Shhh - Correlizer has available WUs

[Icecold]

I like that each WU doesn't take very long to complete; it makes it seem worthwhile to run it even on older machines. I couldn't justify Folding on one of my Core2Duo machines since it would only get ~1,000 PPD vs 45,000+ on a Phenom X6 with 2 GTX 460's, but the fact that I can see it completing and turning in Correlizer WU's fairly often makes it seem worthwhile. I have 19 cores working on Correlizer right now, time to fire up a couple more machines.

 

[biodoc]

I like that each WU doesn't take very long to complete; it makes it seem worthwhile to run it even on older machines. I couldn't justify Folding on one of my Core2Duo machines since it would only get ~1,000 PPD vs 45,000+ on a Phenom X6 with 2 GTX 460's, but the fact that I can see it completing and turning in Correlizer WU's fairly often makes it seem worthwhile. I have 19 cores working on Correlizer right now, time to fire up a couple more machines.

19 cores! Awesome! :thumbsup:

 

[Icecold]

All of my Folding@Home machines today were getting terrible PPD for some reason, so right now I'm all in on Correlizer with 32 cores.(some of them are pretty slow cores, though)

I have noticed something strange, though. I have a Phenom X4 9150e(first generation Phenom, 1.8GHz quad core) and it completes tasks much quicker per thread than a 2.7GHz Core2Duo. It can complete 4 tasks in roughly 2/3 of the time it takes the Core2Duo to do 2. Core2Duo IPC should be roughly on par with AMD K10 if not a little bit higher, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Maybe there is something about AMD chips it favors? I'm waiting on a motherboard to get here to put my extra AMD 1090t in(just put an FX-8350 in that machine) so once that's here maybe I'll quit running Correlizer on a couple of the machines that are slower at it.

I'm pretty new to distributed computing in general, how long does it usually take for stats to update with Correlizer? Under 'pending credit' on their website I have a bunch of stuff listed, as well as a lot of tasks still waiting on 'ready to report' under BOINC manager, so I'm not sure what my 'average credit' will look like once all that updates.

 

[Rudy Toody]

@Icecold, per @Biodoc, the AMD chips rock on these WUs. My 1100T finishes in about 11:00 min per WU. I have over 1000 WU pending which seems to be the sweet spot for receiving maximum daily scores for my box. We are at the mercy of our wing-men.

 

[biodoc]

@Icecold, it looks as though correlizer stats are only updated once daily.

Here's the TeAm Correlizer stats at Free-DC

Most boinc projects (not all) have a quorum of 2 so each WU is sent out to 2 crunchers. You won't get points until you and your "wingman" finish the WU. Because of this system, it take about 3 days for your PPD to reach maximum. Your RAC will take about 3 weeks (guess) to hit maximum. I'm not sure why it's called "Recent Average Credit". Maybe it should be called NRAC (Not so Recent Average Credit)! :biggrin:

 

[Icecold]

Thanks for the help Rudy Toody and biodoc

I've read a lot of forum posts, FAQ's about folding, BOINC, etc. but there are still occasional things I come across that I'm unfamiliar with. I had not previously heard about the quorum of 2, but that totally makes sense. I had wondered how they validated that the results were accurate, and weren't incorrect due to overclocking or general system instability.

I will give it a couple days to get a good average and then post how long each WU takes on each of my machines to help give others an idea of how each processor I own performs at Correlizer. My biggest observation thus far other than that Phenom / Phenom II does great with Correlizer, is that Piledriver does fairly mediocre. With both processors at stock, my FX-8350 performs very similarly to my 1090t. It takes longer per WU, but is doing 8 at a time vs 6, and when I do the math it seems they're pretty darn close. Anybody with a 2500k/3570k or 2600k/3770k able to post how long it takes each WU to complete? I did some quick googling but couldn't find anything.

 

[biodoc]

Crunch times (minutes:seconds):

1090T@3.2 (6 cores): 11:14
2600K@4.2 (8 logical cores): 14:28
3930K@3.8 (12 logical cores): 19:15
Q9550@3.4 (4 cores): 14:31

 

[biodoc]

We've moved into 4th place in the 2013 Formula Boinc/Correlizer project.

