credit Application
5086195796 7966351 Completed and validated 800.12 58.11 45.44 SETI@home v8 v8.00 (opencl_intel_gpu_sah)
x86_64-apple-darwin - INTEL Iris Pro (1536MB) OpenCL: 1.2

5086195797 7722731 Completed and validated 8,256.51 6,840.05 45.44 SETI@home v8 v8.00
windows_intelx86 - Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4030U CPU @ 1.90GHz [Family 6 Model 69 Stepping 1]

5125103213 8075414 Completed and validated 590.46 252.28 45.44 SETI@home v8 v8.00 (cuda50)
windows_intelx86 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 (1536MB) driver: 372.54 OpenCL: 1.1

So, 8,000+ seconds using a quite recent CPU, against 600-800 seconds with a GPU. !!

You can see that GPU's still hold the upper hand in pure crunching terms and the newer NVidia cores use far less power too.

2) The biggest issue with GPU's is clearly heat dissipation - they get hot and that heat needs to be removed from the case, else the entire system could overheat.

Some NVidia GPU's have a single fan at the end furthest from the VGA/HDMI sockets and draw internal air into the graphics card, which is then drawn over the internal heatsinks and is then funnelled out of the PC, via exhaust vents in the end. Other cards seem to have multiple fans, which draw air directly down onto the GPU heatsinks, but then this hot air can still be circulating inside the case, as the card might not have exhaust vents on it's end.

Graphic card cooling therefore, is an area where common-sense and some lateral thought is therefore required, to ensure that room temperature air is drawn in through (say) the front (and/or sides) via a large (say 120cm) fan and warm/hot air is pushed out via the graphics card own vents, as well as any case/power supply fans at the rear.

And needless to say (as I found out, having bought some 2nd hand GTX580's a while ago) that the internal heatsinks can easily become clogged up with detritus and this significantly affects the ability of the GPU to shed heat...after I did a complete stripdown and clean of one of my cards, the measured temperature when running a specific BOINC task on the GPU, came down over 20 deg C. !!

Hope this helps
Tim

[chriscambridge]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the info. I think I understand most of it; its difficult as all the cards are different, even with the same gpu, and all boxes (cases) are different some with just 1 fan, others with multiple fans, and some like my dell precision t500 with fans really aimed at the CPUS rather than graphics card, to the extent they even have "plastic channels" that seem to direct the cpu heat from the heatsink, (i think is the term), out of the box..

--

If I had not made a commitment to non-gpu projects, such as climatepredication and worldcommitygrid, as well as gpu-projects, then I would go GPU all the way, especially after buying my GTX 970 and seeing the credits that is/has/can produce. Indeed I would probably just bitcoin mine as I understand that gives you most credit, probably via dedicated boxes.

If anyone wants to guy down that route to make profit from crunching, this is quite a good article:

"How a total n00b mined $700 in bitcoins"

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/ ... -bitcoins/

--

In terms of energy consumption and cost, I have seen and worked out exactly what you are saying. Clearly CPUS vs GPUS lose hands down!

At the moment I have the following cards..

Quadro 4000
GTX 750 Ti
GTX 970

However now my CPU processing of the projects above is now well below par hence I am now thinking it would be worthwhile to have a go building that workstation above.

The Xeons that I am running are really old and hence the power consumption, and what they produce is far worse than more modern chips like the E-5 and E-3; my chips are E5620 Xeons that do not particularly bench mark that high.

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

Thought it might be a bit difficult. i don't know about it being the best way to set up the cards but it worked for me. I'll take some pictures tonight if I remember, it's about time that machine had a bit of a rest and a clean out anyway.

Usually (always in my experience but it's not been that extensive) the GPU fans pull air INTO the card and onto the internal heatsink(s) The heated air is then either directed to the end of the card and vented out of the back where the connectors are or just allowed to exhaust back into the inside of the case.

