BOINC/Grid computing: Numbers Go Up, Hardware Edition

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > BOINC/Grid computing: Numbers Go Up, Hardware Edition

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Aunt Beth: Feb 23, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

My basement server has been contributing diminishing returns to the goon WCG team for years now with its CPU from 2010!

# ? Dec 17, 2019 02:03

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# ? Dec 7, 2023 00:07

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

OhFunny posted:

Cracked 1,000 results returned on WCG.

In other news, Navi GPUs appear to have a broken OpenCL implementation. This has raised a ruckus on r/BOINC and r/Amd, and is especially interesting given the very strong compute performance from pre-Navi AMD GPUs. I guess that's some evidence that RDNA really isn't Yet Another GCN Retread.

# ? Dec 17, 2019 03:36

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

WCG Project Updates, December 2019

Another month of research team updates from the World Community Grid forums. The text of all updates is from Caiti Larkin, WCG Admin.

Note: WCG entered a lull this month, with one project reaching completion, and three on hiatus while researchers do analysis and work out what their next targets will be. Additionally, the Africa Rainfall Project has been fully online for a month, but its structure means that there are comparitively few in-flight workunits at any given time -- around 1900 per day. (For comparison, MCM1 averages 675kWU/d)

Africa Rainfall Project

We plan to start mini-updates for ARP in January.

Microbiome Immunity Project

We wrapped up our call with the research team just now.

They're hoping to get their paper (mentioned in last month's update) submitted before the end of 2019.
They're also working on a project update for us; however, they also have some grant applications due that are taking precedence.
They're generating more work units--no ETA yet. We'll let everyone know if there's a gap between the time we run out of work and the time we receive new work.
They may be presenting at a Protein Data Bank conference in the US in February--more info to come if this happens.

Smash Childhood Cancer

[This update is from November but happened late, so I missed it last month.]

Highlights from our monthly SCC research call:

There is going to be a change in the project leadership. We expect to have more details and an announcement next year.
The researchers are looking for additional team members to help create work and analyze data that comes back from WCG.
The SCC team is international, and there has been continued political unrest in one of the countries where some of the team is located which has affected universities and research work.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project. We'll release more news as details are confirmed. It's important to note that the researchers are very committed to continuing to work with WCG, and there's transition going on to help solidify the project.

Help Stop TB

Had a quick call with the researchers today, with no significant updates except that they're working on a project update for us and continuing to get their new team member up to speed

Fight AIDS @ Home Phase 2

Updates from our monthly call with the researchers:

WCG just started beta testing on the new work units, after a few weeks of alpha testing. We will let everyone know once beta testing is over and we have new work units ready to go out to the general volunteer group.
The two phases are planning their annual face-to-face meeting early next year, as mentioned in the last update.
The Phase 1 team continues to plan for more work on WCG next year--this is still in the early planning stages and we don't have an ETA yet.

Mapping Cancer Markers

We just wrapped our monthly call with the researchers.

We had a status check on work units. We've been running about 28 batches per day on average.
WCG has begun alpha testing on sarcoma work units. This may run for a few more weeks. We'll make an announcement as usual when beta testing starts.
They are working on a project update for us.
The project PI will be speaking at several meetings early next year (Boston, San Diego, etc.) that are related to computational research, and he will be mentioning WCG when he presents.

OpenZika

Just wrapped up our monthly call with the research team.

We've confirmed that there's no more work coming to WCG. We'll update the progress bar soon.
The project PIs have recently presented on OpenZika at two conferences in Brazil.
They have two accepted papers, which should be published next year. An additional two are in the writing stage.
They've prepared a project update for us, which we plan to publish later this week or early next week.

# ? Dec 19, 2019 06:18

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

After finding some inspiration and spare time, I have written and released Homefarm v2!

If you're in the market for a system to manage your BOINC machines, check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/BOINC/comments/ee9dlp/homefarm_2_released/

# ? Dec 22, 2019 20:01

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

In Asteroids@Home, Team Something Awful is looking great here. We have broken into the Top 50 in recent average credit for the first time in my memory. It was just this last month that we broke the Top 100. We're also #331 in total credit too, and that's been going up substantially. A lot of these teams have fifty or so members in them, but are really just one or two people doing all the recent work.

