UK BOINC Team Forum

Thought I'd drop by and introduce myself since I've been doin' this on and off for a while (usually on the team!).

So, hi!

Hi Dan, and a very warm welcome to the forum.  

Hi Dan

Dan wrote:.... (usually on the team!) !

That's alright, so long as you stay here all the time now  :P

Hello Dan, welcome to the forum!  

Woodles wrote:

Dan wrote:.... (usually on the team!) !

That's alright, so long as you stay here all the time now  :P

Mwhahaha  :twisted:

Welcome aboard Dan  :D

Hello and Welcome!

Hi Dan, Welcome aboard   :hello2:

Welcome to the best team in the UK.
May your stay be along one.
Need any help ? Then just ask there is
always someone around to give advice.



b.

Hello Dan and welcome to UBT

Thanks all, looking forward to dossing around here

I had a question or two which may or may not be best asked elsewhere, but perhaps some of you can help out.

- I've noticed some of the projects have specialised apps, some for CPU and some for (most often nVidia? I have Ati cards) certain GPUs. I tried to do some searching around for the SETI app, but always found out of date info and broken links... can anyone give me the lowdown on this?

- I tend to favour the physics type projects over others, but I'm not averse to using my cores to help out the team. Is there any projects that are weighted better such that I might help our standing more, or should I just pick and choose my projects as the fancy takes me?

Dan wrote:- I've noticed some of the projects have specialised apps, some for CPU and some for (most often nVidia? I have Ati cards) certain GPUs. I tried to do some searching around for the SETI app, but always found out of date info and broken links... can anyone give me the lowdown on this?

- I tend to favour the physics type projects over others, but I'm not averse to using my cores to help out the team. Is there any projects that are weighted better such that I might help our standing more, or should I just pick and choose my projects as the fancy takes me?

Hi Dan

Optimised CPU apps for seti are available from the lunatics site. There's no doubt they make a dramatic improvement and they're fairly easy to install.

At the moment I think there are 3 projects that support NVidia GPUs (seti, gpugrid and aqua) and 1 project for ATI GPUs (milkyway)
Even a PS3 can get in on the act with gpugrid and yoyo

An 8800GT and above will do well on those nvidia projects and your ATI will need to be least a ATI HD3850 for milkyway.
Points wise, for GPUGrid my 8800GT averages about 7,500 credits a day and my GTX295 30,000 credits a day.  My ATI HD4870 averages about 90,000 credits a day running milkyway.

Let us know what you interested in and we'll sort you out

Thanks for the pointers. I've installed the optimised SETI app, fingers crossed that shows an improvement...

The milkyway app - WOW. I've crunched a pair of WUs practically in the time it took to write this message, and it appears to only be using a single card (I'm running a duo in xfire) too.

Dan wrote:Thanks for the pointers. I've installed the optimised SETI app, fingers crossed that shows an improvement...

The milkyway app - WOW. I've crunched a pair of WUs practically in the time it took to write this message, and it appears to only be using a single card (I'm running a duo in xfire) too.

Ah to get yet more brownie points you can disable the crossfire (via the Catalyst program i think) which will allow milkyway to use both gpus and double the credits! However you will have to use a dummy plug in the end of the 2nd ATI card, or plug the 2nd card into another monitor to get it to work.

Once i have enough pennies i was going to try getting another mobo with dual PCI-E slots so i can get the 2nd card up and running.

Shame about the crossfire situation, I suppose it makes sense when you think about it. I had a play this morning, disabled crossfire and checked the utilisation of the second card - nothing. I suppose like you say it'll need to be capped off to work, regardless I'm not really up for disabling crossfire for boinc anyhow since that same machine is my gaming rig

Playing with my nVidia machine now, I hadn't realised that the current boinc/seti client would make use of the GPU by default (as I see now it has been), but I suppose that's a good thing! Installing the optimised apps on this machine seemed to have a negative effect, by using these apps I suspect I'm forcing the client to ignore the GPU for it's work, would that be accurate? I think leaving it to use it's default CUDA app is better.

