More on the RAC Increase

I think I stopped slightly short of making my point last time, or possibly the post title slightly overstated my point.

Anyhoo my point was that despite a fairly severe pruning of my hardware, my RAC has not dropped much and certainly, seen through the longterm prism of Boincstats-RAC, is remarkably steady. (The surge then drop in raw RAC is mainly due to Milkyway giving me lots of credit in a hurry and then stopping rather than due to the hardware depletions.)


In part this is because I have kept the most efficient bits of the farm. A contibuting factor of course is that GPUGrid has improved it's credit for those who return their results early. Whatever my efficiency is hugely improved which is nice: As well as less noise heat & cost there are far fewer wires which looks much neater and must be much safer!

The Downsizing Continues - The RAC rises!

I'm doin' it, I'm doin' it!

Against all predictions I'm successfully downsizing the farm and I've got more plans to become yet more sustainable.

After the last downsize I slipped back a bit, tempted by the charms of Milkyway optimised for top end ATI cards, and acquired an HD4850 card. With up to 70K per day this bagged me a useful 1,000,000 credits before the supply of WUs all but ceased. Within the last 24 hrs I sold this to one of the TSBT young turks.

Also sold in the last week, again to another TSBT bod, complete with the rest of their system gubbins including cases, were two Quads one with a 9600GT and one with a non-boincing GPU (how legacy can you get?). This entailed carting two huge boxes weighing a total of 23kg down to my local Parcelforce depot. Leaving aside the damage to my hernial orifaces, the feng shui of the principal field of the farm has been significantly improved as did the climactic tolerability, my 'lecky bill, my carbon footprint &, with any hope, the noise, both in terms of fans & drives & the PSCAF (persisant spousal critical acoustic factor). The room feels almost empty and my KVM has only half of its 8 ports occuppied.

The reason one of the Quads was sold with a boinc-free GPU was that I discovered that my Phenom sytem supported up to 4 PCI-E cards so, from being a prime candidate for retirement, it got up graded to running two 260s and should, given the recent improvement in GPUGrid credit, be able to return 20K per day and become the Jewel in the Crown of the farm.

So that's the hoose with:
1x E6600 Hopefully soon to be sold as it brings little to the boinc party.
1xQ6600 with 1 x 260 [I think this is upgradable to take another GPU but it will need a better case first]
1xPhenom 9600+ with 2 x 260 [Imagine this with a Nehalem processor & mobo]
1x Q9450 with 1 x 260 [a better mobo allowing another GPU would be a great thing].
1xQ6600 with 1 x 280 [if only it could take another GPU]

Also I have two laptops and a work machine but they don't really matter.
So, despite some radical downsizing I still have a significant croft which, with some modest upgades, signposted above, should, even just running 4 machines, be enough to keep me in the top 200 for weeks to come, and in the top 500 for the foreseeable.

Boinc smarter not harder!

The Downsizing Begins

I spoke about downsizing last time but what with winter the thermal imperative was never there. Then when FlyingFocRS sold of most of his farm I just had to bag 3of his PCs mainly for the 260s that 2 of them contained. This got me back up to 8 PCs upstairs! It is obvious as the temperatures outside nudge double figures and those inside head towards 30degC that something has to give. I have therefore decided on a Bill Gates style spree of philanthropy and am giving away my farm, or at least some of the less productive fields, to anyone that will have them. Let me know if you are interested!

The plan will be to be left with 5 quads, 4 with 260 GTX cards and one with a 280 GTX. This, augmented by 2 laptops and my work machine, should be enough to pump out 40K per day. This will be a lot less than the 60K+ I had been managing but still enough to keep me in the top 300 overall individuals for a long time. And at least the lost credits will only have been redistributed within the team.

Already I have dismantled my semi-permanant caseless "test rig" for spares and rid myself of an E6600+9600 which is already propelling another member up the ranks. The drop from 8 to 6 machines means a drop from uncomfortably hot to pleasantly toasty. The roar has also dropped from Heathrow main runway to wind-tunnel which is a big improvement

It's hardly minimalism yet but it feels significantly more sustainable.

Despite some major setbacks - Buster's retiral because of ill health & Nightlord having to downsize severely because of redundancy - TSBT are managing to maintain an RAC above 1/2 a million and have moved up to 40th overall! So no overall downsize.

If you want to score for a buckshee PC let me know- if there is enough competition I'll put the stuff up to a charity auction.

Coding Blues & Farm Plans.

I made a new site &, after lots of revisions, it seems to have been well enough received. I've some ideas for the content too. A major frustration has been getting the page centred. I have now figured out how to do that but at the expense of scrambling every element on the page.

I've said it before, but this time I mean it, and t I'm going to downsize the farm to an ultra efficient croft. I reckon with the 2 laptops, [1.5K/d optSeti], my work PC [1.2K/d optSeti], Jo's desktop [4K/day running PS3Grid & OptSeti] and just 3 Quads & a phenom in the farm [together up to 36K on PS3Grid & OptSeti] I could have enough crunching power to get into the top 200 & stay there. Losing 3 machines upstairs would reduce the heat & noise considerably. Selling the spare parts would raise loot which I could use to upgrade the current mATX cases which are so small that they need an awful lot of fast fans to keep them cool. My one full tower is almost silent & it would be nice if they could all be like that. So keep looking on ebay.