Asteroids is one of those projects that seems to run out of WUs every week or so. Apparently, this is attributed to availability of hard drive space on the server end. Since this is generally my only project, what I do to make sure my computers always have work in the meantime is I tell my BOINC clients to store work up to five days in advance:

Don't do this if you're doing other projects as well, especially Africa Rainfall.

# ? Jan 2, 2020 21:19

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

I tried joining Asteroids today, but the auth server appears to be busted in some way.

I did rejoin crunching on Einstein@Home after doing a PSU swap, getting a node back online, and slotting my spare GTX 750 Ti into it. I attached that machine to GPUGrid as well, but only to crunch "small" jobs, and I think that perhaps none exist at the moment. Either that, or it's still busted on Linux? :iiam:

Pushed out a Homefarm update as well: v2.0.1 has fixes for Arch switching the compression on their packages. Previously the local repository tooling had assumed eveyrthing would be an xz file.

Thank you for attending my TED talk.

# ? Jan 5, 2020 04:33

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

I passed passed 2,000 results returned on WCG :toot:

My new AMD 3600 has tripled my daily results. I just switched over to crunching on my Linux boot to see if that gives faster results. The WCG forums says it does.

The Something Awful team hit new highs on the New Year. 69 (nice) days run time and 663 results returned.

# ? Jan 5, 2020 05:53

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

OhFunny posted:

I passed passed 2,000 results returned on WCG

quote:

My new AMD 3600 has tripled my daily results.

I love Zen 2.

Edit: WCG's FAH2 is shipping WUs again. Has been since the day before Christmas, but I got my first one late last night, and ran to the forums for confirmation.

mdxi fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Jan 5, 2020

# ? Jan 5, 2020 07:48

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

mdxi posted:

I love Zen 2.

Edit: WCG's FAH2 is shipping WUs again. Has been since the day before Christmas, but I got my first one late last night, and ran to the forums for confirmation.

Yeah Zen 2 has been great.

I see I got 1 FAH2 task on the 5th. I recently deselected MCM to work on other badges, but it's just been a sea of MIP1 with 1 African Rainfall task thrown in.

# ? Jan 6, 2020 08:01

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

It took 30 minutes of running commands by hand and adding debug info to a script, but I have finally joined 2 of my machines to Asteroids@Home. I'll be contributing to the SA team as soon as I get some WUs.

The problem this whole time has been that I typoed my email address in the config file :derp:

# ? Jan 10, 2020 05:18

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

I got the gold badge for 90 days CPU time contributed to the Mircobiome Immunity Project.

Broke 200+ results returned on the 6th.

Something Awful team reached 700+ results returned on the 8th. The highest since 2017.

# ? Jan 10, 2020 19:27

yummycheese: Mar 28, 2004

I recently built a new system around a Ryzen 3700X and a Nvidia 1650 super and joined it to Einstein@Home. AMD's built in autoclocking seems to allow me to run tasks in the 4.2ghz range with around 90watts consumed by the CPU(65watt TDP CPU). Seems good to me.

Im curious what to expect in points per day with this type of CPU. Right now it seems to be in the 20k/ppd range after just a few days. Will need to give it some time to stabilize I guess. I wonder what it takes to get to the 100k+ ppd range. Multiple powerful GPU's or ???

Are there other project with more ppd incentives I could target? Have been looking at climateprediction.net and possibly WCG.

I seem to be unable to create an account on climateprediction.net via the BOINC manager at the moment. Its been telling me account creation is disabled. Not sure if its due to them having a lack of work. Looking around their site all their projects seem to have no WU's available except for the linux only "UK Met Office HadAM4 at N216 resolution" project.

I might dual boot my system into linux so I can run these types of projects. Open to distro recommendations and dual boot advice. I tried installing the boinc client in a fedora VM and it seems as though the package is not been kept up to date.

https://www.climateprediction.net/support/server-status/

https://www.cpdn.org/apps.php

# ? Jan 12, 2020 18:43

yummycheese: Mar 28, 2004

Hmm. It appears my machine IS a 100k+ points per day machine. When I rebuilt the machine I re-used the old windows install and that meant the computer id on BOINC didnt change. The daily avg is pulled down by my old WU's and wont reflect an accurate avg until I rebuild or the last of the old WU's stops contributing to the daily avg number.

