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Posts by old_user81594

Posts by old_user81594

1) Message boards : Number crunching : 1.22 million....and out!! (Message 38107)
Posted 12 Oct 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Hi everyone,

Well after several years and over 1.22 million CPDN credits contributed by my various PCs, here at home, I have finally decided to call it a day with CPDN and BOINC in general.

I have enjoyed the time a lot.
I started with SETI back in 2002 and moved onto other projects including CPDN, Rosetta, World Community Grid, uFluids and others in order to help advance science.
I hope my contribution has indeed helped and long may other contribute to these worthwhile projects.

Good luck,

Neil.
Sussex, UK.

2) Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Nearly 1 PFLOPS for climate research (Message 37182)
Posted 12 Jun 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
My university in the USA got a super computer. IBM calls it "cluster computing".

http://www.ist.ucf.edu/hpc/main_page.html

What kind of RAC would I have with 48 Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor E5450 working for CPDN?!? :)


Interesting question.....my guess would be around 130000 - 160000. But that all depends on the system and OS.

Neil.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P's too much RAC weight? (Message 36709)
Posted 13 Apr 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:

So I\'m pretty certain that the errors are not occuring at the \'export\' stage. The faulty figures are in our local database long before the exports are run: the problem has to be in the RAC calculation which is performed locally on the CPDN server......


Has something been fixed, as I see that my RAC from yesterday in my BoincSynergy signature has dropped like a stone, or was that simply because there was a server-outage yesterday which was only fixed late on in the evening??
Assuming the source of the RAC problem is found, I guess it\'ll take another 6 weeks or so for everyone to get back to their normal (appropriate) RAC?

Best regards,

Neil.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P 6.06 on One Core of 4-Core Computers? (Message 36704)
Posted 12 Apr 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:

Sunday 12th April:
On my Q6600, current projects running are now 2 x Wold Community Grid and 2 x CPDN. Of the two projects I have one HADAM3P (currently at 13.9% and 8.12s/TS), and an SM3 Mid-Holocene 6.02 (currently at 53.1% and 1.97s/TS)


Well after just 11 hours of so, my HADAM3P is now down to 6.63s/TS, from 8.1 - all four cores are running Boinc (2 x CPDN and 2 x WCG)

...but no CPDN stats uploaded today I see???

Neil.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P 6.06 on One Core of 4-Core Computers? (Message 36700)
Posted 12 Apr 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:

[/quote]
I\'ll experiment now for 48 hours or so to see if I can run just one AM3P on my Q6600 to get a speed-up.
[/quote]

Sunday 12th April:
On my Q6600, current projects running are now 2 x Wold Community Grid and 2 x CPDN. Of the two projects I have one HADAM3P (currently at 13.9% and 8.12s/TS), and an SM3 Mid-Holocene 6.02 (currently at 53.1% and 1.97s/TS)

(The figures in my previous post were actually taken about 16 hours ago, so you can already see a slow-down. Let\'s see if that helps.

On my 950D, I\'m going to pause the mid-Holocene so it is just running one model on a dual-core machine (it has DDR2 PC6400 RAM so I hope that helps) but as the L2 cache is dedicated to each core, maybe the improvements won\'t be so dramatic.

Regards,

Neil.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P 6.06 on One Core of 4-Core Computers? (Message 36699)
Posted 12 Apr 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
When I had 3 HadAM3P\'s running simultaneously on a quad and a HadCM3 on the other core they trickled at 9.5s/ts when I changed it to 1 HadAM3P, 1 HadCM3 and 2 other projects it speed ed up to 4.7s/ts I also worked out the HadCM3 was running 30-40% slower with 3 HadAM3P.
Dave


I did read about the slow down the other week - also the crazy RAC situation with the HADAM3P models.
I seem to be getting acceptable credits per day, if a little low for a 950D and a Q6600 machine. Combined over the last few days they average out at about 1870, but my RAC is 3909 !!!!

