Posts by Skillz

21) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 76117) Posted 1 Jul 2023 by Skillz Post: Its amazing how much you think you know. To anyone reading this. If you increase your ncpu count far beyond how many cores you actually have and do nothing else to limit the number of tasks that can run at once you'll crash your system on some projects. I am speaking from experience as I've done it, many times, mostly by accident by forgetting to change it back. Buy a better computer. That's cute. Just one of my computers is more powerful than your entire fleet. LMAO
22) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 76114) Posted 1 Jul 2023 by Skillz Post: Not a problem if you're not trying to interact with it as an everyday computer. Yes it is. It will cause the computer to grind to a halt and work done will be even slowly than before. Not to mention it could cause Windows or Linux to crash. Nonsense, unless you tried to run a billion of them or something ridiculous. What do you think happened when we ran a few programs at once on a single core machine in the past? As long as you don't run out of RAM, there's not a problem, and Boinc limits RAM usage. It doesn't affect the results. Those tasks are so old and computers today are so much faster a 16 core CPU is many times faster than 64 or 128 core systems from years ago. I thought the tasks were perhaps programmed to use x cores and if you didn't give them that many the program would screw up. Otherwise why are they dividing them? Just so everyone gets one which runs in a reasonable time? Its amazing how much you think you know. To anyone reading this. If you increase your ncpu count far beyond how many cores you actually have and do nothing else to limit the number of tasks that can run at once you'll crash your system on some projects. I am speaking from experience as I've done it, many times, mostly by accident by forgetting to change it back.
23) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 76110) Posted 1 Jul 2023 by Skillz Post: Not a problem if you're not trying to interact with it as an everyday computer. Yes it is. It will cause the computer to grind to a halt and work done will be even slowly than before. Not to mention it could cause Windows or Linux to crash. Not sure of the advantage, unless you have tasks not using the whole core when they should be. Some projects only give tasks based on the number of cores a host has. Faking the core count will allow you to download more tasks at once. Helpful if you're on a limited connection that you only want to use at certain times of the day. [/quote] If it's multicore tasks, just tell them in the app_config that although they are a 12 core task, they use on average 8 cores.[/quote] Completely different. Thanks Conan I had never even thought of doing it for that!! I guess I'm on my way to get some hours in a couple new apps!! Yes, good idea. I wondered who had those 128 core CPUs! Not sure what the project's desires are - how important larger ones are, maybe you should ask over there and see what they really need done. And suggest others do the same if they need the 128s done and hardly anybody has machines really that big. It doesn't affect the results. Those tasks are so old and computers today are so much faster a 16 core CPU is many times faster than 64 or 128 core systems from years ago.
24) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 76101) Posted 29 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: As Link posted a snippet of the code required. That belongs in the cc_config.xml file. Not the app_config.xml file in the project directory. Just to clarify. But keep in mind, BOINC will then think you have that many cores and will schedule the running tasks accordingly. IE: If you have a single core processor, but use that config to tell BOINC you have two cores, then BOINC will try to run 2 tasks at the same time. Unless the tasks are multi-threaded, then it'll just think it's running two cores/threads on the single task, but physically only one core will be running. This can be a problem in that BOINC will try to start way more tasks at once than your system can handle and will slow it down tremendously if you aren't careful. IE: Telling BOINC you have 100 cores on a 8 core CPU. 100 tasks will try to run simultaneously on that poor CPU.
25) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76100) Posted 29 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: The "tasks ready to send" include a bunch of separation wingman jobs that are not being sent out. I will remove those from the system soon. The extra "tasks in progress" are probably Separation tasks that are still floating around on people's machines but haven't been aborted or returned yet. i think you should abort/cancel/wipe the in-progress tasks on the database side, if you can. I have ~200 tasks reported as in-progress that are not actually on the host at all. i even performed a project reset which is supposed to abandon those tasks and nothing changed. they wont come out of in-progress naturally until they time out from hitting the deadline. I've got a little over 1000 with the same issue. Project reset didn't solve it. Not too worried about it. In a couple weeks they should fall off after the expire anyway. I do have almost 30k inconclusive tasks though, but again I am not worried about them. If they eventually get marked valid (earn credit, dont earn credit) or marked invalid. Doesn't matter. I'd rather the admins/development team here spend more of their time optimizing a GPU app for N-Body that's worth running on GPUs over CPUs.
26) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76074) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: Meh, I had over 200k tasks pending validation. If they get credit, cool. If not, then oh well. Appreciate your time, Tom.
27) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75833) Posted 21 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: And yet I play fine in HD with an old 8000GFlops Nano. What games? What display resolution? I thought that was obvious. Two cards, twice the computing power, should achieve twice the calculations and render twice as many frames in the game, just like a twice as fast card. Both cards are not running to their full potential. So why can't I use those rates to estimate how fast they are at games? Don't argue with me. Go look at gaming benchmarks with the 4090 and 7900XTX comparisons. You'll see the 4090 has better frames in nearly every, single game. I think it's more to do with things getting so much more complex, programmers divide things into chunks. Just like building a massive building, everyone works on a different part, then finds something the plumber wants to do ruins the structural integrity. Not exactly. Building games for more developers is like having a building already built (the game engine) and then populating that building with your assists (the content in the game). Unless the game is built with SLI/Crossfire in mind, you wont see any performance gains. Nvidia doesn't even included SLI bridges on most of their new cards anymore because it wasn't worth the little gains. Because you said you hated Nvidia. And since AMDs are cheaper the three of them wouldn't set you back much more. Not all games support Crossfire. Even the games that do may not optimize it. I've done the whole multiple GPU gaming setups before in the past. It's not worth the headache for the little gains you get in the games that support it. A larger screen requires a higher resolution to be sharp. Well no kidding. But you said, and I quote "a 100 inch 8k display" where you specifically stated the resolution of the display. 100 inch is irrelevant. As I said before. Just saying "an 8k display" would be the same as what you said. Because it doesn't matter if it's an 10in 8k display or a 100in 8k display. It's 8k and takes orders of magnitude more processing power to render than 1080P. Ah, you live in another world, one where people have an extra zero on their salary. Regardless of how many zeros I have. AMDs cards can not process their 1s and 0s as fast as Nvidia's flagships. They have been getting extremely close and that closeness has become even tighter with AMDs release of the 7000 series, but they're not there yet. Maybe in a few years AMD will have something that I will give their GPU drivers another shot at on whatever rig I am gaming on at that time. For now, 7950X and 4090 is the best setup for me. (Note that I also run BOINC on the computer and other production stuff, so having the extra cores over the "real" gaming CPU with less cores from AMD is a better solution for me.
28) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 75770) Posted 20 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: Unfortunately n-body and separation are on the same hardware and it is not possible to pull the plug on separation without touching n-body. If you go into your MW preferences on the web site here and untick Separation it will stop sending them to you. The N-Body will continue on as normal. I have a feeling the bit above statement was related to the MilkyWay server not a participants profile I am pretty sure that user is running both Separation and N-Body tasks on their hosts. They think the only way to stop separation is to tell MW to not use GPU. Which MW will still use the CPU on separation tasks. Unticking Separation in the "Run only the selected applications" section of the MW @ Home Preferences page will block separation from being sent to that host for both GPU and CPU. While still allowing the host to download N-Body. The user can then just abort any separation tasks that have downloaded so their host only runs N-Body.
29) Message boards : News : Separation Application Shutting Down on Tuesday, Jun 20th (Message 75768) Posted 20 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: Unfortunately n-body and separation are on the same hardware and it is not possible to pull the plug on separation without touching n-body. If you go into your MW preferences on the web site here and untick Separation it will stop sending them to you. The N-Body will continue on as normal.
30) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75763) Posted 20 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: I assumed it was because a modern single one was fast enough. Less electricity, smaller power supply, less hassle fitting it in a big case. Even modern GPUs struggle with high resolution games. Dual, triple or quad GPUs was the only way to get close to getting high frames on modern games with a high resolution, but it wasn't 100% increase performance per card added. Never has been. Since you appear to know everything, how on earth did they manage to use twice the computing power to achieve less than twice the result? Need some context here. What uses twice the power of what to achieve what? Surely games use texture and pixel rates, which I quoted? Well yes they do, but the 4090 provides high frame rates for nearly all games. Only a few select outliners where the AMD card was higher. Realistically, the top model AMD card is more comparable to the 4080. Similar price, similar performance. And when I had Nvidia problems, I saw everyone else with Nvidia problems. All drivers/software/any program is rubbish. Programmers always have been and always will be useless, they make mistakes all the time. No one is perfect. Game developers on the PC have to build a game that's compatible with thousands, millions even, of possible hardware combinations. That's not exactly easy. You could always use triple AMDs. Why would I buy 3x the amount of GPUs to do what a single GPU can achieve? While I do have systems with multiple GPUs and I've even had systems that I gamed on with SLI'd GPUs in the past. It's not worth it. Outside of those previous points, not all games even benefit at all from multiple GPUs. And just what are you powering anyway? A 100 inch 8K screen at 120fps? The size of the display is irrelevant. A 10 inch 8k display or a 100 inch 8k display will require the same processing power to achieve the same results. Any card on sale now gives a decent gaming experience. I play 3D shooting games at HD with a Radeon R9 Nano! I have dual 4k displays with a third I plan on purchasing soon. These displays have a 144hz refresh rate where I try to get the FPS as close to 144 FPS as possible for the best possible experience. Solidair. He said "Your scale is off for current GPU'S 7900xtx is about a grand" You two are so similar I thought you were the same person. I'm sure he's just as offended as I am about that assumption.
31) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75760) Posted 20 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: They should, you have twice the processing power. For example one card can do odd numbered frames and the other can do even numbers. The programmers would have to be monumentally terrible not to achieve x2. It's amazing how much you think you know but don't actually know. Like I said, the programmers screwed up, if you have twice the manpower, the job is done in half the time. Just like when you pause a game the GPU usage remains high. What's it calculating?[/quote] If it was possible it would have been done. There is a reason why dual GPU setups are not popular and are not being supported much anymore. Nothing does what it says on the tin, but you can use them for comparisons. If your car stated 40mpg, and mine states 30, we can agree neither will get that, but yours will be about 1/3 better. On your paper the AMD card is better than the 4900, which it's not. Go look at gaming benchmarks. The 4090 does better in nearly every game. Odd I've had the exact opposite experience.[/quote] Its a widely known problem. I'm not the only one. And you're funding their monopoly. I prefer to play games at the best possible experience. Nvidia offers that. I have to pay it. And did you say a grand earlier? A grand is the cost of a whole computer, not one part of it. I guess someone has to buy them new so I can get them 2nd hand. The ones running MW here cost me Â£40 each. I never said price. You are confusing me with someone else.
32) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75736) Posted 20 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: They should, you have twice the processing power. For example one card can do odd numbered frames and the other can do even numbers. The programmers would have to be monumentally terrible not to achieve x2. It's amazing how much you think you know but don't actually know. There is not a single dual card configuration on this planet that will double the performance for a game. There are TONS of benchmarks on the Internet showing SLI (don't even think Nvidia does this anymore) and Crossfire (think AMD named this something differently now) GPUs where they barely achieve 30% performance boost, much less 100%. It's also cute that you post the specs of GPUs when that's only half the picture. Paper benchmarks NEVER work as desired. I've owned many AMD GPUs in the past and always regret it. Last AMD card I owned was a 5700 XT and the gaming performance wasn't all that great and don't even get me started on the AMD GPU drivers. Constant GPU driver crashes until I switched that GPU out with a 3070Ti and absolutely no more crashing and smooth gameplay. I root for AMD to come out with good GPUs just because I dislike the fact that Nvidia controls the market and the price. Until that day comes, Nvidia from here on out.
33) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75634) Posted 17 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: The bat file runs the command line. And it randomly doesn't bother working. Unless you restart/reboot or log off the computer then you should only need to start it once and leave it running. Neither do I, I have a 1 day deadline, but several projects. It always ends up repeatedly downloading stuff for a project with more debt, and leaving the other with just enough time to run, except it always miscalculates the time. I told them it would be better to leave some leeway but they didn't understand. What do you mean you have a 1 day deadline? You don't pick the deadline. The project(s) admin(s) choose what their tasks deadlines are. But I only brought that up to do with what most people are doing. Just because part of the statement may be true, doesn't mean all of it is. I was only pointing out the incorrect part of the statement. I have no way of knowing who runs multiple instances on their GPU hosts who run both n-body and separation tasks on the same host. Though it's highly likely those that run CPU most likely just run nbody and those who run separation mostly run it on GPUs. Probably a small portion of people run separation CPU tasks. The project will end up losing a bunch of users as a lot of them only run the separation GPU tasks. So useless. Not entirely. No it isn't. Boinctasks is a much better interface. I didn't say BM's interface is better than BTs. I merely pointed out that if you are only running one computer on BOINC, then the BM is sufficient. This holds especially true for people who are new to BOINC. May be a little weary with installing new software. Much easier for them to just run the BM that comes packaged with BOINC on Windows to get attached to a host. As most of them just want a "set and forget" type setup and aren't concerned with micromanaging their single computer other than suspending it when they're doing something CPU or GPU intensive where BOINC might interfere. If they end up going down the BOINC rabbit hole like many of us have, then installing other software to help manage multiple hosts, multiple instances, so on and so forth then BT is highly recommended. (For Windows) BT isn't all that great on Linux. Same here. The house computer. The other stuff is in the garage along with two very loud Amazon parrots. They like the tropical temperatures. Cool.
34) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75625) Posted 16 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: You sound like a Linux geeky person and probably get along with command lines. I don't. Linux or Windows, doesn't matter. Both are extremely easy and straight forward. The command line does help, but just creating a .bat file in Windows to start the instance is easy enough and no command line stuff required. Just notepad and double clicking the file. I can agree with that, sometimes I watch it and try to guess what it's going to do next, and it always does something stupid. It always misses deadlines. Complain to the authors and they either blame the projects or say it would be stupid to schedule a different way. Or they say the project's running an old version of Boinc server, like Einstein, but they're doing that because they modified it since it used to be even worse, so to upgrade they'd have to adjust all sorts. I never have issues with missing deadlines due to the default scheduler, but I also don't ever over commit work the computer can do. You originally brought it up when I said "I disagree - since it was not possible to run both on the same computer. So the Nbodys being done were on non-GPU machines." - I'm referring here to most people not running multiple Boincs, so most GPU machines were not running Nbody, and they now will be, while the GPU is sent off to Einstein. I know what I quoted and I didn't bother to snip out the specific part I was referring to. I thought most people would understand that I was referring to not being able to run NBody and Separation (GPU Only, No CPU) on the same host (computer) is fairly easy to achieve and not impossible. I can't think of a way to manage several computers with just the basic Boinc. Hell I wouldn't manage a single computer with it. It doesn't even group queued tasks! It doesn't colour code tasks! It's unusable! The BOINC Manager is capable of connecting to many hosts. It just does it one at a time and/or you'd have to open multiple BOINC manager windows at once. Its a better solution for Windows when you only have one computer to manage. Although for Linux I prefer boinctui if I only need to manage one host. I use BOINCTasks mostly on my main gaming rig though where I control everything.
35) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75622) Posted 16 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: Running multiple instances is pot luck if it works. It's not for the faint hearted. I did it once to make only one half of Boinc pause for another program (the idiot Boinc programmers don't realize we might want to pause the CPU and leave the GPU running), but it wasted a whole afternoon fiddling about. I copied the command line (a 20th century thing) exactly from another user, but some of my computers decided they just didn't want to start a second instance. I doubt many people were doing that. Just because you can't get it to work reliably doesn't mean it's not reliable. I run multiple instances on all of my hosts and on some hosts more than just two, regularly. Simply because the built-in BOINC scheduler sucks. So I micro manage my hosts so they do want I want them to do and not what BOINC thinks they should do. You are right that most people running N-Body probably isn't doing so on multiple instances, but that's not what I was saying. Yep. I do a fair bit of crunching but have never bothered with more than 1 BOINC running. Too complicated for me and I don't have the time to manage it across multiple pc's. For most cases it's not needed. However, as someone else mentioned their are tools for easily managing multiple computers on a single computer. Whether it's the BOINCTasks or a BOINC Account Manager such as BAM! or custom scripts/software that does this for you. There are plenty of ways to control multiple computers (and instances) on a single computer.
36) Message boards : Number crunching : Will N-Body projects all use multiple CPUs? (Message 75618) Posted 16 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: N-body tasks are multi-threaded. You'll need to do something to micro manage them if you wish to run other projects along with MW N-Body. One method is using an app_config to limit the number of concurrent tasks and the amount of threads each task use for Milkyway N-Body. Another method is running multiple instances. -Use the main instance to run all your other projects and set the CPU usage in this instance to something other than 100%. Such as 50%. So all the other projects will use 50% of the CPU's available cores/threads. -Use the second instance to run only Milkyway N-Body tasks. Set the CPU usage in this instance to something other than 100%. In the example above, since the main instance is using 50% then you have up to 50% available for this instance. -Both instances CPU usage needs to add up to 100%. Going over 100% (Such as using 60% on one instance and 50% on another) will result in over utilizing the cores/threads in your system. -It's recommended to also use an app_config to set how many N-Body tasks MW uses on the second instance, as using more than 1 thread on those instances gives better performance.
37) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75616) Posted 16 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: Because when you try to run n-body and separation gpu it also downloads separation cpu That's why you setup multiple instances on the same computer. One for N-Body and one for Separation (GPU). Running both projects on the same computer is not only possible, but very easy to do.
38) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75614) Posted 16 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: I disagree - since it was not possible to run both on the same computer. So the Nbodys being done were on non-GPU machines. That's not true at all.
39) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75548) Posted 14 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: I think https://foldingathome.org/ uses double precision. It does not. As Ian said, even though some projects do have some FP64 in their code, it's very minimal where higher DP doesn't really benefit that well compared to having higher FP32. F@H is not one of them.
40) Message boards : News : Separation Project Coming To An End (Message 75544) Posted 14 Jun 2023 by Skillz Post: https://sech.me/boinc/Amicable/ http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/ https://einsteinathome.org/ https://www.gpugrid.net/ https://numberfields.asu.edu/NumberFields/ https://www.primegrid.com/ https://srbase.my-firewall.org/sr5/ https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ http://boincvm.proxyma.ru:30080/test4vm/ invite code is "PrimeGrid" http://gerasim.boinc.ru/ While those projects do use GPUs, none of them benefit from having high FP64 compute. Which means the P100s would be essentially wasting electricity running those projects when there are far better alternatives that can crunch more work with the same amount of power used. So unless Separation continues then there are no other projects that benefit from FP64. Which would ultimately mean any old GPU that has good FP64 would most likely not run other projects that well. Such as the AMD 200 series cards, S9000 series cards and the P100s. The Titan Vs still do pretty decent at other projects, but for the price of them newer GPUs would be a better option.

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