Leibold, thanks for the reply. I agree that I have the ability to use a large number of our desktops for the project, but I don't believe it would be very effective due to the majority only being run during normal operating hours, 8am-4pm. I would attempt to use some of the servers for processing, but with my particular setup, vmware with 3 hosts and hardware failover, I think I'd run into issues with setting up a vm that could use the host properly - mainly due to the fact that I'd have to estimate what I could spare, set a theoretical limit for the vm and hope it wouldn't interfere with our other vms, SQL, exchange, backup processes, etc. And then recreate the vm on two other hosts and aim for the same results. Honestly think it'd be too difficult for the outcome, maybe a total of 10k RAC. Hence, the reason I'm looking to use my machine build to output as much RAC as possible without having to worry about affecting other users within our department.
said by EliteAlien:It's been a long time since I've visited the forums. Seems this place has nearly died and I have missed many things. Over the years I've attempted to keep something around me crunching for our team. Almost 2 years ago now my wife and I had our first child, and I ended up switching jobs shortly afterwards. I am now a network administrator for a decent sized sheriff's office here in Louisiana. I have control of well over 120 desktops and a cluster of servers running vmware. Overall it's a pretty nice setup, well over 100k worth of equipment just in the servers, storage and software. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I can crunch on any of it since it had to be available 24x7x365.
Now that I have said a bit about me, now comes the question I have, since I really haven't delved into boinc much more than the regular installer in quiet some time. I am looking at building a machine for me this coming fiscal year. I should be able to spend around 3k on my build. I have been torn on my build when it comes to the GPUs. I've done quiet a bit of research over the past few days scouring through the official SETI forums, looking at top hosts and GPU configurations vs price of the individual GPUs. I think I may have settled on the Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 770 OC version with their windforce cooler. I think I can purchase a total of 3 of them at this time, at roughly $330 each. If there are better combinations for the money please let me know, if I can get something with roughly the same processing power/money I'll go for that. I'm also curious if it would be smart to use SLI in conjunction with boinc? It seems that everyone just installs the cards individually and let's them act on their own? I wasn't sure about that.
Thanks for the info, it'll all be going back towards the team in the end. I'll try to check in regularly to see if anyone responds.
P.S. - Excuse me for any typos as I typed this on my Galaxy S4.