That's good for 12 points since Correlizer released new work.

http://formula-boinc.org/projets.py?lang=en&prj=149&year=2013

 

[Icecold]

We've moved into 4th place in the 2013 Formula Boinc/Correlizer project.

That's good for 12 points since Correlizer released new work.

http://formula-boinc.org/projets.py?lang=en&prj=149&year=2013

Looks like we've dropped to 5th place. As of ~15 minutes ago I've got another 1090t machine up and running(from push of power button to fully booted and ready to go is around 10 seconds, running Linux Mint on a Crucial M4 128GB SSD). It is crunching Correlizer, so right now I'm at 36 cores running Correlizer, but I am probably going to stop running it on 2 of the slower machines running it which would leave me at 32 cores.

It will be more difficult to justify building any more machines at this point as I've used up all my 'spare' parts(usually buy an extra PSU or two when on sale, as well as the occasional case / SSD / etc; this last 1090t build just involved purchasing a used mobo on the cheap, I already had all the other parts lying around)

 

[wayliff]

I'm back in with 7 cores!

SETI.USA is closing in at higher speeds.
We're still a good 2.5M points ahead and holding the lead.

I had to take the 7 cores off for several days to achieve a WCG goal.
I just finished adding 15 cores to this project! go go go!

 

[biodoc]

I had to take the 7 cores off for several days to achieve a WCG goal.
I just finished adding 15 cores to this project! go go go!

Awesome!! :thumbsup:

 

[Icecold]

I moved my FX-8350 machine(with 2 GTX 460's) back to Folding@home but I still have quite a few machines on Correlizer. For the heck of it, I actually fired it up on a spare Pentium D machine and it complete's WU's faster than I would have expected, but that's a spare parts machine that consumes a lot of power so I'm not gonna run that very long. As a curiosity I may see if i have an extra IDE drive to get an old Pentium 3 I have here up and running(IIRC it's 550mhz or something thereabouts) purely as a curiosity to see how long WU's take on that. I'm guessing around 3 hours, so definitely not worth running for any length of time, but it's interesting for me to see the evolution of computer hardware. Has anybody here ran Correlizer on a Pentium, Pentium 2, etc. and if so, do you remember how long WU's took on it?

Either way, my Correlizer RAC may be taking a bit of a dive since I moved the FX-8350 machine back over to Folding@home, but I'll move it back if it affects it too much. We are the #2 team for Correlizer RAC right now and the #1 team overall, so that's pretty cool.

 

[biodoc]

We are the #2 team for Correlizer RAC right now and the #1 team overall, so that's pretty cool.

I agree, very cool!!

My production should be back to normal tonight post PrimeGrid race.

 

[Kiska]

Well Pentium 3 on 700 Mhz takes just above 1 hour to do for moi

 

[Icecold]

My production was down for a few days as I re-arranged and worked on some machines, but should be back up after today. Right now have 34 cores on Correlizer. I am noticing that it seems to run quite a bit faster on Linux, though, unless there's some other variable I'm not realizing. Has anybody else noticed it running faster on Linux? That's the only difference between my 2 1090t machines that I can really point my finger at, and it runs considerably faster on the machine running Linux Mint.

Right now:

AMD FX-8350(stock speed, 8 cores) running Windows 7: 15:04
Phenom II 1090t(stock speed of 3.2GHz, 6 cores) running Windows 7: 11:19
Phenom II 1090t(stock speed of 3.2GHz, 6 cores) running Linux Mint: 9:50
Athlon II X4(2.9GHz, 4 cores, DDR2 ram) running Windows 7: 14:20
Athlon II X4(2.8GHz, 4 cores, DDR3 ram) running Windows 7: 13:01
Phenom X4 9150e(1.8GHz, 4 cores, DDR2 ram) running Ubuntu: 18:21
Pentium E5400(2.7GHz, 2 cores, DDR2 ram) running Windows XP: 22:01

I'm really tempted to pick up one of the Poweredge C6100 XS23-TY3 servers that are on eBay that can be had for ~$1k and would probably double my output. 32 core / 64 thread Nehalem 2.26GHz, 96GB ram all in one box for $1,000, very tempting.(note: they're actually 4 separate nodes, each with 2 L5520 4 core / 8 thread processors, but it's still technically in 'one box')

 

[blckgrffn]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERE...610947?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item1e778ae803 <--?

