Posts by NightmareXX

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Memory usage (Message 63877) Posted 29 Oct 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Since coming back to R@H after participating in the SETI gauntlet, I've noticed the RAM usage on one of my machines is extremely high compared with before SETI. http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=832882 I can only have 2 work units running as each one takes up around 600MB. What can I do to help this other than increase the RAM?
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Minirosetta 1.90 and 1.91 (Message 62784) Posted 5 Aug 2009 by NightmareXX Post: How do I fix these errors? :( http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/results.php?hostid=986605&offset=20 Try installing a more recent version of BOINC. Version 6.4.7 is said to be quite stable (Version 6.4.5 has been working well for me since I installed it so I am sticking with that for now). Check the logs of your firewall and anti-virus software to see if either have been blocking files from downloading. I don't have a firewall or AV on my server and no, it doesn't have any virii either. I've updated to the latest version of BOINC but no luck, still the same problem.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Minirosetta 1.90 and 1.91 (Message 62781) Posted 5 Aug 2009 by NightmareXX Post: 05/08/2009 17:06:15\|rosetta@home\|Started download of boinc_rb1_1aiu.pdb 05/08/2009 17:06:17\|rosetta@home\|Finished download of boinc_rb1_1aiu.pdb 05/08/2009 17:06:17\|rosetta@home\|Started download of lr8_1aiu.out.zip 05/08/2009 17:06:45\|rosetta@home\|Finished download of minirosetta_database_rev31588.zip 05/08/2009 17:06:45\|rosetta@home\|Started download of boinc_rb1_1acf.pdb 05/08/2009 17:06:45\|rosetta@home\|[error] Signature verification failed for minirosetta_database_rev31588.zip 05/08/2009 17:06:45\|rosetta@home\|[error] Checksum or signature error for minirosetta_database_rev31588.zip How do I fix these errors? :( http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/results.php?hostid=986605&offset=20
4) Message boards : Number crunching : How many people are crunching Rosetta? (Message 62764) Posted 4 Aug 2009 by NightmareXX Post: it's here: http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=rosetta&view=users there are 4 items in blue text just above the first graph. first one is users overview which basically confirms what i posted earlier. It also says that most crunchers have 2 machines on line: Users 44,823 Hosts 76,429 This is only Active users, but what does that mean for those that have multiple machines? I think the stats are off a bit. I mean Muraski has 2 pc's on line, Greg has 1 pc, Felipe's are hidden, Rochester has 1 pc, but Emigdio has 7 pc's!! And that is only a small representation of users and their numbers, I am not sure that works for the real numbers. Either there are A LOT of users here with only one pc or one of those numbers is off! I don't see a problem with those stats. I myself am running 4 hosts so that would be enough for 2 other single machine crunchers to count as having 2 machines. Some of the people on here run it from their business and so have hundreds of machines under their name.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Single vs. Dual Channel DDR2 (Message 61012) Posted 5 May 2009 by NightmareXX Post: From my own testing using a system with exactly the same components, just changing the memory speed, it has no effect on R@H. Tested on a Phenom 9850 at 800MHz and 667MHz. There was no drop in the average credit granted between the two. What does affect R@H pretty significantly however, is the amount of L2/3 cache your CPU has. My 9850 (RIP) only had of 4MB L2/3 cache total. I swapped it out for an Intel Q9450 which has a slower clock speed but a massive 12MB of L2 cache (4MB per core!) and the amount of decoys I was able to generate per work unit shot up resulting in a much higher RAC :)
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 60000) Posted 6 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Rather interestingly, my RAC is picking up now even though I'm using the old client. Looks like whatever I did, it's working :)
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59997) Posted 6 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Is the RAC going down on that machine? Windows has 'issues' with not releasing stuff as it does its thing, meaning less and less is available for other programs, ie Boinc in this case, making them slow down. I tend to reboot mine about once a month, manually running an anti-spyware program at the same time. Nah the RAC has never gone above 500 but it hovers around 480 ish. It's got masses of spare memory too as it's a dual core running on 2GB of RAM.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59992) Posted 6 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Related question: if you reboot a machine does the task time go back to the last checkpoint, or does the time remain and just the work reset to the last checkpoint? if it's the latter, the credit will be lower per cpu second... I presume the first but it won't matter either way as it's on 24/7 without rebooting. I've got a dual core that's been on for 54 days now without a reset :)
