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

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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!"

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World Community Grid Badge System

Based on a post on the World Community Grid statistics system, I have decided to write this post hopefully starting a discussion on the pros and cons of each system.  World Community Grid uses total run time dedicated to each project instead of relying on the point system that basically every other badge awarding project uses ( though there seems to be no firm set standard for what gets a point/

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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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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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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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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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