Back to the s/TS. I have 3 x HADAM3P\'s running and a Mid-Holocene and the three AM3P\'s are 8.1, 6.8 and 7.0s/TS and the mid-Hol is running at 1.8s/TS on my Q6600.

Now, on my 950D (3.4GHz dual-core, 800MHz FSB) I have an AM3P running at 6.8s/TS and a mid-Holocene running at 1.65s/TS.

I\'ll experiment now for 48 hours or so to see if I can run just one AM3P on my Q6600 to get a speed-up.

Will report back in a couple of days.

Neil.

7) Message boards : Number crunching : The big 1,000,000 (Message 36573)
Posted 30 Mar 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Thanks for sticking around and doing so much for the project, Neil. The most important personal quality required by long-term CPDN crunchers must surely be patience!



Patience is certainly required, that\'s for sure. Especially when things go a little wrong, and models crash.
I\'m really interested in upgrading to a new Core i7 machine, but the hardware costs seem high right now, especially with the mobo and DDR3 prices. I\'ll keep crunching instead with my 950D & Q6600!!!

Neil.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P's too much RAC weight? (Message 36572)
Posted 30 Mar 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:


....When 2 or 3 days\' worth of credits are exported all together it pushes the RAC up abnormally. We\'ll have to keep an eye on this to see whether our RAC does return to normal after a few weeks as it should if the CPDN server behaves for Milo....



I have to disagree here because if the credits aren\'t exported for a few days, then your RAC will drop over that period, only to return to the level it would have been at when the credits are finally exported.

The RAC is just a measure of average performance over time, as you know, so if your PC is capable of RAC=1000 for example, then you let it run 24/7 but disconnect from the internet for a week, your RAC will drop exponentially over the time disconnected to around 500 or so.
When it is reconnected, you may get 7000 credits or something crazy, but your RAC should only pop back to 1000 again; no more, no less.
Or is the RAC equation more complex than this???

Regards,

Neil
9) Message boards : Number crunching : HADAM3P's too much RAC weight? (Message 36570)
Posted 30 Mar 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Could everyone please note that all model types are generating the correct amount of credit.

I hope iansm and Neil Hunter don\'t mind that they\'ve been mentioned by name. I\'ll send them both PMs on Monday so they do at least know.

Belfry, thanks for delving into the problem for us. I\'ve edited the thread title to what you suggested.


Hi everyone,

Well this is perfect timing to see this thread (and the PM from Mo).
I have just started a few of the new HADAM3P models just 48 hours ago. I grabbed three for my quad-core machine and two for my dual-core.
Firstly, one model crashed after just 11 hours, which forced me to do a Windows repair install which was annoying to say the least.

Secondly, they are certainly slowing down. On the Q6600 machine, they are currently running at around 5.1s/TS each, and 6.8s/TS on my 950D. I\'ll monitor how much slower they get. On the Q6600, I am running World Community Grid and Rosetta as well as two HADAM3P models plus a mid-Holocene. I hope a combination of these will be OK, as I read that running four HADAM3 models will slow the s/TS dramatically - there must be a FSB/RAM bottleneck.

Lastly, the RAC issue is weird!! The credits seem perfectly normal - but the RAC has jumped far too much in too short a space of time.
See my BoincStats page - http://boincstats.com/stats/user_graph.php?pr=cpdn&id=81594

You\'ll see my credit is normal for today (my PCs run other projects too, so credit is 1267 today, but the RAC has gone from 358 on Saturday to over 1100 in just 48 hours, despite the credits being just 79 yesterday and 1267 today!!! I would have expected a jump to maybe 450-500 maximum after just this amount of credit; it should take about 6 weeks to get the RAC up to your daily credit level I believe.

Anyway, I\'ll keep an eye on all of this, and will let you know my findings in a couple of days.

Best regards,

Neil.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : The big 1,000,000 (Message 36520)
Posted 28 Mar 2009 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
In the next 24 hours or so, I\'m pleased to announce that I should hit the magic 1,000,000 credits.
Although I have been actively running a number of other science projects, I remain committed to CPDN with two reasonably powerful PCs crunching away.

