SPCR

Hey, here's an odd question. I recently set up some of my machines to do FAH, so far not a lot of progress as most of them are older/slow machines, but otherwise it's been pretty smooth. I usually keep them running 24/7, so I figured I might as well get them going on this and see what happens. But anyway, I just set up my atom 330 nas backup system to run stuff last night after a reinstallation of Ubuntu, but now that I think about it, the 330 is 64 bit capable, would it improve things to upgrade it to 64 bit linux and try setting up SMP? I have two fah jobs running on it now, would SMP give it enough of a boost to be worth installing 64 bit linux? The two jobs are currently running really slow now, it looks about 10 days to finish a work unit, but with two in parallel I guess it'll average out to 5 days or so. Does anyone have any experience running on the 330, or am I the trailblazer here?

And while I'm asking, on my slower machines the jobs seem to be running really slow, are there any config optimizations that can help out? I've set a couple of them to use small packets, does that make any difference? At the speed some of them are running, it looks like it'll take them a couple weeks to finish one work unit, is that just a waste of time or should I keep it running? For instance, my old 1.5Ghz via c-7 chip seems to be just dog slow, should I even bother?

Hi,

How fast is it doing the regular units? The SMP has a much shorter deadline -- like 3 or maybe 4 days, so if it doesn't finish, then it loses all the credit. There is no harm in trying, if you don't mind the setup time and effort.

Someone recently ran GPU on integrated video with 16 stream processors. Gets about 450 PPD, for around 5-15 watts.

Maybe under SMP you should specify only small units, they should be the original 1760 point WUs. Perhaps you can get them done in time.

when you specify the unit type, are you limiting your wu's to that type only or are you requesting preference for that type? i used to know but have forgotten. if you just request preference, then you could get some that you could finish and some that you won't.

Oh, wait a minute, there's a time limit for work units? I may be in trouble then. I'm pretty sure the via c7 or the eeepc probably won't finish in time. Anyone have a link on that stuff? I'm going off to check the web right now.

According to the Stanford site, it looks like the minimum time deadline for all uniprocessor work units is 10 days. I couldn't find a hard deadline for the smp wu's, but some people mentioned 3 or 4 days. I'm not entirely sure that the ones I'm running now will even finish in 10 days, so I doubt the smp client will get a wu done in 3 days. So, I'm not going to bother with a 64 bit upgrade. In fact, I think I'll check the time on all my machines and see if they'll finish within 10 days. Ah well, so it goes. Let's see, I'll go get some data....

currently running wu estimates
eeepc - 15.3 days
atom 330 - 12.8 days each core
dual P3 600Mhz - 17.6 days each core
via Esther 1.5Ghz - 10 days

Huh, so I guess the via will stay on. And maybe I'll let the atom stay on, probably kill the eeepc and P3 clients. I guess it's time to get some better video cards. Hmmmm.

Many WUs have no expiration date,

FYI - 1 day = 1440 minutes, You can estimate length per each checkpoint. Don't forget conversion - 1 min 36 seconds = 1.6 minutes.

Thanks for the tip, I'll see if I can figure out how to get the slow systems configured to use the unexpiring jobs. In the meantime, things are looking up, the smp WU on my quad core finally posted, and my dual core seems to be done with a WU although it hasn't posted yet, and one of the P4 jobs is almost done, so I should start racking up some more points fairly soon. But I am seriously thinking about adding some video cards now, I could probably add them to 3 or so of my systems, that might give me a boost. Although I would be fairly picky about how much noise they made. Eh, maybe I'll poke around the video forum or post another thread here.

Most of the linux uni-processor WUs I get have around 40 days to the first deadline (when they send it out to someone else too) and another 20 until you get no points, so a couple of weeks isn't a problem.

Thanks for the info, I did decide to just leave them all on, I'm glad they may wind up helping out. I've had a number of turns on my quad core, a couple on my core duo and the pentium 4 machines have each wrapped up their first WUs, so I am actually contributing more than with the slow machines, but it's nice that those won't be wasted. I am going to try some video card upgrades too, I just ordered a pci card for the dual pentium III, I have that in a big cosmos 1000 case so there's plenty of room and power for it in there. And last I checked my team rank was at 393, so I'm moving on up steadily, guess that's good. But I'm glad my lower power machines won't be running for nothing.

So I've been working on getting a new dvd drive working on the system, and while doing that I decided to try to install 64 bit ubuntu. Now with 32 bit linux, I had been running 2 jobs, and according fahmon they were each running at about 50 ppd, so a total of 100ppd for the machine. Now with the 64 bit install I made sure that the bios was set so that multithreading is on, so I have 4 virtual cores running on it, and so I set the smp client running on it, let it go for a while, and now, according fahmon again, it's doing 708ppd! Now the tricky thing here is that the deadline (according to fahmon) is 2d 20h, and the ETA is 2d 13h, so it's really only just barely fast enough. Now that's a 1920 point unit, maybe if I set a preference for smaller units I can get some more margin, but when I did the initial config I set it for normal units. But I have to say, for an Atom 330, this is kind of amazing. I'm having visions of setting up a little Atom farm.

Hey, just to let you know, I now have it running at around 950ppd, it turns out that it really helps to turn off the ubuntu process monitor.

cordis wrote:Hey, just to let you know, I now have it running at around 950ppd, it turns out that it really helps to turn off the ubuntu process monitor.

I know! That stock Ubuntu process monitor is such a hog!

You know what would be cool? If the integrated video has 16 shaders, and you add a GTS 240 (a multiple of 16 at 86 shaders) and the whole thing used 100 watts. That would be something to see.