# ? Jan 13, 2020 00:25

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

yummycheese posted:

Are there other project with more ppd incentives I could target? Have been looking at climateprediction.net and possibly WCG.

I didn't know there were any projects at all with incentives for points. That said, in my opinion, it's really best to treat BOINC points like the points in Whose Line Is It Anyway. There's a lot of fudging in what a "point" is between machines; a WGC point is inflated compared to a "standard" BOINC point; and apparently those aren't so standard either, because the BOINCstats people have their own weighting for RAC calculations. I wouldn't take them too seriously.

Also, your points per day aren't actually the points for the work done by your machine for any specific day from your point of view. It's the points credited for any workunit on which you were the primary or a wingman, validated in the last 24 hours from the point of view of the project server. There can be a decent amount of fluctuation day-to-day, even if your machine is crunching the same project, 24/7. So BOINC points are only generally useful as a performance indicator, when considered as a trendline across timescales of a week or more.

Anyway, what kind of incentive are you after?

quote:

I seem to be unable to create an account on climateprediction.net via the BOINC manager at the moment. Its been telling me account creation is disabled.

I don't have any useful info on this, or on dual-booting. Sorry.

# ? Jan 13, 2020 06:14

Tweeter99: Nov 8, 2016

yummycheese posted:

I seem to be unable to create an account on climateprediction.net via the BOINC manager at the moment. Its been telling me account creation is disabled. Not sure if its due to them having a lack of work. Looking around their site all their projects seem to have no WU's available except for the linux only "UK Met Office HadAM4 at N216 resolution" project.

I have found that the majority of projects seem to have issues signing up for accounts through BOINCstats or through the BOINC manager. I usually end up having to go directly to the project's site and create an account there and then punch in the login info as an existing account in BOINC manager.

I just created an account here: https://www.cpdn.org/create_account_form.php

then I was able to link it up to my BOINC manager by selecting the climate prediction project in the project list and entering my account details. It doesn't look like a very active project with only ~2k WU's ready to be sent out to ~10k computers.

# ? Jan 13, 2020 13:23

yummycheese: Mar 28, 2004

mdxi posted:

Also, your points per day aren't actually the points for the work done by your machine for any specific day from your point of view. It's the points credited for any workunit on which you were the primary or a wingman, validated in the last 24 hours from the point of view of the project server.

Thanks. This is hard to grasp at first.

mdxi posted:

Anyway, what kind of incentive are you after?

Number go up. Numbers that go up faster are more entertaining. It feels good to build a machine and modify it a bit so that you get good value for all this computing.

Tweeter99 posted:

I just created an account here: https://www.cpdn.org/create_account_form.php

Thanks for the direct link. I poked around for five minutes myself trying to find the direct way and didnt find it.

The WCG project seems like an interesting challenge since its
1.) Linux x86_64 only for the OpenIFS work units.
2.) The work units is this silly weather modeling software written in FORTRAN
3.) The memory usage per WU is approaching 4GB/unit which makes its difficult to run 8+ WU's on a machine unless you have gobs of ram.
4.) The WU's take 7+ days to execute

It seems like you need serious dedication to meaningfully contribute. Lots of linux janitoring and probably running retired server hardware at home.

Whether this is a good use of any ones resources I have no idea. I figure someone has to do it. It vaguely maps back to my day job of running terrible software in the enterprise. Also its outside the reach of a lot of casual boinc users who only run the windows gui in the background.

Another thing I was fooling around with. I started up a copy of boinc in Google Compute Engine. I was hoping to abuse some of the preemptable vm instances to get some cheap compute. I experimented with the linux hibernate to disk feature to try preserve running tasks from having to start over from their checkpoint.

You can see one of these instances here
https://einsteinathome.org/host/12802771
So far the return seems abysmal. Ill burn through the $300 credit in a few months and maybe only get a few thousand points for the effort.
If someone has any tips on getting boinc points from da' cloud I'd like to try some other angles.

