@MJH

Thanks, I'm very interested in hearing the details. 4 GPUs per motherboard is my goal.

I'll definitely take a look at Donate@home when my 7970 arrives.

More than happy to see this photo of lab hardware.

I'd love to see some pictures too. MJH, you do realize that your goals are different than ours (most of us). While you design for one project, our systems are designed to run many projects with many different needs. We also run CPU projects at the same time, generally on all cores. Projects like POEM need massive CPU support. Other GPU projects need almost none. Most scientific projects are CPU only so we need to be able to support those too. Most of my GPUs are ATI so I ran up 500,000,000 credits on Donate, hopefully it helped a little to fund a budding researcher. But there are so many good projects to support...

Regards/Beyond

Off-peak electric is a scam. Most people revert to their old habits, and the electric companies know that - that's why they turned up, and left in shock. I think it's only GPU crunchers that can actually benefit.

Running two same type GPU's can be a real pain. For here it's usually not an issue, but POEM can't even use two same type cards which means complicated settings, outages and hands on project juggling. I concur with MrS' analysis; POEM outages are common and running optimally isn't normal. With no other real bio-medical ATI research projects it makes getting an ATI less attractive. Einstein and Albert don't give much credit and their ATI app is slower than their CUDA app. MW often has outages. Ditto for SETI and donate has more issues than GPUGrid. You can get very high credit from a GeForce 600 series GPU at PEOM and reasonable credit here. So I think if someone wanted a GPU an NVidia has a good shout.

It use to be the case, with previous apps, that high PCIE rates were important to GPUGrid. That situation unexpectedly changed with the 4.2app, and PCIE2 based systems are fine. Its also the case that one CPU is sufficient to fuel the GPUGrid apps. This means that older systems are fine for here. At POEM the opposite is true, you need massive PCIE bandwidth and as many CPU cores/threads as possible. Even an overclocked i7-3770K with high end memory & SSD struggles to fuel a single GTX660Ti with no other projects running.

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On the bright side...
The Folding@home guys at Stanford have been making progress for AMD cards.
They have a new lead GPU developer.

Latest FAHBench results show that AMD cards are quite capable at processing explicit and implicit WUs (older gen cards and fahcores could only work on implicit WUs).

I just want to be able to contribute my GPUs to projects that focus on disease research and not so heavy on the CPU usage.

Sadly at the moment POEM@home, GPUGRID and even F@h aren't options for me. :(

Projects like POEM need massive CPU support.

POEM needs in first line much RAM Bandwidth ;) i tried that with underclocking and overclocking a dual core CPU. with no in/decrease of GPU Load. But when i changed only some mhz in the ram Clock it de/increased massive.

@ evil penguin: i wish folding@home would go back to BOINC :/

@ skygiven: huh? MW has not really interupted here since months..since they got the latest GPU Problem out.

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Hmmm, maybe AMD wasn't such a sound purchase after all. Seems like there are some options for it however. I couldn't give 2 hoots about the credits so Albert or Einstein will do fine, maybe Folding@home is where it will go. I wouldn't crunch MW or SETI if they were the last projects standing in fact the sooner they blow up and never return the better. I'll put my 7970 to good use somewhere when it arrives. Optimal crunching? Well, it's a worthy goal but life is too short to lose sleep over it. I guess that's easier to say when one gets electricity as cheap as I do.

Your HD7970 will do fine at POEM, and Einstein, Albert or Folding would be good backup projects. I haven't really looked at Folding for a long time. The last time I was there I think a high end GPU could only match the performance of a high end CPU, which seemed a bit of a waste to me.

I wasn't aware that MW was running so smoothly, but since POEM and Donate it's been largely relegated to a backup project. Not Sky!

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> I wouldn't crunch MW or SETI if they were the last projects standing in
> fact the sooner they blow up and never return the better.

What don't you like about MW?

Your HD7970 will do fine at POEM, and Einstein, Albert or Folding would be good backup projects. I haven't really looked at Folding for a long time. The last time I was there I think a high end GPU could only match the performance of a high end CPU, which seemed a bit of a waste to me.