Usually, the fan inlet is on the side of the card so stacking them next to each other tends to block the air intake. Cases with multiple GPUs generally tend to have the cards on extender cables or risers to enable them to be spread out. That would be a very impressive motherboard that could support 7 or 9 Titan GPUs!

So true. Originally, BOINC was set up to use the SPARE cycles in your existing machine, nowadays, people have filled garages up with multiple systems purely running BOINC.

Unless you have a specific project that doesn't have a GPU application, GPUs will always outperform CPUs both credit and power wise. An i7-6700k is rated at 91W and 1.2 Teraflops, a GTX970 is rated at 145 W and 3.49 Teraflops - 300% of the computing power for 150% of the electrical power. As Tim pointed out (and I found before) the same SETI workunit finishes 10-15 times faster on a GPU than a CPU (and SETI GPU applications are amongst the worse for GPU efficiency - not well written at all!)

There are many projects that don't have a GPU application, some processes just can't be transferred efficiently (for example operations that depend on previous results so paralleling them just means they have to wait for the earlier calculation to finish) so CPUs will always have a place.

That looks like an interesting build and quite affordable. you'll have to let us know how you get on if you end up building one.

If you want to have a go at mining bitcoins let me know, I have a few boxes you could borrow that only need a 12 volt power supply and a USB cable

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Hi Mark,

I am just on the tablet at the moment, so I'll write reply later, the following link show x8 gpu racks, although tesla cards.

http://www.tyan.com/solutions/TYAN_GPU_ ... forms.html

And the APEXX 5 workstation below has x5 GPUS

http://www.boxx.com/products/workstations

[chriscambridge]

Hi Mark,

I just re-read that last reply; when I said I was "on the tablet", I of course meant tablet computer, not some other pharma type tablet :@

If you could add some photos it would be very interesting but not essential; I guess us smaller players are always interested in what boxes the big cruncher's are running and how they have these setup.

--

Typically I could have sworn I had saved the URL for that 9 Titan-x GPU Monster but I cannot seem to locate it anywhere; if I remember rightly it had been built, I think by Boxx, as a bespoke GPU box to show what is possible, for some trade show in America.

I will try and find it if I can because it looked quite impressive. However noticing that the other link shows 8 Tesla cards then perhaps it was 9 Tesla's instead of Titan-x's but I could have sworn it was these.

I do wonder if PCIE is a bit outdated now, given our discussion of heat expulsion as well as air flow inwards - but also outdated especially if you take the fact that there is a Full A.I deep learning Compute Accelerator built as a USB Stick eg The Movidius Fathom; perhaps this shows the way that Boinc projects could go in the future instead of Graphics cards, as Bitcoin mining boxes have shown.



http://www.movidius.com/news/movidius-a ... -framework - Image (c) 2006 Movidius

--

In terms of building that box, I will have to wait a few months until I get my monies back up, and to be honest being more software than hardware I would have to do some research to find out if it is just a case of connecting every thing, inserting the Windows CD, and then booting up; if not then I would have to get someone else involved that had a more hardware experience than I.

Perhaps I will post it into this forum to see if anyone has the skills and confidence to build one of these - or even better to build one, and then do a post with clear examples on how to do this; clearly loads of these running will help CPU crunching as well of course credits

--

Talking about credits! Tim just gave me a heads up explanation on Bitcoin Utopia and why you guys got involved, as well as what kind of numbers these dedicated boxes can produce; wow!

** Update **

Found out from Tim that a RBox2 would only consume a small amount of electricity, about the same as an i3M laptop - and should only cost about £30 + PSU; so did a quick search on ebay but no RBox2's available, only a Antminer S3 + PSU, which was costing around £160 including 2x p&p, which was the cheapest out of all the listings that I could find. Way to expensive for my current budget..

So perhaps I will take you up on your offer; Thank you soooo much! :}

How would we go about doing this so that it definitely did not get damaged in transit from you to me, and me to you back later? Also I am pretty reclusive so would it just be a matter of popping it back in the packaging it arrived in, and then taking it to the post office and getting it sent back to you via Royal Mail recorded/registered delivery?