WCG is the poor, and also rather standoffish, relation in the SBT family. Nobody loves it and so after only a very brief stay at 100th it has drifted downwards again. I'm going to make it my #1 priority, even after bagging my WCG million to drive us back into the premier league even if it drops my RAC to 30K. The wonder of PS3/Gpugrid is that it frees you up to crunch poorly paid projects as the PS3grid returns dewarf everything else.

10,000,000, A new recruit & A Learning Curve

Well I beat Nightlord to 10 million. The fortunes of TSBT may be gauged by the fact that I am only ranked 3rd in the team (4th when Nightlord finally manages to stomp me) but notwithstanding my headlong fall within TSBT I am heading rapidly back to the world top 300 thanks to the miracle of GPU crunching.

The new kid on the team is Merlyn (previously Steve of Boinc UK) who is UK number 1 and whose contributions have added 50% to our output. Realistically we can expect to be top 50 by the end of the year!! Eventually we might manage to make a move on the UK #1 place!

I've decided that my sadly unloved & unlovable TSBT website [which recovered as soon as uploaded my last post] needs a total overhaul. Never having been able to find a decent Website Editor Program I've decided to become a hardcore, Notepad using, HTML/CSS code monkey. At present the learning curve is so steep that I keep falling back down but I think I'm getting the hang of it. So keep reloading that URL.

Website Down & GPUGrid Update

Bugger bugger bugger etc. The website is down, so is the Forum and my email. Obviously the weekend cleaner at the hosting company unplugged a server to plug in her hoover! I'll be onto them tomorrow.

Update on PS3/GPUGrid.
It has transformed my fortunes and boosted TSBT no end. I'm churning out about 20K per day on it. A few forays to my local PC shop & on ebay mean that I now have 4 PCs running it. The 260GTX that I got for the frankly rather feeble phenom gets thru a WU in 10 hours and as the value of each has increased to to 3232 that works out at 7760 per day meaning that the runt of the farm can manage 9,000 in total & out-crunch the Ubercruncher: Or at least it could if the ubercruncher hadn't been equiped with a 9800GT which cost 40% of the price of the 260 but manages 55% of its performance. So 3232 ever 18hr means 4300 per day, which added to 3 cores running optimised Seti means 9550 per day. Awesome!!

Awesome too, is the performance of TSBT, returning 100K per day on this one project. Our RAC has risen above 300K and we are going to be top 50 before long!

I'm going to use the miracle of GPU crunching to rationalise the farm: I reckon I can get down to 5 desktops & 2 laptops and still return 35K per day: And finance all the necessary upgrades by selling redundant components.

GPUGrid Works, a Demotion & some more figures.

Finally GPUGrid seems to work on Windows. My venerable 8600 takes 45 hrs to do a WU worth 1980ish credits. The rather newer 9600 takes 20 hours. The way it works is the GPU acts as a coproccessor to one of the CPU cores. This makes it an ideal upgrade route for the slower PCs but it wouldn't make much sense for say the ubercruncher where a single core doing optimised SETI can easily outcrunch the 8600 and is almost on a par with the 9600.

I got stomped yesterday by Buster who replaced me as team credit-leader. Cool!

For all you figure fiends here are more numbers for Milkyway & CPDN, each based on just 4 work units, running on the ubercruncher.

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs ____ ______ 300 _____________ 8944
Seti__________ 12.2hrs ___ _______ 374 _____________ 2951
Seti[optimised] _ 5.9hrs ___________ 431 _____________ 7013
Yoyo _________ 42.3hrs __________ 1692 ____________ 3840
CPDN .................. 879hrs ....................... 26749 ........................ 2920
Milkyway .......... 13.6hrs ....................... 784 ............................ 5534

BTW Cosmology has since altered its credit structure since the above and is now much less rewarding!

Quad Back Up

I got my stricken quad working again. Only now it's crunching optimised seti so I look forward to at least another 4800 per day from it!!! That is until I figure how to run PS3Grid on it. As well as a top end PSU for it I took the chance to get a decent graphics card for it so that with a little linux black arts I can utilise the GPU as well as the CPU!!!!

In praise of mobile internet.

For the first time ever I am able to address you from my country retreat in deepest Argyll, a delightful place but with no phone line and where previously hanging out the front room window got you a single wavery bar of Vodafone reception if you were lucky, and could thole the midgies long enough to complete a call.

Today however, I have 5 rock-solid bars, even from the sofa, & more importantly my USB Mobile Broadband dongle has got me on-line! Okay, so it's just at dial-up, not broadband, speed, and no doubt this will cost me much more than if I got the full contracted speed, only available in our major cities, but who cares? I can post and check my stats & even do non-boinc surfing should I so choose!

Several times over the course of my just completed holiday thru the Utter Hebrides have I been able to get thus online, most strangely on the Isle of Scalpay, a medieval Wee-Free ruled backwater of an island where alcohol is outlawed [yikes!!!] and which lacks all modern amenities, [except sheep] but you can get online from the room of your B&B where every spare surface is covered in admonishments against sin [although come to think of it sheep weren't specifically mentioned].

Anyway it's great that armed with a lap-top & dongle one can get online even in the depths of the Gaeltachd. The 21st century is here & here to stay!

Quad down!

As if making concessions to the risk of a fatal paternal hyperthermia wasn't threatening my RAC enough, I tried to fire up the farm again and one of the quads just wouldn't respond. Maybe it's a PSU not quite making the grade anymore, but whatever it is, it is totally deid! It'll be two weeks before I get a chance to sort it. Arse, arse & thrice arse!