# ? Jan 15, 2020 03:18

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

yummycheese posted:

Number go up. Numbers that go up faster are more entertaining. It feels good to build a machine and modify it a bit so that you get good value for all this computing.

Well, I certainly understand that motivation. It's (a part of) why I went from a single dual-core machine to 4 12-core machines and 2 8-core machines in the space of two years.

quote:

The WCG project seems like an interesting challenge since its
1.) Linux x86_64 only for the OpenIFS work units.
2.) The work units is this silly weather modeling software written in FORTRAN
3.) The memory usage per WU is approaching 4GB/unit which makes its difficult to run 8+ WU's on a machine unless you have gobs of ram.
4.) The WU's take 7+ days to execute

WCG is a project of subprojects. The weather subproject (ARP), which you seem to be talking about, is definitely the "heaviest" of them in terms of resource requirements. But I don't believe being written in FORTRAN has anything to do with that

According to WCG staff, the average time for an ARP WU to complete was 24h, and I believe they said to expect usage of about 1GB/WU, so I'm unsure why you're seeing such high overhead. You can turn off ARP under "My Projects" on the WGC site if you don't want to run it.

Other subprojects definitely require far less memory, in any case. Right now I'm seeing Mapping Cancer Markers WUs using ~35MB each, and Microbiome Immunity Project WUs using around ~350MB each.

quote:

It seems like you need serious dedication to meaningfully contribute. Lots of linux janitoring and probably running retired server hardware at home.

I suppose that depends on your definition of "meaningful". I think that as long as the work is getting done before WUs are late, it's meaningful. If you want to compare RAC (recent average credit) with the seriously big users, then yes, you'll need lots of modern cores.

I can't argue with you about the linux management part. I created a whole project to take care of that for me (but I enjoy that sort of thing). I absolutely do not use any rackmount stuff, as I have neither the space for it nor the desire to have a constant 90dB of fan noise in the background. A lot of people do, because a lot of people who get into this seem to dig the homelab thing. Personally, I use desktop-grade CPUs and 140mm fans.

quote:

Whether this is a good use of any ones resources I have no idea.

I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it was a good use of resources. But they're your resources, so it's your decision.

quote:

Also its outside the reach of a lot of casual boinc users who only run the windows gui in the background.

There's nothing wrong with running BOINC in the background and/or on Windows.

quote:

So far the return seems abysmal. Ill burn through the $300 credit in a few months and maybe only get a few thousand points for the effort.

Cloud instances are provisioned with the assumption that you'll be running something very, very transient and/or bursty -- because that's how most apps are these days. There is massive oversubscription. My very small bit of experimenting with this showed similar results to yours. For 24/7 computing at full load, the ROI is way better on real hardware, assuming you don't live somewhere with cripplingly high electricity costs.

# ? Jan 15, 2020 05:34

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

I passed 3,500 results returned on WCG today and reached 50th on the SomethingAwful team ranking. (49th on points!)

I think I'll finish up today's tasks and move to Asteroids@Home for a little bit to boost the SomethingAwful team there for a week or so.

edit: I see A@H WUs give a flat 480 points of credit regardless of completion time.

OhFunny fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 19, 2020

# ? Jan 18, 2020 04:42

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

Another month, another WCG update digest.

# ? Jan 22, 2020 05:35

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

On Asteroids@Home, Team Something Awful continues to make gains. In total credit, we have broken into the top 300 and we continue to be going up. Our recent average credit ranking is even more interesting though, right now we rank #35. Observe:

Never mind pulling ahead of 4chan, goons are now doing better than Russia, Ukraine and the entire US NAVY :patriot:

OhFunny posted:

edit: I see A@H WUs give a flat 480 points of credit regardless of completion time.

Yes it's still 480, even if a Raspberry Pi running on all four cylinders takes two entire days to finish four WUs. I guess it balances out somehow because those things are cheap in both hardware and energy costs.

# ? Jan 24, 2020 06:53

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

I've moved back to crunching WCG tasks since Asteroids work units ran out on the 21st.

# ? Jan 25, 2020 17:43

Progressive JPEG: Feb 19, 2003

I have a small cluster of 8 Raspberry Pi 4's running a Kubernetes (k3s) cluster on stock Raspbian.