I hope that the goals of the project are reached and with even more powerful PCs hitting the market on a monthly basis, those goals should be reached more quickly than ever.

Best wishes,

Neil.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : lost work (Message 35683)
Posted 14 Dec 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
I have just noticed something strange.
After have been crunching a few other Project\'s WUs recently, I came back to one of my CPDN models. Before it (HadCM3 Opt 6.04 model) started, it said it had 776 hours to go. I then re-started it, and I lost about 200 hours worth of work, as it dropped back to be on 25% completed with 1006 hours to go.
I thought there were checkpoints where the work is saved, so if you do have to stop a project, the most you would lose is 10 minutes or so?

If I work on the model again, will I get credit for doing the work again? I don\'t want to do 200 hours of crunching for nothing.

Neil.
12) Questions and Answers : Windows : Getting to end of models (Message 34729)
Posted 24 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Well, I\'ve bumped up my \"local Preferences\" disk space, and I now have two WUs come through.

Why are there two settings for disk space? One asks for, \"Use at most xx Gb\" and the other asks for \"Use at most xx %\" disk space - which takes precedent?

If I have an 80Gb partition with Boinc on, and I set the first to be \"Use at most 10Gb space\", but the second is \"use no more than 5%\" for example, will I get 10Gb used, or will I be limited to 5% of 80Gb = 4Gb???

Neil.
13) Questions and Answers : Windows : Getting to end of models (Message 34728)
Posted 24 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Hi

I have four cores running on my Q6600 m/c and two of them are nearly finished (96%+)

In Boinc Manager, I have allowed CPDN to grab new work, but I get this message, despite my Preferences allowing plenty of disk space for Boinc Projects:-

24/08/2008 07:02:50|climateprediction.net|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work. Requesting 587236 seconds of work, reporting 0 completed tasks
24/08/2008 07:02:55|climateprediction.net|Scheduler request succeeded: got 0 new tasks
24/08/2008 07:02:55|climateprediction.net|Message from server: No work sent
24/08/2008 07:02:55|climateprediction.net|Message from server: UK Met Office HADAM3 needs 537.34MB more disk space. You currently have 486.66 MB available and it needs 1024.00 MB.
24/08/2008 07:02:55|climateprediction.net|Message from server: No work available for the applications you have selected. Please check your settings on the web site.

Why is this? I\'ve allowed 10Gb disk space: I have 2Gb RAM, and all is running fine I feel - it just can\'t get hold of another WU.

Neil.
14) Questions and Answers : Windows : Quad and dual core set-up (Message 34727)
Posted 24 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:


edit
I just tried it with a calculator, and 7/8 is .875
So, just reverse the numbers, and put a decimal point in front of them.


So can you confirm that 3/4 = 0.43 in decimal terms???
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Yay! Workunit finally finished after 1 year! (Message 34585)
Posted 10 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Congratulations!
Keep the dust blown out of the machine, make backups, and you should be in good shape.



That\'s a very good tip for everyone. I recently unclogged both of my CPU Coolers with my vacuum-cleaner. My Linux m/c was re-booting every now and again and my XP m/c did the same a couple of times. When I opened up the cases, I could see why. The cooling fins were completely clogged up with dust resulting in no airflow or cooling capability.

All back to normal now, except that my CPU cooler fan is broken (siezed-up) as it has been spinning at max rpm for over a year due to the temps.... oh well.

Now, I\'ll give my PCs insides a clean out every couple of months.

Neil.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Size of the WU in ClimatePrediction..... (Message 34584)
Posted 10 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
I just started back crunching ClimatePrediction, & I\'m surprised to see this first one taking 2,935 hours to complete.

Will I live this long?



Just grabbed a couple yesterday on my 950D dual-core, and the Coupled 5.44 model I got is quoting 3600hrs to complete. I know this will drop, but that sounds like a big one! That\'s 5 months roughly....