I wasn't aware that MW was running so smoothly, but since POEM and Donate it's been largely relegated to a backup project. Not Sky!

Now that both the GPU and CPU clients can handle the same type of work, GPU WUs are using a "unified GPU/SMP benchmarking scheme".

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=22808

A GTX 570 was getting over 150k PPD.
Crazy high bump in points.

> I wouldn't crunch MW or SETI if they were the last projects standing in
> fact the sooner they blow up and never return the better.

What don't you like about MW?

It's run by a dirty skank who steals crunchers away from other projects by paying exhorbitant (understatement) credits. It's a rogue project.

Maybe, but I think that the goal of the project is more important than the credits. Furthermore, I would say that MW has a better goal than SETI, because it can be useful, however I view SETI as almost throwing work away looking for sentient alien signals. I would crunch for them if they were the "last" project available, but there are more dire issues that need to be solved.

In conclusion, I think computers can focus on better projects than SETI and MW, however it is not my decision to make, and also SETI has helped to develop distributed computing to where it is now, and without SETI, distributed computing would probably be a lot less popular, or efficient, in terms of the applications used. I hope what I said makes sense, I just wanted to share my views.

That's the same kind of flawed logic that says "During WWII we developed electric welding equipment and procedures to speed the joining of metals for the purpose of building ships faster, lighter and stronger therefore we should have another war so we can develop even better electric welding equipment and procedures." (Lincoln electric did in fact develop DC welding machines, extruded flux coated electrodes and low-hydrogen welding rod in response to war time ship building needs and is credited in many circles with making D-day possible. Prior to low-hydrogen electrodes ships broke apart at sea due to welds failing from hydrogen embrittlement. Lincoln electric did the research, found the cause of the weld failures and engineered the solution... 7018 welding electrode which is now the workhorse of the welding industry.)

All of the BOINC development work could have (and should have) been done at a project that has a reasonable chance of yielding success. SETI's chances of finding ET is so minute we may as well say it is zero. That is fact, not romantic fiction. If there were no other project in need of donated CPU time then I would say it doesn't matter if CPU time is wasted on SETI but that is not the case. I know of 30 projects who stand a much higher chance of success and their need for donated time is real. If I find time I want to form a group that will lobby NSF and whoever else funds SETI to stop wasting money on SETI so that the CPU time wasted there can be diverted to worthy objectives. Oh I am pretty sure aliens exist; I just know we're never going to find them with SETI's method.

As for MW's goal... their goal is to steal crunchers. A pox on them as well as the credit system that makes it possible for rogue projects like MW to work their evil.

Abolish credits, abolish MW, abolish SETI; those are my goals. No credits no crunchee? That's BS and I'm gonna prove it.

Alas, this thread has decayed into another credits debate.
The solution is still GPU performance X GPU usage = credits, and the solution to the scheduler is still have a separate GPU scheduler. Both were suggested years ago...

This project utilizes the GPU more than POEM, Albert, Einstein and several other GPU projects. The power draw is higher, and it's CUDA based which means its as complex as it gets. It's sad that less useful projects that don't utilizes the GPU well, perform less complex calculations can pay stupid amounts of credits, but what's really sad is that people crunch for them and think they are achieving something.
You can certainly learn lessons about GPU crunching and develop code, but finding the millionth digit of Pi isn't finding a cure for Cancer, or a drug treatment strategy. I think the banks are getting enough support from us without us spending money finding new primes for them for their high security transactions, while they leave the back doors open and sell our info on to the latest scam artist.

While it's everyone's own choice what they crunch for, and some people do have genuine interest in astronomy, watching others brag about get massive credits for stupid research puts many off crunching altogether.

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> I wouldn't crunch MW or SETI if they were the last projects standing in
> fact the sooner they blow up and never return the better.

What don't you like about MW?

It's run by a dirty skank who steals crunchers away from other projects by paying exhorbitant (understatement) credits. It's a rogue project.