I've got 7 of them (all except the master node) running the BOINC client and attached to Asteroids@Home, Einstein@Home, and SETI@Home. Mainly went with those since they all had ARM support.

For setting up the container spec, I just used the stock BOINC client docker image and added the following:
- Run clients on the host network so that I can just connect to each instance from the UI using the node IPs.
- A ConfigMap containing the account XML snippets. With this they seem to immediately attach to the accounts I'd created. These could have been stored as Secrets but I'm only putting the weak credentials in them so I don't really care.
- A separate "boinc-ui" Secret containing the password for connecting to the clients from the UI.
- A persistent volume for holding the workloads/configs.

Anyway here's what I ended up with, feel free to copy and tweak as needed. For example this assumes arm32v7 images and a local path provisioner for the persistent volumes (included by default in K3s). I'm mainly just happy that it was straightforward to get auto-attach working:

code:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: boinc-config
data:
  # Config files with WEAK account keys:
  # - can only be used for gaining credits, not valuable
  # - will change if password is changed
  account_asteroidsathome.net_boinc.xml: |-
    <account>
      <master_url>http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/</master_url>
      <authenticator>snip</authenticator>
    </account>
  account_einstein.phys.uwm.edu.xml: |-
    <account>
      <master_url>http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/</master_url>
      <authenticator>snip</authenticator>
    </account>
  account_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml: |-
    <account>
      <master_url>http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</master_url>
      <authenticator>snip</authenticator>
    </account>
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: boinc
  labels:
    app: boinc
spec:
  serviceName: boinc
  replicas: 7
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: boinc
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: boinc
    spec:
      # Allow accessing each boinc instance directly.
      # Could replace this with TCP ingress, but may need different services for each pod:
      # https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/exposing-tcp-udp-services/
      hostNetwork: true
      affinity:
        # Ensure that boinc pods are not colocated/contending with each other
        podAntiAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
              - key: app
                operator: In
                values:
                - boinc
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
        # Ensure that boinc doesn't run on the master which already needs some CPU
        nodeAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
            nodeSelectorTerms:
            - matchExpressions:
              - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
                operator: DoesNotExist
      containers:
      - name: boinc
        image: boinc/client:arm32v7
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        command:
        - /bin/bash
        - -c
        - cp -v /roconfig/* /var/lib/boinc && /usr/bin/start-boinc.sh
        env:
        - name: BOINC_GUI_RPC_PASSWORD
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: boinc-ui
              key: password
        - name: BOINC_CMD_LINE_OPTIONS
          value: "--allow_remote_gui_rpc"
        - name: TZ
          value: "Pacific/Auckland"
        ports:
        - containerPort: 31416
        volumeMounts:
        - name: boinc-roconfig
          mountPath: /roconfig
        - name: storage
          mountPath: /var/lib/boinc
      volumes:
      - name: boinc-roconfig
        configMap:
          name: boinc-config
  volumeClaimTemplates:
  - metadata:
      name: storage # pvc will be named "storage-boinc-0"
    spec:
      accessModes:
      - ReadWriteOnce
      storageClassName: local-path
      resources:
        requests:
          storage: 2Gi

Now on the hardware side I need to see if I can bump the PSU voltage enough to fix the low voltage warnings I'm now seeing in dmesg...

e: remove autoinserted url tags, thanks radium

# ? Jan 26, 2020 04:20

Progressive JPEG: Feb 19, 2003

Noticed that the BOINC jobs were running at low CPU priority (19), so figured it was fine to try running it on the master (pi-01) too. To do that I edited the earlier K8s spec to have replicas=8 and commented out the nodeAffinity rule.

code:

NAME    CPU(cores)   CPU%   MEMORY(bytes)   MEMORY%   
pi-01   4000m        100%   742Mi           18%       
pi-02   4001m        100%   977Mi           24%       
pi-03   3997m        99%    628Mi           15%       
pi-04   4000m        100%   441Mi           11%       
pi-05   4002m        100%   425Mi           10%       
pi-06   3999m        99%    807Mi           20%       
pi-07   4000m        100%   711Mi           17%       
pi-08   4002m        100%   984Mi           24%

# ? Jan 26, 2020 05:48

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

Progressive JPEG posted:

I have a small cluster of 8 Raspberry Pi 4's running a Kubernetes (k3s) cluster on stock Raspbian.

