Dust My Arch Nemesis!

I do not know what it is about this apartment, but dust is pervasive, and almost sadistic in this place.   Those of you that know my other interests, know I am rather into Tea and Teaware, and I thought it was bad just to consistently clean my teaware display, which seems to always be getting coated in dust.

Well that build up on the teaware should just be a hint at what is getting sucked into my computers.  The Dust vents are the number one clue of what is really going on in my computers.  So today my mission if I choose to accept it is to try and clean these vents to help keep my computers cool.

Sadly neither of the front panels to my computer have removable dust screens, so I went with the trusty power down and vacuum clean the front.  It was mostly cosmetic on my newest system, as that has been running incredibly cool the entire time I have had it.  The machine that caused concern was my old Optiplex.

Opening it up and really inspecting airflow has me a bit worried.  As the only fan inside the case is a specialized fan meant to funnel air from the front past the huge heatsink for the CPU.   This partially explains why the GPU has been running so toasty, and it may be to early to judge, but I do think my efforts were not completely in vein.

After being on and crunching for nearly 15 minutes My GPU is mostly levelled off at 92C  Which is not quite the improvement I was hoping for of getting it sub 90's ( it has been idling at 95-96C).    I will need to consider what I am going to do with this GPU, as while its Max recommended temp is 100C, I do not feel comfortable running a processor so close to its max recommended temp consistently.  I hate to say this but I may turn this into a machine just for crunching CPU projects and a media center for movies and what not.

Not to mention at night it sounds like it is getting in a fan noise fight with my Laptop when both are crunching away at full force, and I think its starting to get to me and alter my sleep.  So I am now in fan of saving a bit of energy and powering down my loudest systems each night.

Pending Upgrades

Well this week has been disappointing into receiving shipments, but I won't completely go into that.  The one that matters on this blog is not that major, but I caved an decided to upgrade the GPU in my Tower, also known as the Frankenstein computer, or the Workhorse computer.  This worries me slightly as while I hear from my friend that the GPU works fine with the PSU in the system,  and all power calculations say it is acceptable, it is a little below the recommended wattage on the GPU specs.

But this should roughly double the computation speed of the GPU tasks, which rather excites me.  I am going from a 1.5GB GT 440 OEM, to a 2GB GT 640 both of which are Nvidia cards.  This goes from 144 Cuda cores to 384 Cuda cores.  Sadly I am still trying to unravel GPUs so I am not sure if the Cuda cores run on the Graphics clock or the Processor clock, but either way the 640 should be a good improvement.

Thinking I was being both power saving, and nicer to the noise levels in my place at night ( this PC is located rather close to my bed),  decided to go with a passive cooling card.  I hope I will not regret this decision, but I do know for the first few hours of crunching once I receive the card, and get it installed, I will be watching the temps on the GPU like a hawk, and if it gets anywhere close to too high, I will pull the plug, and try and get new fans for my computer.

I hope it does not come to that, but I honestly never tried to look at how well the air flows inside that computer.

Happy crunching!

BOINC: CPU Time vs CPU Utilization

I mentioned I was going to run this experiment awhile back, and while I have been running it, I forgot exactly how my computer initially behaved, so switching a few settings back, I can now give a report on whether it is best to cut back on CPU Utilization or cut back on Percentage of CPU time BOINC uses.

Results:  I have found that in terms of both temperature control, and credits earned in a lengthy amount of time ( lets just say 1 month), that it is better to use all CPU's but throttle back the CPU time.

Hardware: This is on my Dell Laptop running  an Intel i3 Processor with 2 cup's but hyperthreading enabled causing BOINC to view it as 4. Ubuntu 12.04 is my OS.


First set up: Using 50% of the processors, I could only crunch two tasks at once, but it did enable me to crunch projects quicker, as I could increase my CPU utilization to nearly 50% before the temp became unstable ( I like to keep the temp of my CPU below 80C, though at 50% of CPU time it would often flirt above that line, especially if any other task on the computer was running).

Second set up: Using 100% of processors, so I can crunch four tasks at once, in theory this places any stable CPU temps, at a utilization of anywhere over 25% a slight victory.  I recalled 30% being stable in the past, which is why I was keen to try something else, as projects seemed to take forever to complete.  But now ( maybe because it is winter and the temps are in general cooler), I can get stable temperatures while using 35% of CPU time.


If your goal is to finish each task as quickly as possible the second set up is not for you.  But if the goal is to do as much crunching as possible, even if each task does take longer, the second set up seems ideal.  I have not quite thought of an exact way to measure these performance factors, but assuming 50% of CPU's at 50% utilization is identical to 100% of CPU's at 25% utilization, I in theory while running at 35% utilization have a 40% increase in performance over an extended length of time. 

The 40% is calculated, based on CPU time spent on each project.  Two cores, each with 1 project spending 1/2 of every second on a project amounts to 1 second of crunching each second.   While when crunching 4 projects at 35% means each second we advance the combined four projects by 1.4 seconds.  Thus 1.4 is 40% better than 1.

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 Community grid, other then specifying the projects I wished to crunch, or if it read the boinc settings on my main machine and used that.  Either way I have 3 different computers with 3 very different concerns, and it wasn't until looking at ways to consider optimizing them, that I realized the issues I had.

First my oldest computer, a laptop that has been on its last legs for 3 years now ( the energizer laptop).  After reinstating it as a WCG only machine with reduced settings, a few months after I posted I was retiring it, I watched after it downloaded a Clean Energy project that should have only taken 14 hours to complete, but things got fishy after it had been running for 20 or so hours one week.  I realized due to it being shut down at night, and stopped and started for other reasons, that it was a computer like this that they post the notice about system requirements about for the Clean Energy Project.  With checkpoints few and far between ( not sure there really are any), even leaving it running for 4 or so hours at a time might not result in a check point, causing all such data to be lost upon shutdown.  So that was my first test ride.

