Project Update

[veebee]

Hmmm - don't think I have seen a single GPU work unit yet...

[Dingo]

I have not had a GPU work unit yet either, but I see posts on the WCG forum saying people are crunching them  ???

[Dataman]

I have not had a GPU work unit yet either, but I see posts on the WCG forum saying people are crunching them  ???

No there are no GPU wu's just the occasional resend. I think the next beta's will be for the 3 VINA app fixes. Sekerob posted the next GPU beta's may not be until April. Good news it you will make it to April before I will. 

[Dataman]

Another new project at WCG with a 4/16 launch. Computing for Sustainable Water.

Preliminary details here:

http://faculty.virginia.edu/CSML/projects.html

Badge here:



It appears to be a short one ... <year. Get crunching mates. :aus1:

[kashi]

Hmm, not so many work units, I'll need to get stuck into this one to get some badges on the board before it finishes.

Strange how you can look at the same thing multiple ways. I was concentrating on the green when looking at the badge and wondered what a large tortoise eating a drumstick signified. Then I thought of the project name and realised I should look instead at the blue.

Arrr, I've had some hearty tankards of red wine and Myers's rum today. Haven't had this much grog for months, cruising really nicely now, everything is fine and mellow.

[Dataman]

Ahhhhh, Myer's ... 

It will be interesting to see how many world-wide crunchers will take on a project affecting only one estuary (largest in USA). This bay went from pristine to highly toxic in the last 100 years and, although some areas have been restored, some areas are so oxygen depleted that few creatures can survive. For those interested, there is more information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay

[kashi]

Well just because the research focuses on a particular area, doesn't mean it doesn't have implications for water quality in other places in the world. For example CFSW lists a model on the Murray-Darling basin in the Papers section of the website.

Just checked your Chesapeake link, it's a big 'un, alright!

I've been given a bottle 4 times now and only noticed on the last one that it's Myers's. I've been calling it Myers or Myer's for years. Endings with s's aren't used much at all now, the label design and spelling must be old. They can spell it with a "z" if they want as long as it still tastes good.;D

[Dataman]

A reminder that Crunching for Sustainable Water apperars clear to launch on Monday. The last Beta seems good. So I am off to the Bay and start crunching. Soft-shell crabs ... yum yum yum! 

:aus1:

[kashi]

I'm crunching some right now. No, not soft-shell crabs but CFSW tasks.

[tazzduke]

Yeah, I have jumped onboard as well, but am off to a slow start, as I have some DSFL's to clear as well as ALBERT GPU Tasks (Now you can run two tasks at a time without an app_info.xml file, change your account preferences on website) which take two cpu's away from me as well.

Another thing, I have just noticed with BOINC V7.0.25, I have 4 cores being used (I only have a quad), when I started running some POEM and ALBERT tasks on GPU (doing two at a time), my cpu tasks will auto drop back to 2, prior to this release, it was a case of manually setting boinc to only use 2 cores for cpu and allowing 2 free for GPU.  Its just something I noticed. 

I would like a 8 core machine, maybe one day I will get one

Happy crunching and badge hunting
Regards
Tazzduke

[kashi]

Yep, slow start for me too, cache of FAAH won't be completed until tomorrow. I've only finished 3 just to get an idea of how long they take. All 3 took about 4 hours on my Linux VM. None have validated yet, claimed credit is currently about 20% lower than FAAH tasks, I think host scaling is turned off until you have completed 10 tasks.

CFSW tasks use 3-4 times more memory than FAAH ones so I will need to increase the memory allocated to VirtualBox if I want to run all CFSW on Linux. I will give it a go on Windows in a few days and see how it compares.

That's interesting offering the ability to choose 2 concurrent GPU tasks via preferences. I think the difference with 7.0.25 relates to how the maximum ncpus is set. They changed it to prevent idle cores when multi threaded tasks are waiting to run. Then they discovered that change could cause unacceptable slowdown due to CPU overcommitment so they changed it again. I still don't like the 7.0.xx versions at all, not only does the new work fetch cause high priority tasks if one of your projects has a very short deadline but also I experienced a number of "If this happens repeatedly, you may need to reset the project" errors which are a nuisance with CPU applications that have a long checkpoint interval. I thought it was just my computer but I recently saw it mentioned elsewhere.

Some of these new OpenCL GPU apps are very bad with their low GPU load percentage and high CPU usage. POEM requires 3 HT cores to support 4 concurrent tasks and the GPU load percentage is still only 90%. WCG HCC only uses the GPU for a half or less of the task duration and a full CPU core for the rest of the time. Plus it is also CPU bound like POEM, although not nearly as bad but it is still more efficient overall science wise to leave all CPU cores free. Turning off HT and running CPU tasks on 3 physical CPU cores is possibly the best compromise for my setup, but it's pretty crook for badge hunting. Many NVIDIA cards have full or partial busy wait bug so full CPU core is being used for the majority of the task duration. At least the GPU load percentage is better on some of the NVIDIA cards. Busy wait is actually a good idea for WCG, many there are so CPU-centric or new to GPU that they fail to leave a CPU core free to support GPU processing so suffer from CPU overcommitment and the resulting slowdown of both GPU and CPU processing. It doesn't avoid CPU overcommitment slowdown but busy wait ensures the GPU application does not stall due to lack of CPU resources.

[Dataman]

Got a bronze and probably silver tonight. Helps that it is a single quorum project.

[tazzduke]

Glad to hear your input Kashi, and to all others that input through this forum, its how I learn things that happen around in here in BOINC world 

Regards
Tazzduke

[kashi]

Got a bronze and probably silver tonight. Helps that it is a single quorum project.

Congrats with karma on your new badges.

Wish I had known that it's a single quorum project before I downloaded so much work. I've got about 1.5 days worth in my cache and it's all quorum of 2. I've had six validated so far and all but one granted 10-15% less than claimed. Haha, my WCG RAC will drop like a stone with CFSW compared to FAAH.

Strange, when I was doing only a few CFSW tasks at a time the runtime was consistent at about 4 hours but now that I'm doing all CFSW the runtime is varying from 3.1 to 4.1 hours. I've noticed that variability before with other projects such as DNA@Home. Not sure if it's Linux or the virtual machine that causes it. Usually doesn't happen in Windows with no VM, but Windows is often slower.

[Dingo]

Congrats on the new Badges Dataman +2