Happy New Year!

I did not post this goal for the year I set 1 week ago ( I know it was a very long term goal), but seeing as how I was close to the Gold Medal Ranking on World Community Grids Human Proteome Folding Phase 2. Seeing that it was close to possible, I put forth all of my limited ( for the holiday seasons) crunching efforts towards getting that badge.

As you can see by the side bar, and the World

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BOINC: CPU Time vs CPU Utilization

I mentioned I was going to run this experiment awhile back, and while I have been running it, I forgot exactly how my computer initially behaved, so switching a few settings back, I can now give a report on whether it is best to cut back on CPU Utilization or cut back on Percentage of CPU time BOINC uses.

Results:  I have found that in terms of both temperature control, and credits earned in a

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Graphics Cards (if I could dream)

PNY Technologies VCQ4000-PB Quadro 4000 PCIE X16 (Google Affiliate Ad)

I have been reading a lot about graphics cards lately, and comparing oh so many of them.  I have been fighting really hard to resist the urge  to not buy all the parts for a new computer. Of course what graphics card you use really depends on what you will be using the computer for when you are not crunching away.  Maybe

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Be Active On Forums

I will admit when I first started crunching I was a little stir crazy, I didn't quite find my "calling" yet so to speak.  In fact for someone viewing my stats, it looks like I crunched a little of almost everything for awhile, and I admit it certainly felt that way.  While being a mathematician, at first I felt I should crunch mathematics based projects, but upon a bit of an epiphany I realized,

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Define Device Profiles

I have recently realised the full importance of defining device profiles for each device you run.  Especially when the projects themselves allow you to set the specs with the project which over rides anything you have set with boinc on your machine.  Though the only project I have really ever see do that is World Community Grid.

I honestly do not remember if I set the default profile for World

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Happy 8 years to World Community Grid!

I have almost exclusively been dedicating my CPU's to World Community Grid for the past month now.  Why?  It offers a large variety of projects run by very impressive teams, with potentially profound implications to the sustainability, and over all living conditions of our planet. 

While this post is a little early, their official birthday is November 16th, I would just like to encourage anyone

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My biggest issue with Linux

Do not get me wrong, I love Linux, and I have found a way to get to use basically any program I want to use from Windows on Linux.  But for a cruncher, whose biggest work horse, non GPU processor is located in a laptop with serious heat issues, Linux has one big flaw.  That flaw is its lack of tools to be able to effectively manage heat.

 When I ran windows I relied heavily on a TThrottle

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Milkyway@home on Raspberry Pi (FAILED)

Tuesday Oct 9th:

Found out yesterday that there are a few other projects that offer files which you yourself can compile to customize it for your own system.  These even work on ARM processors ( the big hurdle towards crunching boinc projects on the Raspberry Pi). One of which is Milky way @ home, so I got to work on it last night, only to realize somehow the whole boinc client and manager pair

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Cold Weather Joys

I have seen a few articles, about how many large IT companies, such as Facebook, that need massive server farms to keep their "product" available to everyone all the time, have started building quite a few of these sever farms far far north in which the weather almost year round acts as natural cooling for the servers, while the heat from is used to heat the offices of the workers in those

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Boinc On Raspberry Pi Page Updated.

The page located in the top bar of my blog, focusing on Boinc  on the Raspberry Pi has been updated.

The Big news is I have learned that Radioactive@home is now supported on the Raspberry Pi.  Sadly this makes the only two projects which seem to be supported with little to no effort on the Raspberry pi reliant on extra pieces of hardware.   Radioactive at home requires radiation detecting

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Tough Decisions-- the retirement of a Machine

Today, for my oldest laptop, the one I dedicated to office use, I marked each project it is attached to through BOINC to no longer receive tasks.  As such it is my plan to retire the machine, and hopefully let it live out its remaining days peacefully.  The real question is what prompted this decision?

For one I am not in a position to pump much money into old machines just to keep them working,

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Uwingu

I will not plan on doing posts like this on a regular basis, and I am a bit surprised I am writing this post myself. I would like to throw my name into the hat, and throw my support behind Uwingu. 

Why?

While some may argue exactly how much Mathematics is considered a Science, I share many of the same experiences and pains with other graduate students and researchers in the Sciences.  I know

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Tech Can Make it Too Easy!

While I am one of the millions who own an iPhone, I am not an apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I lean more towards the apple hater side of the equation than the apple fan boy, though I wouldn't call myself either.  But now having every single machine I have running Linux apple iTunes is basically out of the question now, not that I bought much from them anyway.

I will say

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A funny thing happened

Just when you think you understand computers and certain sets of commands, weird almost  nonsensical things can happen.  So to tell the full story on Wednesday my AC broke down, so trying to keep things as cool as possible in my place, I turned off all my computers when they were not in use, that included my desk top.  I turned it back on on Friday, then checked on it a hour or so later.