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59986) Posted 6 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Well I've updated the machine with Vista 64 and the newest BOINC client yet sadly no change. link I'll order a HT 3.0 motherboard on monday and hopefully that will make a difference.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59980) Posted 4 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: To me, that sounds like an excellent idea. The ability to compare a machines performance so that it produces the best result is never a bad thing. You'd be able to compare different OS's, CPU's, motherboard's, RAM. As for the amount of benchmarks, as long as there was a wide enough range it'll be fine. I've no idea how the client really works but maybe if there were different run times for the data so you could see which has the potential for the most work done. Back to my original point, I've changed my machine so it only gets 1 day of work and see if that makes any difference. It'll allow me to compare like for like in case it makes a difference.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59968) Posted 4 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: So what are we left with? Is Vista64 that much better at scheduling a multi-core CPU than XP32? It might be, though I do believe an update of the Boinc Manager is in order. I was getting a very high error rate with 5.10.45 which 6.4.5 has resolved and while there's no sign of that in any of our machines (to the point of erroring out) there may still be some benefit in addition to removing one of the differences between us. One other question I wanted to ask is about the credit system. Is it only dependent on the hardware or the HWOS combination? There may be a much simpler answer than we think! Well I'll test that tomorrow. I'll leave my XP installation intact and move the 6.4 client over to a Vista 64 install. I'll then leave it a few units to see if the score improves. If it still doesn't, I'm 99% sure that I've covered everything else that it can be and I'll order a HT 3.0 motherboard and hopefully, that'll sort it out.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59958) Posted 3 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: that'll be because there's more cache available for tasks in the two running cores. I think it's more likely to either be that Sid's queue is shorter than yours so he's running different (more recent) tasks which may give higher credit, something to do with memory - has anyone tested changing the timings to see if that makes a difference? If the cache is saturated (which it seems it is if running two tasks improves things) then maybe it's the memory latency that's the problem? or could Sid's mobo possibly be OC'ing automatically? Quite a few do by default but not to that extent... Fair point about the cache but I'm pretty sure that the HT link is the speed that the CPU has to the RAM. I replaced the 667MHz RAM I had in there to 800MHz stuff and it's made no difference. R@H must do a lot of RAM data transfer and therefore, a faster HT link should provide more decoys in a given time as more data can be transferred. As for RAM timings, my 9850 is on 5-5-5-15-23 where as my 940 is 5-5-5-15-22 so I doubt the timings have much effect on the RAC. Sadly I have no way of being able to check this without buying a new motherboard and I've exhausted pretty much everything else. As for the OC'ing, I doubt it's doing it automatically. AMD boards don't have that sort of feature. EDIT Done some reading around HyperTransport and it isn't related to the memory performance. It's the link from the CPU to the rest of the system, minus the memory so it can't be that. What I did find out was that unganged mode RAM allows for more requests per second so I'll try unganging my modules and see if that works.
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59954) Posted 3 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Firstly, what motherboard are you using so I can check on it's spec? I've just completed my first unit using only 2 of my available 4 cores. Just as I feared, it got the full points for the unit as the HT link wasn't being hammered as much. I'll let it run for a bit longer to see the effect only using 2 cores has but it looks like a new motherboard is in order.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59947) Posted 3 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: I have a 9850 currently running Linux and Rosetta that also does nothing else. It seems to be doing units in about the same time as yours is. What size hard drive do you have? Could it be close to being full? I noticed you have a 1 week cache while I have a 1 day cache, neither should make any difference over the long run. Does your machine connect to Rosetta every day or just when it needs new work? I also upped the memory speed in my 9850 and it made no difference that I could tell. Apparently memory speed is not a way to speed up Boinc. HDD is only a 120GB but it's no where near full and BOINC has lots of space that it can use. As you pointed out, cache size doesn't make a difference as we're both getting low credit. R@H can connect as often as it likes, I'm on a broadband connection via my router. However I had a thought. My motherboard only has a 1x HT link. If my memory serves me correctly, this is the speed at which the CPU talks to the rest of the system or something to that effect. Sid on the other hand is using this motherboard which has a max HT link of 3x. Cross referencing this with AMD's website, the 9850 is an AM2+ CPU. If you're also using a HT 1x motherboard, this is the only reasonable explanation that I can come up with. Yes Sid, that's right. I downloaded the newer client of BOINC and added myself as an entirely new client and only let it get a few work units. I let those run, saw that I wasn't getting any more credit and reverted back to my old client (2 separate install locations). For the moment I've set BOINC to only use 2 of the 4 cores. If I get more points when using just 2 cores, it'd agree with my HT link theory I think. Anyone got some more straws I can grasp at? :P EDIT I've browsed the active computers a little more and found another AMD with appropriate RAC. I've PM'd the owner to see if I can get some more information about the system.