Hum? A high end ati card there (who uses nvidia there?!) gets only a bit mor points then a high end nvidia card in gpugrid ( youncant use the ati here expect donat@home). So i dont think they steal cruncher away. And i think it is better to run MW then prime or collaz ;) due its opencl 1.0 one of my 4850 cards can crunch only mw as the only science project ( expect ....... Seti.....). I would through it away before calculating on prime or collaz ;)

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Alas, this thread has decayed into another credits debate.
The solution is still GPU performance X GPU usage = credits, and the solution to the scheduler is still have a separate GPU scheduler. Both were suggested years ago...

If the solution really were that simple it would have been implemented long ago. The stumbling block is measuring GPU performance. The stumbling block for CPU related credits is the same... measuring CPU performance. They tried it and there were glaring anomalies and inconsistencies that nobody was happy with. And on top of all that any client side measure of performance is open to cheating.

This project utilizes the GPU more than POEM, Albert, Einstein and several other GPU projects. The power draw is higher, and it's CUDA based which means its as complex as it gets. It's sad that less useful projects that don't utilizes the GPU well, perform less complex calculations can pay stupid amounts of credits, but what's really sad is that people crunch for them and think they are achieving something.

It's the lemming mentality. People are told "this is how you do it... you get the credits then you put them in a big annoying sig and then your wretched pointless life suddenly has quantified meaning". To be accepted into the herd they don't question they just act like all the other water buffalo and chant the mantra "moo, moo, I cannot crunch without my credits, moo, moo".

You can certainly learn lessons about GPU crunching and develop code, but finding the millionth digit of Pi isn't finding a cure for Cancer, or a drug treatment strategy. I think the banks are getting enough support from us without us spending money finding new primes for them for their high security transactions,

I believe you're referring to the drug money laundering so many of them have been implicated in recently? Or is it their promoting war and conflict so they can rake in huge profits financing those wars that irks you?

I kind of favour cancer and AIDS research too but the counter argument to that is that if people were more careful about what they put in their mouths and where they put their willys there would be far less cancer and AIDS. I hate sticking my nose into other peoples' affairs but they make it my business when they expect my tax dollar to bail them out of trouble.

> I wouldn't crunch MW or SETI if they were the last projects standing in
> fact the sooner they blow up and never return the better.

What don't you like about MW?

It's run by a dirty skank who steals crunchers away from other projects by paying exhorbitant (understatement) credits. It's a rogue project.

Hum? A high end ati card there (who uses nvidia there?!) gets only a bit mor points then a high end nvidia card in gpugrid ( youncant use the ati here expect donat@home). So i dont think they steal cruncher away.

It sounds like they finally mended their ways. Thanks for the info. Well, as long as that skank who started their high credit policy is on MW staff I won't crunch there. Anybody who steals crunchers the way she used to isn't very intelligent in my books so I doubt her research can have any merit.

Don't want to be argumentative but as someone who's run pretty much all of the major GPU projects (a lot and for a long time), in the earlier days MW credits were (and are) slightly higher than Collatz which was arguably because they were using double precision (which is why NVidia doesn't do so well at MW). MW credits were and are well below those in Donate, DistrRTgen, POEM, Moo and the early days of PrimeGrid (until PG lowered theirs).

Edit: I see credits in the same light as playing a game. Only the object is to collect as many credits as possible. Adds a flavor of competition and helps many science projects. The difference as opposed to other games is that you're helping to promote science. A neat idea if you ask me...

'World Community Grids' Help conquer cancer project uses AMD & Nvidia gpus. It's due to finish in about 5 months. An HD7970, using an app_config file, can get 140,000-150,000 boinc points/day. A GTX580 will only get ~25,000.

It is a Bio-science project and after POEM probably the best place to aim your ATI cards. 150K isn't bad (probably better than Einstein and Albert) but you would get far more at POEM; ~1M for an HD7970 (with the right setup)!
I would take the 5 months remaining lifespan with a pinch of salt though, that crystallography project has been around as long as some hills.
I agree that it's certainly not for NVidia cards though; it actually started off as a CUDA project and was later adapted to OpenCL. I think I worked out that two GT240's would match a GTX580 due to the CPU time. Horses for courses.

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