TPU's WCG/BOINC Team

[Boatvan]

Guys I was wondering about the Dell R710 for CPU's as I was looking at grabbing a few pairs of hex cores, I was curious what everyone might suggest? I've seen the X5650's in a pair for about £40, and the X5680's go for anything past £130 for the pair.. For price/core or thread, I thought the X5650's might be an absolute steal.... ??
I was quite happy with the lowest spec hex cores and hopefully maybe tweaking them so they might be a little lower on the wattage (what settings I have in the bios of these server boards I'm not 100% sure but...) but what does everyone else think? I was considering a pair of X5675's for my SR2 board, maybe a little overclock on them so I'd have a few cores to play around with I'm aiming for efficency but I'm not sure that the X58 based kit is the best for that so challenge accepted

I have 2x Xeon x5550@2.66Ghz and 2x Xeon x5675@ 3.06Ghz crunching 24/7. They pros are that you have many threads to run many tasks on and the models that I have are quite cheap to buy used. The cons are that they suck power and barf heat, which also in turn makes them loud (at least for me because I have 2 Poweredge r610's that are 1 U).

 

[blindfitter]

My recommendations for a Ryzen based budget cruncher:
-cpu- 1600/1600X/1700/1700X
-mb- B350 chipset board
-ram- 8GB DDR4 2400 or 2666 (over 2666 isn't really needed to crunch imo if your budget is tight)
-os- Ubuntu or Mint (latest build)

No real need to overclock imo. If you do then make sure you have decent cooling

Appreciate your input @Norton its the confirmation I needed.
have 50% of bits here already just need a cpu 1700 is my goal + cheap and cheerful B350.

@thebluebumblebee have mint running on 2 machines, alas with cinnamon, ( i'm a newbie ) how to go about staying away from cinnamon desktop.

Imminent Build

 

[thebluebumblebee]

I'm not 100% sure that it's Cinnamon, but I find myself needing to reboot my systems about once a week because they start cycling between 100-108-92% and it really hurts their PPD. I believe that it's Cinnamon because when I reboot, there's often a warning about "Cinnamon Settings Deamon" running, asking whether I want to wait or kill it. I posted about it here: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/linux-systems-wigging-out.228863/post-3573299

 

[phill]

I have 2x Xeon x5550@2.66Ghz and 2x Xeon x5675@ 3.06Ghz crunching 24/7. They pros are that you have many threads to run many tasks on and the models that I have are quite cheap to buy used. The cons are that they suck power and barf heat, which also in turn makes them loud (at least for me because I have 2 Poweredge r610's that are 1 U).

I ran a X5660 clocked to 4.4ghz for a while. Not the most efficient set up though, registered around 300w with a kill-a-watt meter. PPD was around 10k running linux mint.

Currently have two 2011 v3 Xeons both running linux mint. A 14 core/28 thread @ 2.5ghz, pulls 185w PPD around 22k, the other is 12 core/24 thread pulling 160w and about 18k PPD.

The Ryzen chips are pretty efficient but for just a pure cruncher don't rule out the X99 Xeons. ES chip are fairly cheap on ebay, you can pick up a decent board used now for less than $150. I run both of mine with just 8gb of ram, so not a lot of upfront cost if you go this route. Stable as can be as well, my one rig has over 100 days of uptime.

The reason for asking the question with the X560xx series is that is what is being recycled from work so if I can make them a crunching monster for about £40 then I thought it was a lot cheaper than a few hundred £'s that I don't have currently! Lesser of two evils I guess but maybe the better one for me now? If I can get a few of these with hex cores running during the day (solar panels should hopefully take care of the rest providing it's sunny in the UK... erm, maybe that's not something I shouldn't rely on!!) but that's all I was considering for now

Eventually I'd love to grab myself some Ryzen CPU's for crunching and go from there

 

[blindfitter]

I'm not 100% sure that it's Cinnamon, but I find myself needing to reboot my systems about one a week because they start cycling between 100-108-92% and it really hurts their PPD. I believe that it's Cinnamon because when I reboot, there's often a warning about "Cinnamon Settings Deamon" running, asking whether I want to wait or kill it. I posted about it here: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/linux-systems-wigging-out.228863/post-3573299