Very interesting.

 

[GLeeM]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERED...item1e778ae803 <--? Very interesting.

Is this the same thing but $275 cheaper?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERE...959406?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item3ccf5c21ae

What is the catch with these? Does the OS have to be a $2,000 Enterprise Server Linux OS?

Four computers - 64 threads in one box! And only like 450 watts from the wall? Very noisy though

Wish I had the internet bandwidth to support one of these ... and the funds.

 

[Icecold]

Is this the same thing but $275 cheaper?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERE...959406?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item3ccf5c21ae

What is the catch with these? Does the OS have to be a $2,000 Enterprise Server Linux OS?

Four computers - 64 threads in one box! And only like 450 watts from the wall? Very noisy though

Wish I had the internet bandwidth to support one of these ... and the funds.

The main 'catch' is that it's 4 different pc's in one box, so you can't run BigADV, and it's generally preferred to have a single 4p system with a total of 4 processors that are 8 core / 16 thread each. If you know that going in, though, there's not really a catch. Load Linux Mint or whatever you want to run on each node, install Teamviewer and stuff it as far away from sight(and sound) as possible. That's the other 'catch' is that the fans are supposedly EXTREMELY loud, and since the nodes are stacked on top of each other, you can't just run it open cased and replace the heatsinks with aftermarket ones, like some people do with 2u 4p machines. There are some threads at other forums where people are trying to make them run quieter, though. As far as I know these just recently hit the market as some datacenters and whatnot are upgrading to newer systems.

My understanding is each node, accounting for IPC differences between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge, and clock speed differences(but twice as many cores) should be at least as fast in heavily threaded work loads as a 2600k/3770k(not overclocked). So essentially you're getting the compute power of a 3770k and 24GB of ECC ram for ~$250(per node).

You have to really be careful with the eBay listings, though. Some are missing almost all drive cages, and they are expensive to purchase separately. Others(the ones that are like $700) only include 2 nodes. Some have a hard drive for each node, some do not. Some have both power supplies(there's a redundant one in them stock), most of the cheaper ones do not. I've even seen some without ram, but those seem few and far between.

I've really been itching to pick one up as it seems like a killer deal but sometimes it can be tough justifying dropping $1k on something you don't "need", although I could consolidate my file server, VM test box, etc all in just a couple of nodes and still have 2 left over to run distributed computing, encode video if need be, etc.

 

[geecee]

I haven't been getting any new WUs for Correlizer. I'm guessing it has something to do with the feeder process being down on the project status page? Otherwise, there seem to be plenty of available units.

 

[biodoc]

I haven't been getting any new WUs for Correlizer. I'm guessing it has something to do with the feeder process being down on the project status page? Otherwise, there seem to be plenty of available units.

I'm not getting any WUs either. I will keep trying though.

 

[Icecold]

I haven't been getting any new WUs for Correlizer. I'm guessing it has something to do with the feeder process being down on the project status page? Otherwise, there seem to be plenty of available units.

I'm not getting any WUs either. I will keep trying though.

Yeah, same here. Now that the Primegrid race is over I was going to move everything back over to Correlizer. I tried to start getting Correlizer WU's yesterday and couldn't get any, and none today either.

Being fairly new to BOINC, I'm curious if the feeder process being stopped is something that may have been done intentionally(maybe the work it's sending out is invalid or has issues, so they're trying to prevent more bad work from going out or something like that), or do you guys think that it just stopped because there was an issue with the process and needs restarted?

 

[biodoc]

I've got tasks for my 1090T.

EDIT: I guess I was getting work starting March 25th. I need to check my machines more often I guess.

 

[Rudy Toody]

I'm getting work, too.

Biodoc, you have moved back into a tie with me here.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My correlizer box (an E-350 mini-ITX) rig is down, due to needing a CPU fan replacement. (Again!)

 

[biodoc]

I'm getting work, too.

Biodoc, you have moved back into a tie with me here.

I can't figure out what projects those are/