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EliteAlien
Premium Member
join:2002-09-27
Plain Dealing, LA

EliteAlien

Premium Member

[OT] Been a while.. have a question

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.

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

leibold

MVM

It does seem a waste to not use spare cpu capacity in a company setting like you describe.

The technical issue with such an idea is that (as unlikely as it is) there is simply no way to guarantee that the distributed client software would not at some point cause a problem.

The second issue is even more important but often easier to deal with. Before using computing resources for any purpose that is not directly related to the company you need to ensure that you have the appropriate permissions. There are cases where people with good intentions lost their job over the participation in distributed computing projects because the use of otherwise idle cpus was nevertheless seen as a form of theft.

At my workplace we utilize boinc for our burn-in testing of new servers (something boinc is really good for since it exercises cpu, memory, disc and network) but we do take it off before putting the machine into production. For any given server that may only be a week or two of running boinc but these tend to be powerful machines and over the years those workunits have added up to far more then I contribute at home.

I hope someone else can advise you on the GPU questions. Most of the systems I work with have simple 2d video framebuffers or if they do have a GPU it is not supported (too old, too weak).

EliteAlien
Premium Member
join:2002-09-27
Plain Dealing, LA

EliteAlien

Premium Member

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.