Neil.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Effect of L2 cache size and FSB on models? (Message 34583)
Posted 10 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
To make it a little more concrete, let me say that I am running a Core 2 Duo E2140, and have just ordered a Core 2 Duo E7200.

The E7200:

1. Runs a 58% higher clock, internally
2. Has 3 times the L2 cache. (3M vs 1M)
3. Runs a 33% faster FSB. (1066 vs 800)



Can your current mobo support 1066 FSB? If you have a \"pre-packaged\" Dell system (or similar - and I guess you have with an E2140 chip) then the extra capability of the E7200 CPU might not be fully exploited by the board, meaning it will run at 800FSB, dropping its Clock speed by a proportional amount.

Worst case scenario is that your PC won\'t boot, as dropping a new CPU into an existing set-up can cause problems, requiring a full install.

1. Back up everything valuable (photos and software)
2. Make a note of what Programs you have installed
3. Download CPU-Z and find out exactly your mobo\'s make/model
4. Check it will support your proposed new CPU.

Good luck

Neil.

Just last week, I upgraded from an E6600 to Q6600 and had no such issues
18) Questions and Answers : Windows : Quad and dual core set-up (Message 34510)
Posted 5 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Hi all,

Just a general question for BOINC apps. Currently, I have two dual-core machines (one isn\'t set-up though yet!!)
Now, if I upgrade one machine to quad-core, leaving the other dual-core intact, how do I set-up my BOINC Manager preferences?

I have a couple of projects which run on both machines (CPDN for example). Should I just set my home prefs to be \"use 4 processors\" max, catering for the quad-core, hoping the dual-core machine won\'t try to start 4 Models!!!

Looking to the future - Intel Nehalem. Quad-core processors, but with the equivalent of Hyper-Threading re-invented.....so, 8 effective threads/models can be run at once.

What then in the Boinc Preferences????


Best regards,

Neil.
19) Questions and Answers : Windows : Update to Boinc Clint 6.2.14 does not work with CPDN (Message 34509)
Posted 5 Aug 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
.....It usually indicates a problem with the display, and some of the things to check are the graphics drivers, DirectX, and OpenGL compatibility. Mostly the first one; is/are they up to date?


I use an nVidia 6600 card with up to date drivers, and over the last year I\'ve noticed various issues, such as the CPDN graphical globe not functioning. Sometimes, I just see a few clouds and no planet earth!!

On a few occasions, my model has crashed when opening the graphics application.

However, with 6.2.14, all seems OK with me so far. I only have one model running (HadCM3 Optimised 5.44) - no crashes yet!!

Neil.
20) Questions and Answers : Windows : BOINC causing problems burning DVDs (Message 32961)
Posted 14 Mar 2008 by Profile old_user81594
Post:
Problem: Under WindowsXP, BOINC can cause problems burning DVDs, at least when using Nero Express.

Workaround: Pause or close BOINC before burning DVDs

Details: I burn DVDs frequently, and have made around 100 with no problems before installing BOINC. While BOINC was running, I had three consecutive failures. Then, after pausing/stopping BOINC, I\'ve just burned 4 with no problems. Since DVD burning is fairly intolerant of CPU latency, I imagine this is because of the high load BOINC puts on the CPU, and isn\'t indicative of any special problem with the software.

This is no big deal--the solution is just to suspend BOINC, but I thought users might want to know this. Hopefully this will save someone from making a few coasters.

A suggested fix would be to have BOINC somehow recognize that a DVD was being burned, and suspend itself during this process. Since that might be technically tricky, and there\'s such an easy workaround, this is a very low priority bug fix.

Thanks!





Burning DVDs is about as CPU intensive as running BOINC Programs, so I am not surprised in the slightest that you have issues. Asking your PC to do too much will result in problems and yes, you are right, just suspend BOINC when you need to run other CPU intensive applications.

Regards,

Neil.


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