Let me know how you think this could best work? Would you also provide a PSU as these seem quite expensive on Ebay.

Also let me know if you perhaps you would want to sell me a unit? Especially an RBox2 + PSU.

Chris

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi Chris

Just a quick reply for you. Please be aware that Bitcoin Utopia only supports specific ASIC miners and these all connect via USB.

These are:
Antminer U1 or U2 (from 1.6 - 2 Gh)
Antminer U3 (about 60 Gh)
HexFury USB (about 6 Gh)
RBox 2 (about 32 Gh)
RBox 4 (about 100 Gh)
Butterfly Labs Jalapeno (about 5 Gh)
Butterfly Labs SIngle (both 30Gh and 60Gh models)
Butterfly Labs Monarch (450Gh) (runs on PCie bus, or via USB)

The Antminer S3 wasn't compatible say about a year ago...it might have changed, so tread carefully on buying a new or 2nd hand ASIC.

regards
Tim

[Woodles]

Hi Mark,

I just re-read that last reply; when I said I was "on the tablet", I of course meant tablet computer, not some other pharma type tablet :@

Hi Chris,

Of course, I never thought anything else

If you could add some photos it would be very interesting but not essential; I guess us smaller players are always interested in what boxes the big cruncher's are running and how they have these setup.

Well I took a couple of photos but they're not all that informative. I'll see about taking the motherboard out of the box next week, things might be clearer then.

Typically I could have sworn I had saved the URL for that 9 Titan-x GPU Monster but I cannot seem to locate it anywhere; if I remember rightly it had been built, I think by Boxx, as a bespoke GPU box to show what is possible, for some trade show in America.

I will try and find it if I can because it looked quite impressive. However noticing that the other link shows 8 Tesla cards then perhaps it was 9 Tesla's instead of Titan-x's but I could have sworn it was these.

Not a big deal, it looks like they might be bespoke boards anyway so no chance of the normal cruncher (is there such a thing?) getting their hands on one.

I do wonder if PCIE is a bit outdated now, given our discussion of heat expulsion as well as air flow inwards - but also outdated especially if you take the fact that there is a Full A.I deep learning Compute Accelerator built as a USB Stick eg The Movidius Fathom; perhaps this shows the way that Boinc projects could go in the future instead of Graphics cards, as Bitcoin mining boxes have shown.

PCIe is just the interface specification and it's still evolving (upto revision 3.2 at the moment), you could plug whatever you like into it. It does have it's limitations which is why Crossfire and SLi evolved with their own busses. That does look like an interesting concept though, I'll have a deeper look into it.

In terms of building that box, I will have to wait a few months until I get my monies back up, and to be honest being more software than hardware I would have to do some research to find out if it is just a case of connecting every thing, inserting the Windows CD, and then booting up; if not then I would have to get someone else involved that had a more hardware experience than I.

After a break, I've recently built three boxes up, two from all individual components and one starting from a motherboard already populated with RAM and CPUs and each of them was just a case of putting everything in the box, connecting them together, turning it on and installing an operating system. These days, unless you're going for a more exotic, cutting edge build, it's pretty straightforward.

Perhaps I will post it into this forum to see if anyone has the skills and confidence to build one of these - or even better to build one, and then do a post with clear examples on how to do this; clearly loads of these running will help CPU crunching as well of course credits

I could do with another project so I might price it up and look at the availability of components. Who knows, you might get your step by step build guide

Talking about credits! Tim just gave me a heads up explanation on Bitcoin Utopia and why you guys got involved, as well as what kind of numbers these dedicated boxes can produce; wow!

Thanks for the reminder, I spent a pleasant couple of hours re-reading the thread last night, fun times

Found out from Tim that a RBox2 would only consume a small amount of electricity, about the same as an i3M laptop - and should only cost about £30 + PSU; so did a quick search on ebay but no RBox2's available, only a Antminer S3 + PSU, which was costing around £160 including 2x p&p, which was the cheapest out of all the listings that I could find. Way to expensive for my current budget..

