Posts by dcdc

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Reducing PC power consumption and noise (Message 108199) Posted 25 Mar 2023 by dcdc Post: Hi everyone, I thought I'd post here in case this is useful for anyone else. I've had an issue with my main PC (5800X) making too much fan noise, especially at night. This also reduces power consuption significantly, but I haven't measured that yet. I've dropped the Maximum processor frequency down to 3.9GHz whilst I'm not using the machine and it's much quieter. Ideally BOINC would be able to limit BOINC-spawned threads to not use turbo-boost which is where most of the energy/heat/noise is coming from. In the absence of that, this script works on Windows 11, and probably on earlier versions too: First, go to Control Panel > Power Options > Change plan settings. Under "Processor power management", if you can already see "Maximum processor frequency" then you can skip this first step. If you can't see it, this will make that setting visible: 1. Open "Windows PowerShell" from the start menu. 2. Enter this: powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 75b0ae3f-bce0-45a7-8c89-c9611c25e100 -ATTRIB_HIDE 3. Close PowerShell. That is taken from here: https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/how_to_add_or_remove_maximum_processor_frequency.html You should now see the "Maximum processor frequency" as the first entry under "Processor power management". You might need to close and re-open "Power Options" to see it though. Note: Changing the setting there will only affect the power plan that is selected in the "Power Options" page of the control panel. For example, if you change the "Balanced" settings, but the "Power saver" plan is applied, your changes won't have any effect. I have used the "Balanced" power plan below. Next, create the bat scripts: Open Notepad and paste these two lines in: powercfg.exe -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCFREQMAX 3900 powercfg.exe -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT Change "SCHEME_BALANCED" to the power plan you are using. Change "3900" to the max frequency you want the script to apply. Save it as limit_lo.bat (make sure it's not saved as "limit_hi.bat.txt". Create a new bat file for the high speed setting: powercfg.exe -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCFREQMAX 0 powercfg.exe -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT Use "0" for unlimited, or set a high value there. Then you can either run the files directly (as Administrator), or use scheduled tasks to apply these on a routine basis, or when your computer is/isn't in use. Hope that's useful for someone, Danny
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106489) Posted 7 Jul 2022 by dcdc Post: ..
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106488) Posted 7 Jul 2022 by dcdc Post: 32GB in the two that have issues.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106485) Posted 7 Jul 2022 by dcdc Post: I'm only seeing it on 8-core machines. The quad-core and older machines are all fine.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106482) Posted 7 Jul 2022 by dcdc Post: Seeing all tasks saying "Running" whilst having been sat at 0% for a day and needing aborting, and then having the machine blacklisted from running more VBox tasks is getting tedious. The VirtualBox tasks aren't fit to be released. VirtualBox multi-attach would presumably solve this by reducing disk usage massively, especially on machines with more cores.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Limit number of Python jobs (Message 106400) Posted 16 Jun 2022 by dcdc Post: BOINC is in control of how many tasks are run at a time. You can control it by limiting RAM available to BOINC. I think you can also set the max_concurrent value in one of the files too.
7) Message boards : Technical News : Due to user feedback and an attempt to reduce the load on our servers, we increased the default target run time from 3 to 6 hours, increased job deadlines to 14 days, and added the target cpu runtime option of 2 days (Message 106397) Posted 16 Jun 2022 by dcdc Post: You might just need to click "Allow" at the bottom of this page: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=3371484 It disables the VirtualBox jobs if your computer returns errors, which all of mine do from time to time, usually due to the not starting bug, or the dropping to 0 CPU usage bug.
8) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : 3 tasks, but no oune wil be crunched, "zur ausführung bereit" (Message 106329) Posted 30 May 2022 by dcdc Post: What I would do is: 1 restart BOINC Manager. 2 If that doesn't work, abort those tasks. If you do 2, you will probably have to go to that computer's page on the website and re-enable the VirtualBox tasks using the Allow button at the bottom.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106309) Posted 28 May 2022 by dcdc Post: I'm nothing to do with the project - I just want to help where I can.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : is that right R@H needs 19GB diskspace for WU (Message 106253) Posted 21 May 2022 by dcdc Post: I believe the 19GB will include the amount of free space required by your BOINC settings, as well as any additional amount for the tasks.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106177) Posted 10 May 2022 by dcdc Post: Update on the AVX requirement as final confirmation, not that I think any were needed: I upgraded a 6th gen (Skylake) Pentium (no AVX) to an i5 (with AVX) and it now completes the VB tasks.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Please remove Virtualbox as a dependency. (Message 106172) Posted 8 May 2022 by dcdc Post: If they were to share the tools used to create the virtualbox, would anyone here be able to convert it to a non-VB task? I.e. do the work for them and send the method back? I expect they are all contracted to do specific work based on funding etc which this would fall outside of.
13) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : CASP 15 (Message 106163) Posted 4 May 2022 by dcdc Post: Does anyone know if we'll be running any of these tasks? The first ones are out today it seems: https://predictioncenter.org/news.cgi#421
14) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : Links related to Rosetta (Message 105931) Posted 13 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: Nature article about Alphafold and, to a lesser extent, Rosettafold: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00997-5
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 105926) Posted 13 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: Yeah I've run memtest on all of my machines - so easy from the start menu in Windows these days. No issues detected though.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 105924) Posted 13 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: Agreed. But why do my i5 and 3900XT virtually never have a faulty task? Yeah, that I don't know! My 3700X seems to have more issues than my other machines. Maybe because I use it more. Or maybe these tasks are more sensitive to something like memory errors.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 105922) Posted 13 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: ..
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 105921) Posted 13 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: I don't experience this. I have two computers that do 99% of them ok. I have 5 computers that never do them. Perhaps there's an instruction in CPUs required for a small number, but all my machines are either new enough to have it or old enough to break every one of them. Only your 3800XT and your i5 have AVX so the other machines will all suffer from the Intel MKL crash.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Stalled WU (Message 105917) Posted 12 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: BOINCTasks shows whether a task is using CPU time or not so you can see what to abort. https://efmer.com/boinctasks/download-boinctasks/
20) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 105916) Posted 12 Apr 2022 by dcdc Post: Yeah unfortunately there are lots of bad VirtualBox tasks that waste lots of CPU time. I don't know of any way to deal with them other than to abort them unfortunately.

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