That's pretty cool.

quote:

Now on the hardware side I need to see if I can bump the PSU voltage enough to fix the low voltage warnings I'm now seeing in dmesg

What kind of power supply are you using? I've thought about this kind of thing before, but I am very dumb with electricity and therefore terrified of custom PSU type stuff.

# ? Jan 26, 2020 16:02

Progressive JPEG: Feb 19, 2003

mdxi posted:

What kind of power supply are you using? I've thought about this kind of thing before, but I am very dumb with electricity and therefore terrified of custom PSU type stuff.

It�s a Mean Well RSP-500-5. One downside with it is that the fan is always on in the 5V model. I ended up replacing the horribly loud stock fan with a Noctua A4-20 FLX. I would have preferred a PSU that just automatically turned off the fan when it�s not needed. In this case the PSU is way overkill for 8 RPis so the fan isn�t doing much and frustratingly could just be turned off entirely most of the time if the model had supported that.

An issue with 5V power is voltage drop, where 5V from a power supply might easily be 4V by the time it reaches the device. At higher voltages like 48V a drop of 1V isn�t a problem but when you�re starting from 5V it�s a big deal proportionally. Voltage drop is caused by resistance in the wire, and gets worse for thinner/longer wire sizes and also for higher loads/amps. The RSP-500-5 has a potentiometer that can be adjusted using a Phillips screwdriver to add or remove a volt or so from the output voltage. This can be used to counteract voltage drop by increasing the voltage at the source.

But there�s some risk of cranking it up too much because voltage drop is proportional to load - if the RPis are idle then the voltage at the RPis will go up again, until it�s close to the PSU voltage. So it�s important to ensure that the PSU voltage isn�t increased beyond what the RPis could handle if they were getting all of it.

In my case I found that with the RPis all at 100%, I was seeing around a 0.7V-0.8V drop. I cranked up the PSU voltage to about 5.65V (measured frequently using a multimeter across the PSU output ports) at which point the RPis were getting around 4.9V (measured at a terminal bus fairly close to the RPis) and were no longer showing the low voltage indicators. From some searching it looks like the RPis should be okay up to around 6V so I figured that up to 5.65V reaching the RPis when they�re idle would be okay. Note that I�m powering the RPis using their USB-C port which is supposed to provide some voltage protection, whereas if I was powering them directly via header pins then it bypasses the voltage protection and this becomes much more delicate.

RPis give two indications that they are running in low voltage mode, which makes them run much slower:
- The red power light turns off but the RPi is still running.
- A warning like this in dmesg:

code:

[  926.243482] Under-voltage detected! (0x00050005)

When the RPi gets back to a voltage it likes, the red light turns back on and the dmesg shows a message like this:

code:

[  938.724030] Voltage normalised (0x00000000)

In practice the voltage adjustment can be done by:
- running boinc or some other benchmarks on the RPi to bring up the amps/load (and also the voltage drop) and checking whether the red light turns off on the RPi. If the red light stays on then you�re done and don�t mess with it
- regularly checking the voltages using a multimeter at the PSU and at the RPi and making sure the voltage on both sides never exceeds a level that would damage the RPi (again, the PSU voltage shouldn�t exceed what the RPi could take directly, because the voltage drop will go away when the RPi isn�t busy)
- very slowly turning the PSU potentiometer adjustment with a screwdriver, checking voltages at the PSU and RPi periodically to make sure the voltage is doing what you expect
- stopping once the red light on the RPi turns on again, indicating that the RPi is happy with the voltage it�s getting, OR
- stopping once the PSU voltage is getting close to RPi limits in which case it�s not safe to continue. In this case voltage adjustment alone isn�t enough and you need to back off the voltage and just get shorter and/or thicker gauge wire to power the RPi before trying again

However depending on your local law you may need to seek the help of someone who is licensed to do electrical work before doing any of this, and do not mess with electricity if you are not confident that you know what you�re doing. In the best case screwing up means replacing a fuse but in the worst case it can lead to damage, death, or both. As mentioned above it may be simpler to resolve voltage drop by getting shorter power connections which would reduce the problem at its source.