Secondly the Work horse the tower that has next to no other demands on its processor and gpu 90% of the time, and left to crunch away happily, combined with the fact that it is a tower, it remains quite cool.  This one was suffering far to much being restricted to the level of the others, and upon watching it for some time yesterday and today, I realized somehow the settings were rewritten according to the profile that was my Default for WCG.  Quickly solved by a  new device profile, set to Maximum power.  (Lets see how this works in a few days).

Lastly the machine with so many heat issues its not even funny, my main laptop, so this one I need to constantly toy with, and while it has undeniably the most powerful CPU of the three, the heat issues lead me to throttle its crunching power, just so I don't fry all sorts of components.

So far my experience with these device profiles is rather nice.  I am not sure if WCG limits you to four profiles ( Default, Home, Work, School), but should I need to I will look into finding a way to name your own profiles, and set your own settings. 

Happy crunching and keep on processing away!

My biggest issue with Linux

Do not get me wrong, I love Linux, and I have found a way to get to use basically any program I want to use from Windows on Linux.  But for a cruncher, whose biggest work horse, non GPU processor is located in a laptop with serious heat issues, Linux has one big flaw.  That flaw is its lack of tools to be able to effectively manage heat.

 When I ran windows I relied heavily on a TThrottle program which would automatically throttle down your cpu if the temperature exceeded a certain pre-set amount.  It worked wonderfully, and if I was ever doing something that caused the computer to run extremely laggy, I knew I had to suspend boinc to get through what I was doing.   Otherwise there were little to no problems.

Somehow the Linux community feels no need to develop such a tool, even doing googling for such a piece of software leads to more people talking about it being a hardware error, or poor computer design.  But then again, if its happening under normal use, it likely is one of those errors.  But so few people think about the heat BOINC generates, because so few people crunch boinc, and next to none of them do so on laptops.

It also occurs to me that another reason why they would never think about such a program is that they care so much about performance, that they do not realize that even when you machine is constantly under a mild cpu throttle, for most things that people do on their computers, with the exception of viewing videos for machines with integrated graphics, you see next to no noticeable side effects.  But a pure machine performance purist would consider the fact that for that one program start up, which would have spiked the temp higher than your settings, that it is actually slowed down by fractions of a second.


This makes my biggest issue the fact that even with everything I am trying to do to keep the temp down on my machine, even taking it apart and cleaning out the dust a few months ago, I still face somewhat regular heat issues, on this laptop, which I honestly think was giving too much CPU  for the design, as it does a horrible job getting the heat out of the plastic case.   While my old laptop the base would feel like a stove top that has been turned on, but it never over heated once, because all the heat found its way out of the case in a hurry.

Cold Weather Joys

I have seen a few articles, about how many large IT companies, such as Facebook, that need massive server farms to keep their "product" available to everyone all the time, have started building quite a few of these sever farms far far north in which the weather almost year round acts as natural cooling for the servers, while the heat from is used to heat the offices of the workers in those facilities.   Now that it is starting to get cold in Michigan I am really starting to understand, believe,and embrace that idea.

While when I started running the tower in the middle of the summer, when my electicity bill nearly doubled.  Though sadly there only seems to be 12 months of usage history on the utility companies website, so I only know it is double what my electric usage was in the spring, fall and winter months, and I can not compare it to the previous year when I would have been running the AC consistently.  But now that it is mid to late fall, even with a few rather cold days, I have yet to notice my heater running once even though my Thermostat has been set to heat for the past 3 weeks.

While based on last night, I am sure my furnace will run when winter fully sets in as yesterday with a High of 47F and a night time low of 33F even with the technology running all night long in my little BOINC farm.  And this morning my place was quite cold, but still not quite cold enough to prompt the furnace to kick on, I have hopes that while the electricity usage will remain up, the gas use which often cost the most will be down, and down considerable.

So oddly enough it may seem that the extra electricity costs may help me save money on natural gas costs this winter.  That is very good news.  Now if only I could move to a place where its 40s-60s year round, and get lots of machines.

Being a dedicated Cruncher is not free

All the joy that came from releasing my first few batches of projects on my tower complete with CUDA enabled graphics card, basically came to a near grinding halt when my utility bill came at the end of July.  While not outrageous, and not un-affordable, it lead me to step back and consider a few things.

First things first, while the bill was almost double what I expected, I can not blame it all directly on the crunching, as here just like the rest of the country there was an outrageous heat wave throughout most of the month of July, causing my air conditioner to run excessively.  But at the same time having computers crunching projects is counter productive to an air conditioner.  Something I always try and consider, for instance in the summer my tea drinking is mostly teas that require less boiling of the kettle, which is basically a heat radiator that serves another purpose.  I also avoid using the oven when possible, and when I do use the oven I turn my air conditioner off, until well after the food is done cooking and the oven has been off awhile.

In that vein, I have decided during the summer I will keep an eagle eye on the weather, with weather.com often pulled up on my machine.  My goal is to turn off my tower when the outside temperature is over 85  F.   I will also keep it off on days that the night time low temperature is not below 70 F.  Both of these are aimed at keeping my AC from running like mad, and saving me a little bit of green.

 The positive side to this, is gas is usually more expensive than electricity.  As such in the winter months, I may view crunching the same way I view my tea drinking, while it is a use of energy, the heat helps heat my apartment, causing my furnace to run less, allowing me to get a little extra satisfaction out of the money spent on that energy.