I hope my spark plug arrives tomorrow

Not sure that'll help you. :P

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

I hope my spark plug arrives tomorrow

Not sure that'll help you. :P

My 4850 with BIG Zalman fan won't run without it.

This 4850 is already rated at 700 MHz (as opposed to the standard 625 MHz) - and I've already clocked it at 730 MHz after whipping out my 4870 to test it.

4870 is back crunching, but 4850 with BIG fan awaits it's spark plug ;)

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I once hired a small car in the USA which had 3 cylinders, which I'd never come across before. Can you imagine pulling one of the spark plugs? That's how it is for me a I guess - I hope my spark plug arrives tomorrow ;)

Ahh, yes - the late, lamented (by some) Suzuki Swift or its rebadged twin, the Geo Metro. I met someone who had one, and said it got quite a bit north of 40 MPG. This is especially impressive given that I'm pretty sure this was a carbureted engine!

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I once hired a small car in the USA which had 3 cylinders, which I'd never come across before. Can you imagine pulling one of the spark plugs? That's how it is for me a I guess - I hope my spark plug arrives tomorrow ;)

Ahh, yes - the late, lamented (by some) Suzuki Swift or its rebadged twin, the Geo Metro. I met someone who had one, and said it got quite a bit north of 40 MPG. This is especially impressive given that I'm pretty sure this was a carbureted engine!

I have come across a few Metros. They look so puny. More like the spare car in the trunk. :P
I knew a guy who had one too, can't remember the milage, maybe 30ish.

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

I once hired a small car in the USA which had 3 cylinders, which I'd never come across before. Can you imagine pulling one of the spark plugs? That's how it is for me a I guess - I hope my spark plug arrives tomorrow ;)

Ahh, yes - the late, lamented (by some) Suzuki Swift or its rebadged twin, the Geo Metro. I met someone who had one, and said it got quite a bit north of 40 MPG. This is especially impressive given that I'm pretty sure this was a carbureted engine!

That's it! I recognize the name. It was a Geo Metro. Nice little car, got me all the way from LA to Phoenix and back, and around most of Arizona. Ha ha, I even got done for speeding on the way back from Flagstaff on the I-17, so it could shift for a small car ;)

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I only drove down I-17 once and I lived at the Grand Canyon for 4 years, but they heavily patrol it because of all the truck traffic and mountainous terrain.

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banditwolf wrote:

I have come across a few Metros. They look so puny. More like the spare car in the trunk. :P
I knew a guy who had one too, can't remember the milage, maybe 30ish.

They're dinky, all right, but the results are still pretty impressive.

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Credibility is rising, RAC now 120,000 but normality has not yet been achieved.

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Credibility is rising, RAC now 120,000 but normality has not yet been achieved.

How can normality be achieved when your not normal? You still need more GPU's to catch those ahead of you. Your just being lazy....sheesh....

:p

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

Credibility is rising, RAC now 120,000 but normality has not yet been achieved.

How can normality be achieved when your not normal? You still need more GPU's to catch those ahead of you. Your just being lazy....sheesh....

I agree he's not giving this his full attention.

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me@rescam.org

Credibility is rising, RAC now 120,000 but normality has not yet been achieved.

With Cosmo having scheduler problems more MW work is being crunch... MW total going up quicker. You'll need to do way better.

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me@rescam.org

Credibility is rising, RAC now 120,000 but normality has not yet been achieved.

With Cosmo having scheduler problems more MW work is being crunch... MW total going up quicker. You'll need to do way better.

Oh it's just too much... I wanted to do more, and did much more than I did before... but 'they' are all doing more... it's so hard to keep up... to stop wanting to relax... to long for the days when "poh, who needs a decent graphic card" and crunching was done with actual computers...

Cosmo? I've been trying to crunch Cosmo all day. Keeps telling me it can't attach shared memory, or is it being picky about which graphic card I have ;)

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Cosmo? I've been trying to crunch Cosmo all day. Keeps telling me it can't attach shared memory, or is it being picky about which graphic card I have ;)

Cosmo doesn't want to share with anybody. Too much drama over there. ;)

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me@rescam.org

Ice wrote:

to long for the days when "poh, who needs a decent graphic card" and crunching was done with actual computers...

I hear you. I saw an interview with the founder of nVidia on PBS. Fascinating. He talked about how he is in competition with Intel, even though he doesn't make the same thing (and the interviewer was too ignorant to ask about ATI). Still, the guy had a point. He also talked about Google being in competition with Microsoft, in a similar way.

The funny thing is, as the Tesla boards from nVidia prove, for some things GPUs are a lot better than CPUs.

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Can someone organize this? I got twenty, 9 more folks and we can buy them a 4850 or so.

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Can someone organize this? I got twenty, 9 more folks and we can buy them a 4850 or so.

Precisely. I'm currently unemployed and I could probably scare up that much myself.

Well, I'm not sure about the hdd's. I'm sure we can get the box for that. My concern is that any surplus drives we may get along with it wouldn't be up to the beating they'd surely get in this usage scenario, and volunteers don't take kindly to having their work get lost.

I'll see if I can find a better source of drives.