Just checked my 2machines running mint, and yes they are both hovering in cpu usage. 98 -102%

Thanks for the info, will reboot tomorrow and see if improved ppd occurres

 

[thebluebumblebee]

Just found one of my system's doing this:

 

[blindfitter]

@thebluebumblebee all stable now, will be monitoring, cheers

 

[phill]

Thanks for the tips guys Very appreciated but in a way glad that I don't run mine 24/7 lol

 

[AlienIsGOD]

averaging 2600 PPD or so on the FX 8350 @ 60% load

 

[thebluebumblebee]

I finally got around to checking on what was up with my one system to find that it had lost it's WiFi connection. It's running Mint 18.1 and it showed that it had a peak CPU usage of 117%!

 

[phill]

Overclocking it maybe?? lol
Joking aside, is it the Cinnamon 'theme' that is causing the issue??

 

[thebluebumblebee]

Seems to be.

 

[phill]

I'll speak to the guys at work and see if they can suggest another theme to try

 

[Bow]

Contest time????

 

[thebluebumblebee]

Contest time????

Did you not get the e-mail from @Norton through WCG?

The following is a message from the team captain of your World Community Grid team.

Hi Team,

Just a quick heads up- keep an eye out for our latest WCG Team Challenge. We're currently in the planning stages and expect to start on or around February 22nd.

Once planning has been completed the challenge will be listed at WCG as well as at TechPowerUP (https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/)

 

[phill]

Contest time????

My poor electric!! :lol: I hope the solar will be working its little socks off then!!

 

[Bow]

Did you not get the e-mail from @Norton through WCG?

Yep I found it

 

[Zachary85]

I didn't get the email .... I checked my settings at WCG and the email address was missing one character for some reason. It use to work.
It's been fixed now. Time to start assembling the laptop fleet again.

 

[thebluebumblebee]

Not sure how I'm missing these notifications:

Planned Maintenance on Monday, February 12
8 Feb 2018

Summary
We are updating the operating system on our servers on Monday, February 12 beginning at 15:00 UTC.

We will be applying an important operating system update to our servers on Monday, February 12, beginning at 15:00 UTC. We anticipate that the work will take approximately four hours.

During this time, volunteers will not be able to upload or download new work, and the website will not be accessible. No action is required by you, as your devices will automatically retry their connections after the maintenance work is completed.

We appreciate your patience and participation.

 

[Norton]

Not sure how I'm missing these notifications:

Seems to ok now- there's another one coming on Feb 14th

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=553

12 Feb 2018

Summary
We will be deploying an update to our servers on Wednesday, February 14 at 15:00 UTC.

We will be applying an update to our servers on Wednesday, February 14, beginning at 15:00 UTC. We anticipate that the work will take approximately one hour.
During this time, volunteers will not be able to upload or download new work. The website will not be accessible during this time. No action is required by volunteers, as devices will automatically retry their connections after the maintenance work is completed.
We appreciate your patience and participation.

 

[Bow]

I checked free dc stats and I went from 7-8 grand up to 19. ??

 

[Norton]

The Winter 2018 challenge is open:
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...nch-fold-with-tpu-and-win.241785/post-3802994
Heat up those rigs Team!

I checked free dc stats and I went from 7-8 grand up to 19. ??

FreeDC error- looks like yesterday's total has been added to today

 

[phill]

The Winter 2018 challenge is open:
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...nch-fold-with-tpu-and-win.241785/post-3802994
Heat up those rigs Team!

Heat up those homes I think you mean Rigs are on, solar is working

 

[Boatvan]

Just an insomnia induced rambling incoming. You know what would be super cool for us WCG farmers with many systems? A sort of centralized management client. Does this already exist? I think the web interface does some of this, but I'd like to see the running tasks for each system. Like a BOINC Client in advanced view that can see all of your systems.

 

[Norton]

Just an insomnia induced rambling incoming. You know what would be super cool for us WCG farmers with many systems? A sort of centralized management client. Does this already exist? I think the web interface does some of this, but I'd like to see the running tasks for each system. Like a BOINC Client in advanced view that can see all of your systems.

I believe that there is, it's called BOINCview... or something like that. I've never used but I believe other team members have. I'll see if I can get some info for you about it.