# ? Jan 26, 2020 17:38

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

WCG stats for my team as of this evening:

code:

Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s) (Rank)    100:002:00:45:21 (#1,100)
Points Generated (Rank)              254,878,839 (#617)
Results Returned (Rank)              410,516 (#696)

First century of CPU time!

* Started with one machine, on 14 Jan 2018
* Took just over one year to reach 25 years of compute (19 Jan 2019; up to 3 machines at that point)
* Hit 50 years just under 7 months later (12 July 2019; 4 machines online; one upgraded to 3900X)
* A little under 4 months later (3 Nov 2019) was 75 years. All 4 machines were 3900X by this point, the final 2700 having been swapped out a week before
* Just over 3 months later, today, 100 years. 6 machines crunching; four 3900Xs and two 2700s

I'm effectively out of space and power, so from here on out I'm only getting more CPU through upgrade cycles :science:

# ? Feb 4, 2020 04:44

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

Anyone know who Zilcon is, the founder of Team Something Awful on Asteroids@Home? Looks like some pubbie just joined a few days ago and is attempting a hostile takeover.

# ? Feb 5, 2020 02:39

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

Yeah that's not good.

Team leaders have access to our email addresses.

# ? Feb 5, 2020 06:45

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

Tuxide posted:

Anyone know who Zilcon is, the founder of Team Something Awful on Asteroids@Home? Looks like some pubbie just joined a few days ago and is attempting a hostile takeover.

I searched the forums and believe it might be Zil. I've sent them a PM asking if they are and about the situation.

# ? Feb 5, 2020 07:42

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

I also did a few hours ago, this Zil goon is gonna have a full inbox even if it's not them. I guess it's a taste of things that could come to all of us if we can't get the founder changed to an actual goon. I asked them to make me the new team founder, but that was before knowing the thing about the email addresses.

OhFunny posted:

Team leaders have access to our email addresses.

This needs to be mentioned in the OP I think in case goons don't know this, assuming there's no way to turn it off.

Apparently, there is though. If you go to Your account and then Asteroids@home preferences I see this, but I don't know if this actually works:

Tuxide fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Feb 5, 2020

# ? Feb 5, 2020 09:01

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

To clarify. They can send us emails, but I'm not sure if the founder on Asteroids@Home can see what our email address is.

As the team leader on WCG I can send members emails through the email team panel, but it's just a box where I can type a message and hit send and WCG/BOINC handles the rest. I can't see actual addresses.

# ? Feb 5, 2020 12:11

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that I am now the new leader of the Something Awful team on Asteroids@Home. After four years of honorable and respectful service, Zilcon has stepped down and I have been sworn in to take his place as the new founder. I promise to do my best to serve this team and not to screw this one up.

OhFunny posted:

I'm not sure if the founder on Asteroids@Home can see what our email address is.

I can confirm that the Asteroids@Home founder can definitely see the email addresses of its members.

My legal team has advised me that I need to tell you guys if you don't want me seeing what your email address is, then you need to go to Your account, then Asteroids@home preferences, then Edit preferences, uncheck the Is it OK for Asteroids@home and your team (if any) to email you? box and hit the Update preferences button. This will hide your email address from the team admin's members list so team founders can't see them, in case there's another pubbie hostile takeover attempt. Oh, and this should probably be in the OP as well.

In other Asteroid news, we have risen to #278 in Total credit. We have surpassed teams Anime@home and EG Union (aka Elite Games), two BOINC teams that rightfully don't deserve to be above us. EG Union is a rival player group in Elite Dangerous. A few years ago during the Dangerous Games event, goons came in second place with only EG Union beating us. This latest movement puts us justly on top of them where we belong (least when it comes to mapping real asteroids).

# ? Feb 7, 2020 04:11

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

^^I'm glad that matter has been resolved. I'm sorry this got overlooked due the A@H situation:

mdxi posted:

WCG stats for my team as of this evening:
code:
Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s) (Rank)    100:002:00:45:21 (#1,100)
Points Generated (Rank)              254,878,839 (#617)
Results Returned (Rank)              410,516 (#696)
First century of CPU time!