I have a PayPal account that I could use to collect payments. It's just that I don't expect people to trust me to do so. I am totally trustworthy, and how are various strangers all over the world going to know that?

And there are also costs involved here (at least in terms of time and effort): the initial migration, maintenance and administration. Obviously, as good of an idea as we may think this is, if they don't want to bother, then it's a non-starter.

I just checked the home page, and I didn't see a "donate to this project" button anywhere. I'm not saying they don't have one - just that I didn't manage to find one.

When we hear from Travis again, if he likes the idea, maybe they can add the button (or make it more prominent, if they already have one), with some means of designating where a given donation is to go. PayPal would work well for this, as they already have a comments field that could be used for this purpose. It would just be a matter of them setting up a PayPal account for MW somehow.

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I don't think there is a 'donate' button for this project. Surely the school could put out $150. (mind you mine wouldn't put any money for their own stuff). I think it may be easier to have dave or travis recieve the money and buy it, however they aren't any more trustworthy than you Lloyd, or anyone else, as we haven't delt with those areas(money) before.

I do think a second server has been needed for 6 mo - 1 year now. It would certainly eliviate some(/many) problems.

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

I don't think there is a 'donate' button for this project. Surely the school could put out $150. (mind you mine wouldn't put any money for their own stuff). I think it may be easier to have dave or travis recieve the money and buy it, however they aren't any more trustworthy than you Lloyd, or anyone else, as we haven't dealt with those areas(money) before.

Well, I know I'm a good and honest guy, I just don't expect other people to take my word for it.

Yes I'm making assumptions about, say, Travis' reliability in these matters, and I'm pretty confident we could trust him with the money.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (if anyone even knows what that means, any more), we really ought to plan on new drives, and that will probably require a bigger budget. I'm thinking closer to $500 than $150.

My own experience might be illustrative. My first file server was an ancient, quad PIII Xeon Netfinity. I was able to find some Compaq 9.1 GB drives for it, and an external RAID array and some bigger drives for that (18's maybe). After a few months, the controller (or maybe it was the onboard system management CPU) started squawking about how the drives might be out of warranty (no kidding!). Some time after that, I found that I couldn't keep any disk array running for more than a week or so at a time, RAID5 or even RAID1 for two OS drives.

Much more recently, I was able to buy a nice 2U HP/Compaq box for $75 plus tax - no shipping because it's an ebay seller that's close to where I live. It had 2 X 2.5 gHz P4 Xeon HT CPUs, four 256MB DIMMs, two 36GB or so HDDs, all the hot swap fans (there are two on-board spares), and both redundant power supplies. For about $40 (including shipping), I got two 1GB DIMMS, and I was able to use the two I took out in another server. I ran the original drives RAID1, and was later able to add three more 36GB drives I got from yet another Compaq server as a RAID5 array.

Even at that, I wouldn't propose to run this setup as a BOINC server, especially as the noise the latest three drives make isn't particularly reassuring. This is something that has to have uptime comparable to a bag of hammers, or we are going to lose even more volunteers.

There is a seller in Nebraska that has similar deals, shipping included, except (usually) with no drives or trays, sometimes no RAM. It shouldn't be hard to find something with sufficient room for drives (at least 2U - mine has room for six drives), and the trays can be had cheaply if one shops around, likewise with RAM.

I did some looking on ebay today, and found one seller who had two new, brand name 73GB drives for <$200 altogether, with shipping. There's some other deals to be had, perhaps better (I added this one to my favorite sellers because the auction looks promising). They've changed their search criteria in a way that makes it easier to find new drives, which is helpful.

In any case, about $100 each for 73s, and $60 each for 36s seems to be a reasonable budget for good quality, new drives. If we need hot swap trays, that would be another $10 each or so. A minimal system might be two 36s for OS and BOINC software, and two 73s for data, all as RAID1 arrays. It would be best to have spares (or even hot spares) for both, but that really blows the budget worse than it already is.

It might be possible to scale everything down by half, though it doesn't seem like 18s are all that much cheaper than 36s. Maybe four 36s as two RAID1 arrays, and one "cold" spare on hand in case either array fails.

Speaking of spares, if this were up to me, I would get a spare PSU, and also try for a couple of spare fans. I wouldn't expect to pay more than $20 or so for the PSU nor more than a few dollars each for the fans. What's cool (no pun intended) about the HP/Compaq box I have is that all the fans are interchangeable, and two of them are extra (e.g. if the one right by a CPU quits, you can move one of two others to take its place without adversely affecting cooling).

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I'm sure your honest. It sounds like you know your stuff. I haven't dealt with servers before so I haven't a clue about their specifics. I think with your help and possibly others this project could get a good setup or two. There seems to be a steady rate of new users so the current setup is bound to get full.

Are the drives different than standard computers? 1 TB drives would be much larger. I've seen those for ~$100 on sale.

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

Are the drives different than standard computers? 1 TB drives would be much larger. I've seen those for ~$100 on sale.

I believe they're 10,000rpm drives compared to a desktop standard of 7,200rpm. In enterprise at least, I know that speed is what it's all about, capacity second.

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