|
Personal update, which is also in a way a WCG update.
In the interim I've done a lot of work for DENIS, Einstein, and Milkyway. My current active projects configuration is:
I feel like there's been a general decline in BOINC project activity, which was noticeable even before WCG's troubles began -- though WCG used to be a bright spot rather than a source of worry. This isn't generalized doomerism for the future of volunteer scientific computing, and I think FAH is the most obvious counter-argument to that. But a lot of these sorts of problems are amenable to GPGPU analysis, and renting capacity for project analysis is a pretty standard thing now. The whole reason I'm down to 3 compute nodes is that I've shifted my primary focus to FAH, and GPU compute adds a lot of expense. I may be willing to throw more money than most people at this, but I wasn't willing to absorb a 2X increase in costs, both in terms of buildout/upgrades and operating cost, for 6 nodes. What's everybody else up to these days?
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2023 16:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 16:00 |
|
|
Congrats on 400 CPU-years. I'm still running FAH whenever the heat is useful, or on days when we've had negative electricity prices.  I'm still using my 1660 Super and a 1080 - never felt the need to upgrade yet.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2023 17:17
|
|
|
Had our first snow, which means I feel ok with excess waste heat, so started up FAH again; now on my recently built computer, and my new CPU alone is better than my previous CPU+GPU. ~490k ppd for my Ryzen 7 7800X3D, vs ~380k ppd for my old Intel 4770K + GTX 960, kind of amazing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 23:58
|
|
|
borkencode posted:Had our first snow, which means I feel ok with excess waste heat, so started up FAH again; now on my recently built computer, and my new CPU alone is better than my previous CPU+GPU. ~490k ppd for my Ryzen 7 7800X3D, vs ~380k ppd for my old Intel 4770K + GTX 960, kind of amazing. Wow, yeah, things have come quite a ways since the Intel 4-series. That would have been, what, 2014? (Nope, mid-2013, with DDR3 and 8MB of L3). Happy crunching! In other news, there's a WCG SCC update for the first time in quite a while: quote:Dr. Shefali Chauhan at cc-TDI continues to validate 3 new compounds from CREB1 modeling studies that have cross-specificity for FLI1, the structured half of the EWSR1::FLI1 protein in Ewing sarcoma. Nikita Rozanov at cc-TDI and Dr. Tyuji Hoshino at Chiba University are processing hits for Brachyury (chordoma), FLI1 (Ewing sarcoma), KLF15 (myoepithelial carcinoma) and MyoD1 (sclerosing and spindle cell rhabdomyosarcoma), which Dr. Chauhan and colleagues will then validate. Dr. Charles Keller has recently submitted additional work on PAX3/7::FOXO1, now funded by NIH, as preliminary data for a $25M Cancer Research UK - NCI Grand Challenge in collaboration with Nurix Therapeutics and a network of academic collaborators.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 22:04
|
|
|
I usually turn my work PC off at night, but then I remembered about Folding@Home and searched for this thread. And then I saw Asteroids@home so I signed up for that and will be leaving my work PC running it for as long as it has tasks that need solving. It's just a 6-core i5-10505 but it's better than nothing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2023 23:54
|
|
|
I have retired from WCG. Been crunching for them since 6 Dec 2017. Final totals: 420y 302d 17:17:44 CPU time over 1,532,109 WUs. I'm winding down all other BOINC projects as well (just finishing in-flight WUs). I had DENIS and Einstein as my "backup" projects, but truth be told I've done more work for them than for WCG since The Troubles began. No plans to stop contributing to FAH.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2024 21:50
|
|
|
mdxi posted:I have retired from WCG. Been crunching for them since 6 Dec 2017. Final totals: 420y 302d 17:17:44 CPU time over 1,532,109 WUs. Why is this if you don't mind me asking?
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2024 02:47
|
|
|
skybolt_1 posted:Why is this if you don't mind me asking? I really loved WCG's blend of biomedical and climate projects. But since IBM unceremoniously ditched the project ~2 years ago, it hasn't been stable for more than a month at a time, and the only half-way active project has been MCM. ARP has not returned to finish up its first run. SCC has not been able to get new WUs out the door. HSTB has departed to find a new home. OPNG has, according to the forums, sometimes been available, but only on GPU -- and I had long since switched my GPUs to doing work for FAH. Even when things are "stable", WUs run dry every weekend as soon as there's no staff around to kick the various processes which distribute and ingest them. Most problematic for me is that the communication went from being rapid and fantastic (under IBM!) to sluggish and evasive (under a university research group!). No one really knows what's causing these problems, and the "answers" which are given -- when they are given -- are frequently at odds with observable behavior of the system. Everything just feels sad and bad. I blame IBM for this state of affairs, but that hardly matters and does not change the fact that the project no longer appears to be competently administered. The outcome is unfortunate, regardless of who caused it. As for the other projects, it has nothing to do with the quality of what they're doing, or how things are being run. It has to do with the fact that I built up my volunteer computing infrastructure (hardware and software) largely to support WCG; it is what I felt was worth devoting the time (in software tooling) and cost (in hardware, power, and cooling) to. Over the past two years I slowly spun down from six dedicated machines, to three, to one, to none. DENIS is a fantastic project, but by its nature it is bursty, and its WUs are very quick to crunch; it didn't need all that hardware. Einstein is an interesting project, but the LIGO/VIRGO teams have real funding from elsewhere, and while I love astrophysics/cosmology it doesn't feel as impactful as biomedical research does. It's basically the same reason that I left Primegrid -- the project which got me into volunteer grid computing -- years and years ago. So it's easier to just turn off BOINC. FAH is a well-behaved and self-contained piece of software, and now it just runs on my desktop machine. It has it 95%+ to itself, as I work almost exclusively on laptops. As for the machines, one effectively became an upgrade for my desktop machine. One turned into an upgrade of my wife's gaming PC. I sent the mobo + CPU from one to my brother to upgrade one of his systems. The other three are powered off and collecting dust in the garage. I'm torn on whether to try to find good homes for them, or just donate them to Goodwill and let people be confused about why someone would give away a 16-core machine, and why that CPU would be paired with a GPU that's unsuitable for anything other than displaying a desktop (because I only ever had two "good" crunching GPUs; the other machines just had old spares to let me do diagnostics and upgrades).
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2024 15:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 16:00 |
|
|
mdxi posted:I really loved WCG's blend of biomedical and climate projects. But since IBM unceremoniously ditched the project ~2 years ago, it hasn't been stable for more than a month at a time, and the only half-way active project has been MCM. ARP has not returned to finish up its first run. SCC has not been able to get new WUs out the door. HSTB has departed to find a new home. OPNG has, according to the forums, sometimes been available, but only on GPU -- and I had long since switched my GPUs to doing work for FAH. Even when things are "stable", WUs run dry every weekend as soon as there's no staff around to kick the various processes which distribute and ingest them. Makes sense. The bulk of my computing is being done on a ESXi box w/ an ubuntu VM running the BOINC package on 40 vCPUs. I have done a little GPU computing, it has a Quadro P400 passed through to it. Your comment on the astrophysics / cosmology makes sense, I am of the same mindset. Not sure whether my current setup makes sense to move to FAH, my understanding is that FAH really doesn't benefit much from CPU processing (which I have in spades) but more so from GPU.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 02:09
|
|