My Pi3B+ seems to have topped out at about 600 credit with 3 Rosetta processes. I’ve dropped down to 2 processes, and switched zram to lz4 to see if it affects the average credit or not.

I've been curious, how are the pi's doing now that the database is only stored once for the project rather than once in each active WU slot? Does the memory footprint of the active WUs get reduced and allow you to activate another core?

I don’t know about the rest of you but I control my Pi’s using BOINCtasks where I can see all of the cluster at once. BOINCtasks (BT) is a Windows app, but will run under wine. One of the things BT can show, which BOINC Manager doesn’t easily show, is how much memory each task is using.

I have some instructions I posted on my blog in 2013, but it might be worthwhile updating them, although not much has changed.

reposting here just in case it helps
basically

[list]
* install boinc

sudo apt-get install boinc-client

* set 64 bits kernel
edit /boot/config.txt at end add

arm_64bit=1

*snip*

https://rpi-experiences.blogspot.com/

apt-get install rpimonitor

and one can run pretty much run 'headless' connect remotely to manage the boinc-client instance and monitor cpu loads and temperature on the web at port 8888 (rpi-monitor). running headless is really conveinent, there is only one cable usb C for power that's all. you can place the pi in a good location with wifi access and well ventilated (it needs a good heat sink or sink fan as well) to dissipate the heat

Yeah, I set it to 3 threads from the start. Happy to bump it up to 4 to see the impact though.

I've got a 4Gb Pi4 running 3 threads on Raspian to add to the data pool too. Everything stock, and passive heatsink/case:

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4021327

there is something else i kind of had a brain wave, if pi4 is after all running stable, the checkpoint interval can probably be extended out like 5 minutes
that probably have an effect on the overall power consumption, and does less writes to the sd card as well

I still wouldn't declare a winner right now. There are lots of power consumption tweaks that you could apply to your Raspberry Pi 4 that nobody had bothered to measure up until now.

Also you are comparing the system AC power consumption of an rPi with a theoretical TDP (thermal design power) of a CPU itself (that is itself usually less than the maximal power used). If you add the motherboard, memory, fans, storage and then multiply this all with 80-85% AC conversion efficiency of a power supply, the difference wouldn't be that great as you think.

Also, you may optimize your budget if you ditched the SD card and booted over PXE and ran multiple Pi's from a single power supply (an ATX one one should supply a few dozen maybe).

And while we are mostly mentioning Raspberry Pi 4, there exists lots of other modern single board computers (SBC) on the market with 1-4GB RAM that can run 64-bit Linux, some cost less than a Pi, you may want to look these up. You should also not forget that you may be eligible for a discount when purchasing 100 of anything. I myself got into contact with an rPi employee and got a discount of about 40% for a volume purchase.

When you were comparing the overclocked Pi's you've omitted some important factors:

- Overclocked systems need more expensive cooling
- Overclocked systems carry a higher maintenance cost (lockups and potentially file system corruption every once in a while as you already see here, memory bit errors, etc)
- Overclocked systems _may_ see a higher annual failure rate, increasing costs some more

Despite all of the above advantages, I still agree that managing a hundreds hosts requires great skills and is not for everyone, so purchasing a big box is definitely the easier route for most.

as for myself, Pi4 vs desktop is more a matter of different 'use cases', as the Pi4 runs pretty much like a server, no monitor and in fact only the USB C that is supplying power.
i can let it run without shutting down frequently. the power efficiency is a delightful finding.
my current desktops can produce more points in less hours, in fact in 4 hours, my desktop haswell does as much points as a non-overclocked Pi4 running for 24 hours.
so that would look like 6 times more efficient in terms of points per hour.
but in terms of power efficiency assuming 4 watts at 1.75 ghz on Pi4, Pi4 produces more points (1785) in 24 hours for about 100 watts hours
while my desktop haswell produces 1400 points running 8 concurrent threads in 4 hours, but it consume 100 watts x 4 hours ~ 400 watts hours
so by the points per watt benchmark Pi4 wins out (probably significantly) based on points per watt if these are indeed the numbers

When you bump up the core count, the power increase should be less than linear, because there are various shared components within the CPU. On the other hand, when you are overclocking a CPU, consumption should increase at least linearly with clock and additionally with the square of voltage!

So it should be rarely worth it from a performance/watt perspective, but do share your math if you have _exact_ numbers. We must be extra cautious with our measurements, because dividing such small numbers can introduce big errors, especially if you don't do enough sampling and averaging.

That sounds nice, especially the default consumption of 3.5W. Could you perhaps plot a diagram with each attempted frequency and the lowest over_voltage at the given frequency? It can also be set to a negative number. I'm interested in how much undervolting counts in temperatures.

"Endgame124" wrote:

Note, power reduced pi 4 is using around 3.5 watts. Maybe I didn’t follow something, but a pi 4 running for 24 hours should use around 40 to 48 total watt hours, not 960

Thanks Endgame124

hi all,

please note this, the power consumption of Pi4 in my earlier post https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13791&postid=95478 may be grossly overstated

if this is true, Pi4 consume 4 watts that would only be 4 watts . 24 hours ~ 96 watt . hours in 24 hours and it gets about 1000+ points (overclocked 1.75ghz) in that time frame. it would actually make a Pi4 very efficient in terms of points per watt it becomes 4 times more efficient than say my haswell desktop takes 400 watt . hours to get the same amount of points