So perhaps I will take you up on your offer; Thank you soooo much! :}

How would we go about doing this so that it definitely did not get damaged in transit from you to me, and me to you back later? Also I am pretty reclusive so would it just be a matter of popping it back in the packaging it arrived in, and then taking it to the post office and getting it sent back to you via Royal Mail recorded/registered delivery?

Let me know how you think this could best work? Would you also provide a PSU as these seem quite expensive on Ebay.

Also let me know if you perhaps you would want to sell me a unit? Especially an RBox2 + PSU.

Chris

The original RBox 32 used a 12 volt supply rated at 3 amps so less than 40 watts and about a kilowatt per day if left on all the time, I never had an RBox2 so can't vouch for that and the R4s were a LOT more power hungry!

When bought, they came pretty well packaged in expanded polystyrene and I still have the original packaging so posting it shouldn't be a problem if you have a destination address? Otherwise, there's a few drop-off-and-collect schemes going on (I've picked up quite a few EBay bits from the local Argos shop or Shell garage) so I can have a look into them. Same for returning it I guess? I believe I've got a couple of stand alone PSUs knocking around, I'll sort one out and wire it up to a connector.

As mentioned, I don't have an RBox2, I have four original RBox 32s and a couple of R4s (but I doubt you'll want them ... yet! ) you're welcome to buy any or all of them as I've stopped BU for the foreseeable future and would probably restart with new miners if I took it up again.

I'm out of town this weekend (back Monday evening) so no rush to decide anything.

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Hi Mark,

Just as an update about the GPU Boxes, just came across these which one is now commercially available:

Both the GPU Boxes are basically geared towards AI Deep Learning..

The NVIDIA DGX-1

8x GPU (Tesla's) + 2x 20 Core Xeon E5 v4
$129,000



http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html


3U GPU Server by Supermicro

15x GPU (12x Tesla's + 3x Quadro M6000) + 132 Broadwell-EP Xeon cores

http://vrworld.com/2016/04/14/can-super ... own-dgx-1/

***

Did a quick cost and availability analysis on that 'build your own workstation' and in my opinion the figures do not really add up anymore.

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-aff ... l-xeon-pc/

Total cost (cheapest) was about £800

Also, the article forgot to include the fact you would need a Hardisk, Operating system, and Box to put it all in.

So if you add say an extra £200 for these than that comes to around £1K.

The thing is you can pick up a newer HP Z820 workstation, or Dell Precision workstation, with the same Xeon Dual chips (E5-2670) for around £1000-£1400, and the boxes are obviously going to be a lot better designed in terms of air flow and removal, have higher PSU's, and most cases come with larger RAM than 32MB and its ECC not UDIMM.



Also you can fit 3x GPU's in the Z820!



So that is probably the way I would go; however a great article as those Chips (E5-2670) are benched very well (on Thread performance).

***

I have been doing a lot of thinking about these BitCoin crunchers and what I have decided is not to get involved in that just yet, for many reasons.

Clearly 49% of me want's the excessive credits and to get into the Top25 spot, however 51% quite likes the fact I am doing over 1 Million credits every 2 days just using CPU/GPU's.

So apologies for asking you to think about selling them, and then changing my mind.

What I would say though if you are not desperate to sell them, just keep them and in the very near future, before Xmas perhaps, I will definitely have them off you. I would just want to use a separate account for coin crunching, and also only start that a bit later once I had got my monies back up.

However, if the team that shall not be named, ever decides to start (and lose) a credit war with UBT (again), and you still have these available, then I will buy them straight away and start crunching 247 with them, as I am sure others will too.
***

Chris

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

There's a bit of a difference between 'available' and '$129,000' as far as I'm concerned!