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59936) Posted 3 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: are there any other threads running that could be causing rosetta to get swapped out of the cache? Anti-virus maybe (Norton has a reputation of being a bit of a resource hog)... Not that I'm aware of. The system has 2GB of RAM and is only running R@H. I've got AVG installed but that doesn't show up as using any of the CPU time. The only way I check R@H is by using remote desktop so could it be not having a monitor plugged in? Also, when looking at my results I'm getting low credit because the CPU isn't performing as many decoys as it says it should be. I'll probably install Vista 64 on it within the next few days and see if that has any impact. Is there any way of benchmarking my systems performance and then getting some comparable results? What if I used SANDRA to take some benchmark scores and see if there is any throttling going on?
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59930) Posted 2 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Well I've done a few units with the DDR800 RAM and it doesn't appear to have made any difference. I'm fast running out of ideas now and it's starting to really annoy me :(
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59923) Posted 2 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: hmmmm... maybe the memory speed is quite important then... unless cool n quiet is kicking in to some extent? Nah, got that disabled and I control the fan speed via speedfan. As far as I'm aware, it'd only kick in when the system is idle, which is most certainly isn't.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59921) Posted 2 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: Hi. I am "the other guy"! :) No overclocking here - stock 2.5Ghz machine (200MHz Bus x 12.5 multiplier). So I'm running Vista with 8Gb and Boinc 6.4.5 compared to XP with 2Mb running Boinc 5.10.45 - those are the basic differences. My RAM is DDR2 running at 400MHz - 4 sticks of 2Gb Nanya PC2-6400 (400MHz) 5-5-5-18 according to CPUZ. My FPU speed is showing 20% lower (OCing probably), but my Integer speed is nearly 20% higher. Something in there? No idea, but it doesn't sound right, does it. Aside from that, my machine is on 247 but I work away half the week so there's literally nothing else running on it most of the time. I also tweak my start-up programs with MSConfig and the help of Bleeping Computer and my Services with BlackViper - I've found that very useful. I'll PM nightmareXX with any more detailed information he might need. If I was him I'd be confused too. Ah hey, thanks for replying :D If you've looked at my Phenom recently, it'll be showing the speeds at stock. I dropped the OC thinking that it might be affecting the results but it didn't make any difference. The only continuous feature between all the PC's I've looked at and been able to get in touch with the owner is running PC6400 RAM. I've pinched some from another PC and put that in the 9850 so hopefully that'll make a difference. As far as that systems load goes, it's running BOINC and nothing else. It's not used what-so-ever so each R@H gets 25% CPU.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59915) Posted 2 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: it's 3GHz with 2GB DDR800 (RAM is running at stock). HTH Danny Hmmm the RAM in my machines is DDR667 and DDR533. The only box I have with 800 is my 940 which is getting the full amount of credit. Might be worth testing for a few units to see if the RAM speed affects the results.
20) Message boards : Number crunching : Low granted credit (Message 59913) Posted 2 Mar 2009 by NightmareXX Post: I would suggest Sid might have overclocked his to 3.2GHz. Your average granted credit is around 12.8 and his is 16.5: 2.5GHz / 12.8 * 16.5 = 3.2GHz But then surely his integer and floating point performance would be higher? Mine is lightly overclocked to 2.8GHz yet I appear to have better performance. I've looked at your stats and I see you're running a Q6600. I presume you've overclocked it? If so, would you tell me the clock speed and the RAM speed that you're using.

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