Dan wrote:Shame about the crossfire situation, I suppose it makes sense when you think about it. I had a play this morning, disabled crossfire and checked the utilisation of the second card - nothing. I suppose like you say it'll need to be capped off to work, regardless I'm not really up for disabling crossfire for boinc anyhow since that same machine is my gaming rig

Ah yeah, i know what you mean I also use mine as a gaming rig. Counter Strike: Source, L4D, TF2 !!

Playing with my nVidia machine now, I hadn't realised that the current boinc/seti client would make use of the GPU by default (as I see now it has been), but I suppose that's a good thing! Installing the optimised apps on this machine seemed to have a negative effect, by using these apps I suspect I'm forcing the client to ignore the GPU for it's work, would that be accurate? I think leaving it to use it's default CUDA app is better.

Yeah, the optimized apps where designed to utilize the processor features like SSE2 which did offer a major speedup (much like milkyway ones do). However, compared with the GPU it isn't worth it as they are so much quicker.

ruh roh

MilkyWay GPU app has cause a couple of faults recently. Took my display driver down a day or two ago and yesterday I came home yesterday to a blue screen event log entry and a knackered RAID array (which luckily picked itself up after a reboot - phew). Not 100% sure that it was milky way that caused the blue screen, but I can't remember the last time I had one on this machine, if ever!

So I think I'll ease off on the upservised milky way crunching

oh also yay I hit 600k, 1 mil will be mine, oh yes!

Dan wrote:MilkyWay GPU app has cause a couple of faults recently. Took my display driver down a day or two ago and yesterday I came home yesterday to a blue screen event log entry and a knackered RAID array (which luckily picked itself up after a reboot - phew). Not 100% sure that it was milky way that caused the blue screen, but I can't remember the last time I had one on this machine, if ever!

funny you should say that Dan
I've got 7 active MW GPU machines.
Some don't give any trouble at all but my P4D requires a reboot every morning cos everything locks up and 3 other P4Ds (unused in a back room) need a reboot once a week.
I also have 2 more P4Ds with ati gpus that just don't like MW. If I leave them running overnight they will have blue screen'd when I come in the next day so they don't run boinc now as they're colleagues machines.

I think all but 1 of my machines are winxp pro sp3
edit
all have 8.12 ati drivers

Temujin wrote: I think all but 1 of my machines are winxp pro sp3

It's not just xp though, John. I have an i7 and a P4 running MW on ati cards, the P4 on 32-bit Vista and the i7 on 64-bit Vista, and both need rebooting almost daily. Neither give blue screens, though. The P4 just starts taking forever to respond and the i7 just starts aborting the MWs with computation errors.

Mine's Vista x64 with an Intel Q6600 cpu. Could be a heat issue, it does really thrash the card, and I don't have a shedload of ventilation. Haven't checked the temperatures yet.

Haven't updated the driver in a few months or so (Ati drivers can be a nuisance!), perhaps that might help.

Got two.
My main machine is Win XP64 SP2 running 8.12 drivers, no problems at all. (Kiss of death to this machine now!)
My PVR running vista64 and 8.12 drivers crashes at least once a day when using the remote. Endless loop type of error.
They only run 24hrs a day at weekends though.

I have Vista x64 also and was also having this problem when left unattended. However... I'm not sure if i have solved it by putting the screen saver to 9999 mins! That appears to have stopped it. I think the screen saver was not mixing well and causing it to have all sorts of problems. So far it has been running fine for longish periods of time by itself.

It may also be a good idea to lower the clock rate by about 50Mhz using the CC center. I also dropped the memory clock speeds right down as well as if they arn't being used for gaming they don't need to be cranked up beyond 800Mhz

hi all , heard about this from a friend . would like to know more . every bit helps  :D

Hi Cj,

Every bit sure does help!  :D What would you like to know? How to set up BOINC and attach to Milkyway@Home? Or another project etc