* Started with one machine, on 14 Jan 2018
* Took just over one year to reach 25 years of compute (19 Jan 2019; up to 3 machines at that point)
* Hit 50 years just under 7 months later (12 July 2019; 4 machines online; one upgraded to 3900X)
* A little under 4 months later (3 Nov 2019) was 75 years. All 4 machines were 3900X by this point, the final 2700 having been swapped out a week before
* Just over 3 months later, today, 100 years. 6 machines crunching; four 3900Xs and two 2700s

I'm effectively out of space and power, so from here on out I'm only getting more CPU through upgrade cycles

Congratulations mdxi! Those are amazing numbers!

You are probably returning more results than the entire SomethingAwful Team! I've only just reached 1 year total run time myself after three months.

# ? Feb 7, 2020 06:21

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

It's been a progression! I included the quarter-century times to show that I built up this capacity, and that it took me time to do it. This has latched onto some part of my brain and re-ignited the hardware obsession that I thought went away in my late 20s.

I think what's driven it for me is having a sense of purpose to attach things to. I had gotten over hardware-for-hardware's sake (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that sort of exploration; I'm saying that I have been there and done that, and no longer found it compelling). My personal needs were so slight, compared to the capabilities of modern hardware that I had mostly become interested in low-power/high-efficiency computing. But getting into grid computing changed my personal definition of efficiency from "does what i need in as few watts as possible" to "does as much science as possible per unit time, for a reasonable number of watts". Of course, that hinges on the definition of "reasonable" and currently I'm defining that as "around 100W for the overall system, plus another 100W for systems with GPUs".

This is a huge amount of electricity compared to, say, a Raspberry Pi, but the results are going to be hugely scaled up as well. And what really made me OK with that sort of power usage was realizing that until the mid-1990s when CFLs started to become mainstream, most American homes were lit by incandescent lamps in the 60-100W class. My compute farm is a massively better use of that energy than 7 100W light bulbs.

I'm looking forward to Zen 3 and 4, and seeing what kind of improvements I can manage to get from them. I'll also be happy when Intel finally gets their poo poo together and comes back with a reasonably priced high core count part, now that AMD has changed the game. Historically no one has been able to touch them in the lower power arena (without going down a performance bracket to ARM), so I'd be happy for them to be back in the game to keep AMD from getting lazy again. Really, it's just fun to be paying attention to advances in hardware again, and to have found something genuinely useful to do with computing as a hobby.

# ? Feb 7, 2020 23:29

OhFunny: Jun 26, 2013; EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

The Something Awful team has climbed to 30 in recent average credit. Surpassing the LinusTechTips Team and have reached 248 in total credit rankings. :toot:

# ? Feb 18, 2020 14:00

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

Somehow it's almost March, so here's my monthly roundup of WCG project updates.

# ? Feb 28, 2020 05:18

Tuxide: Mar 7, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

In space-related news, SETI@home will stop distributing work by the end of March.

SETI@home posted:

On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.

Meanwhile, in Asteroids@Home, the Something Awful team has been going up and down between #29 and #27 in the Recent average credit score, averaging around 150k output. If goons can raise this by another 100k, that'll put us on the coveted Top 20 list where we belong. Our total credit ranking will climb to #225 next time the board refreshes.

# ? Mar 5, 2020 01:54

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

Folding and Rosetta both have COVID-19 research work ongoing.

https://www.ipd.uw.edu/2020/02/rosettas-role-in-fighting-coronavirus/

https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19-2019-ncov/

So if you wanna get in on that, you know what to do.

# ? Mar 5, 2020 23:00

~Coxy: Dec 9, 2003; R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD

Has anyone seen a guide for setting up BOINC on Azure?

# ? Mar 10, 2020 03:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Dec 7, 2023 00:07

mdxi: Mar 13, 2006; to JERK OFF is to be close to GOD... only with SPURTING

WCG's Smash Childhood Cancer subproject restarted work today after a three month hiatus, with new targets. I'm super stoked about this.

Can confirm that WUs are being sent out. My farm has crunched just under 60 since whenever the tap opened back up.

# ? Mar 10, 2020 17:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > BOINC/Grid computing: Numbers Go Up, Hardware Edition

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