Nice machine but I'm sure it could be made more cheaply than that.

I'd got a similar price figure from my calculations, I made it £774 plus case, keyboard and mouse so slightly over £800 all in. I wasn't necessarily using the suppliers that they did as the RAM and equivalent coolers can be got elsewhere for less and by trading the motherboard for an ATX version for slightly more, you can get a cheaper and easier to find case. I already have a copy of Windows 7 available and a couple of spare discs so that also kept the price down. I agree though, £800 - £1000 is a bit much to spend on a 'toy' at the moment. Something to keep in mind and I may pick up a couple of the Xeon chips 'just in case'

No problem about the Bitcoin ASIC, it never left my cupboard

I'm not desperate to sell them, they've been mothballed since February and I'm quite content for them to stay that way indefinitly. You (or anyone else) is welcome to them at any time, I will point out though that should that mythical other team ever start getting close again, I'll be starting them up again myself (I do share though )

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

I agree, its way over priced. You could get about 10 of the latest multi-gpu workstations, with 2-4 Titans X's + 36 core 2x xeons in each for that amount..

:}

[UBT - Timbo]

I will point out though that should that mythical other team ever start getting close again, I'll be starting them up again myself (I do share though )

Regards,

Mark

Hi Mark,

"That" team HAS restarted on BU...they put on half a billion yesterday...but that is through 2 of their members. If they get serious then we might need to put on a spurt, just to keep them at arms length. (Though we can probably wait a few weeks until it turns cold again and we need some extra room heaters !!)

regards
Tim

[Woodles]

Hi Tim,

With a lead of just over 170 billion at the moment, I think you're right and we can wait a while yet

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

Hey Mark, (or anyone; I just know Mark has multiple GPU boxes)..

Are you about to answer a quick question on multiple GPU's; hopefully you are still subscribed to this post?

I have installed a 970 and 750 Ti in a box.

The 750 was the original GPU with drivers.

When I started Windows 7 the VGA from the 750 was not being reconised (no signal) but the 970 DVI-I was okay so I used that.

I then installed a 970 driver for Windows 7.

GPU-Z is reconising both GPUs and is showing power and clock / fan speed on both - however Boinc is only using the 970 rather than the original, or both cards.

Any ideas on how to get Boinc to use both cards?

When I put the old GTX 210 in my i7 it automatically started crunching with both the 210 and the on-board Intel GPU - but not in this case for some reason?

Thanks,

Hopefully you will see this post sooner rather than later!

Chris.

[chriscambridge]

Scratch that, I have work it out.

Create a XML file (text file) called cc_config.xml

(In Windows 7) - Save it to:

C:\ProgramData\BOINC\

Use the following to put into the cc_config file..

<cc_config>
<options>
<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
</options>
</cc_config>

Save, and restart Boinc.

Your multiple GPU's will now be recognised.

Chris

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

I'm on holiday at the moment so don't pick posts up too quickly. You're in luck this time though

By default, BOINC will only use the most capable GPU that it finds, you need a

Code: Select all

<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>

entry in your cc_config file to make it use both of them.

As an aside, I believe Windows uses the GPU in the lowest number slot as its video output unless the BIOS is set up to tell it otherwise.

Regards,

Mark

[chriscambridge]

See previous post lol

Thanks for the info about Windows, I was not aware of that.

Chris

[Woodles]

Hi Chris,

Seen it but in my defence, I started typing five minutes before I posted

Glad it's sorted.

Regards,

Mark

[UBT - Timbo]

Chris

Mark is on holiday this week and hence might not be able to answer directly, as he only has his phone (and his partner) with him !!!

regards
Tim

[chriscambridge]

No worries..

Tim, Mark, etc

Just as a heads up..

There are some brand new boxed 1070 and 1080 cards on Gumtree priced very cheaply.

If I remember rightly, the 1080 was £450, and the two 1070s were £330 and £350.

Just search the graphics cards section in London, on Gumtree for more info.