Well my

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Raspberry Pi Update

 

Good News.... As you can see is it is here. And is pictured below in the raw.




The good news, there is a wealth of easy to follow information out their on getting it set up, and as they have been out for awhile most major issues have help forum posts describing how to solve them (more on my main issue later).  To get the full feldged Raspberry pi experience, and deciding to finally test out

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My Current list of supported Projects

So having spent computing time on a large number of projects, I am now trying to cut back and focus my computing energies.  So my current list of supported projects is:

Project (resource share)
BOINC SIMAP (100)
EDGeS@home (20)
Einstein@home (100)
eon2 (100)
GPU Grid (100)
Poem@home (40)
World Community Grid (100)
Yoyo@home (100)

Of course these are all projects I feel are quite interesting

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BOINC on Raspberry Pi

Oh my, oh my, I am gonna try! Alright that's enough of the rhyming. So intrigued by technology, and fun ways to play around with items, and while not using them letting them crunch BOINC projects. I am going to experiment with crunching boinc projects on a Raspberry Pi. There will be a dedicated page at the top of the blog used to catalogue my effort, which will likely be coupled with many

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Always Check Your Machines

I feel like I have taken for granted the fact that computers have gotten to the point where they basically just work, and just work wonderfully at least 90% of the time.  Well I recently got back from a trip to my parents in which I had my tower turned off the whole time. One of the first things I did upon returning was turn the machine on, which is basically set up to not require any other

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Hard Drives

Hard drives are the part of a computer that really drives me nuts.  While their are far more important parts of a computer, the hard drive seems to be the essential component of a computer that just calls it quits like a prima donna drama queen of computer components.  While I as a rule try to avoid dragging my computer from place to place unless absolutely necessary ( as a student when I spend

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MSL Curiosity Rover

Breaking with the general theme of this blog, but still incredibly related to science an human understanding of our universe.  I would like to congratulate the MSL Curiosity rover team, on all their incredibly hard work and successful landing of the rover on mars.  I did not expect watching the feed would be as exiting as it was, nor prior to watching the feed did I realize exactly how involved

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Dream Machines

One of the few magazines I subscribe to is MaximumPC, and I got around to reading part of the latest issue, which is this Dream Machine issue.  I could not help but imagine how incredible such a machine would be or crunching BOINC projects, though at about 14-15 thousand USD, it is definitely completely out of my price range.   It used an 8 core Xeon chip, which some googling indicates that it

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Being a dedicated Cruncher is not free

All the joy that came from releasing my first few batches of projects on my tower complete with CUDA enabled graphics card, basically came to a near grinding halt when my utility bill came at the end of July.  While not outrageous, and not un-affordable, it lead me to step back and consider a few things.

First things first, while the bill was almost double what I expected, I can not blame it all

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Which projects should you crunch? Standard office Desktop

If the Desktop is over 5 years old you may want to refer to my previous post, but some parts of this post might be useful.  Also by Standard office desktop, I do not mean a gaming rig, i.e. something that likely contains one if not more high quality GPU's, that has added features up the wazoo, and potentially has certain items overclocked.  I mean something you'd likely find in your office ( if

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Which projects should you crunch? 5+ year old System

While we all have our own interests, and as such different projects strike each of us as worthwhile, I will give my thoughts on a few Boinc Projects, and their suitability for a given system. As I cut down and refined the projects I am running, I have only run a hand full of them across most of my machines. As such the projects I will focus on in this post are: Prime Grid, World Community Grid

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I Created a Monster

The very first project given to my GPU was a GPU grid long run project, which it says top notch cards could crunch in 8-12 hours. Well I knew for certain my card is not "top notch" especially with the price I paid. But after a little more than 39 hours of crunching it completed a project whose BOINC credits amounted to about 5 months of credits with the typical running of m other two machines.

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Optiplex 745 Signing on

In my very first blog post I mentioned that I was expanding my "farm" and the first machine I got almost solely for the purpose of crunching number ( will likely be used as a back up machine too), is an Optiplex 745 which in among itself is not the highest powered tower available. But as my second post indicated I got a CUDA enabled GPU with 144 CUDA cores, a nvidia GT 440, which at 80 dollars

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Why you should care about CUDA

I by no means started crunching projects expecting to get any sort of reward out of it other than knowing that I helped progress science. But lately I have found I have gravitated towards projects that offer some sort of reward, even if it is a measly graphic "badge" recognizing some level of accomplishment in the crunching. I do not know why but its nice to feel like you are getting recognized

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Expanding the Farm

If you want to use GPU's to crunch projects, and are a fan of NVIDIA graphics cards, then CUDA is essential, and might as well be your best friend for your crunching projects. CUDA is a parallel computing architecture which makes programs written in higher level languages (C and above, but mostly C) to be able to be executed on a GPU easier than it ever has been before. If you have a CUDA

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