Running On Autopilot

I am happy to announce that I have gotten my systems up to the point that they are running almost entirely on autopilot.  Part of it came with a little training of myself as well, mostly to not mess too often with the computers.  Due to power concerns I am running my least efficient machine only on weekends, and my highest powered machine, which is incredibly quiet runs most of the time.

Every

Read More

What do you do to protect your systems?

Last night into today, large portions of the Midwestern United States into the North Eastern portion had bad ice storms.  While lately I have been taking to turning of all but my most silent system during the night, last night I left my computers off for quite some time to protect them from the storm.

While I have not directly attributed any technologies faults to power surges, I am now quite

Read More

Building a Computer Part 2: The Build!

I am not sure what to believe any more, the more you watch videos on building a computer the more and more the emphasize what goes wrong. ( New Egg has a nice 3 part series, part 2 features the actual building. ) These issues, seem like they can be so accidental, and not actually something you consciously do.  Static electricity being the biggest one.  Keeping this in mind probably pointed to my

Read More

Building a Computer Part 1 Finding Parts

In the past week, I sourced the parts for a new Crunching machine, had the parts arrive, assembled them and set up the entire computer.  This is going to be a post detailing my thought processes behind finding the parts.

Step 1: Find your favorite computer parts supplier.

I went with new egg because they have worked wonderfully for me in the past, and I figured "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Read More

Pending Upgrades

Well this week has been disappointing into receiving shipments, but I won't completely go into that.  The one that matters on this blog is not that major, but I caved an decided to upgrade the GPU in my Tower, also known as the Frankenstein computer, or the Workhorse computer.  This worries me slightly as while I hear from my friend that the GPU works fine with the PSU in the system,  and all

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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,

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More