Building a Computer Part 2: The Build!

I am not sure what to believe any more, the more you watch videos on building a computer the more and more the emphasize what goes wrong. ( New Egg has a nice 3 part series, part 2 features the actual building. ) These issues, seem like they can be so accidental, and not actually something you consciously do.  Static electricity being the biggest one.  Keeping this in mind probably pointed to my biggest issue in this build, sometimes force is necessary.



Part one was the test build before putting everything in the case.  the biggest thing to do in this portion is get the CPU into place.  The Intel i5 3350P uses a socket which they bill as "zero insertion force"  which let me just say can be quite misleading.   Let me just say while you just lightly drop/ place the CPU into the socket, of course being very careful to not touch the processor itself.  To close "cage/bracket" which locks the CPU into place it both sounds and feels like you are breaking something, as it honestly requires quite a bit of force.  Then it is simply putting on the heatsink/ fan, I decided to go with the stock fan included ( while I am a cruncher I am not into overclocking, so this should be sufficient).  Hook up the ram and the GPU, plug in the few required cords for the PSU, and do a test boot, hope you see the splash of the BIOS on the screen, and celebrate.




This is where the first issues of this build started to plague me,  I was not getting sustained power, so I was very scared something was shorting out the entire system.  Careful examination of the cords, caused me to realize the cord was not completely plugged into the PSU.  This was not the end of the issues, I was not getting anything on screen even though I did have sustained power this time.  Turns out more cords were not plugged in all the way, this time being the HDMI cord from the GPU to the screen.


Then comes the annoying part, putting everything into the case.  Let me just say your motherboard users guide is so important for knowing what cords go where.



Everything is in except the GPU and the cords are not a complete mess.  Lets see it with the GPU in, a double form factor though passively cooled card Nvidia GT 640.



Alright lets boot up!  Uh Oh, nothing is showing up on screen.  The cord is completely plugged into the GPU, but the not enough force plagued me once more, turns out I did not completely seat the GPU, it needed that extra force, which I was scared to give because the MB bends slightly while inserting it.

Well now it is crunching away, though still in tweak mode.

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!

Graphics Cards (if I could dream)

PNY Technologies VCQ4000-PB Quadro 4000 PCIE X16 (Google Affiliate Ad)

I have been reading a lot about graphics cards lately, and comparing oh so many of them.  I have been fighting really hard to resist the urge  to not buy all the parts for a new computer. Of course what graphics card you use really depends on what you will be using the computer for when you are not crunching away.  Maybe because I am a big fan of GPUgrid, when I think graphics cards I think nvidia, and their cuda techonology.  But to make sure it can run other programs too check to make sure it works with OpenGL, ( the more recent the version it supports the better).

Things like the Quadro 4000 are a very nice choice.  Though with a bit more power and a similar outlay of money, a Geforce 690 may be the way to go, double the GPU chips double the fun right?  For a more affordable price you can find PNY Technologies VCQ600-PB Quadro 600 1GB DDR3 PCIe (Google Affiliate Ad)
 which is also on GPU grids recommended list.  Another reason why I mention these are the facts that they have at least 1GB of memory reserved for the card alone.

Of course if I really could dream I would set up a system with 2 if not 3 GPU's which I imagine could replace my furnace, though be just as costly a way to heat my home. 

Again these are just dreams.  But I feel us crunchers always wonder how we can get better and better systems just to help these scientists with their work.

A funny thing happened

Just when you think you understand computers and certain sets of commands, weird almost  nonsensical things can happen.  So to tell the full story on Wednesday my AC broke down, so trying to keep things as cool as possible in my place, I turned off all my computers when they were not in use, that included my desk top.  I turned it back on on Friday, then checked on it a hour or so later.

Well my GPU was not crunching, it was saying GPU missing, so I went through the list of updates and installed them, and restarted, still no go.  It showed no new driver up dates, nor a new version of the driver for my GPU, so I figured a complete reinstall of the drivers and the CUDA toolkit and SDK and all that fun stuff.

So I found a walk through that seemed to only get me half way and left me thinking my computer was in far worse shape than I started.  A few steps into the walk through it told me to purge all the nVidia files, which I did, restarted, and my Computer started emitting sporadic high pitched beeps when running.  Sadly the rest of the walk through failed for me, I could not get it to work what so ever.  From the log in screen it wanted me to hit ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a terminal type screen, the problem though is I couldn't go further, after logging in, it failed to accept any sort of Bash Command. well actually it failed to recognize any sort of command.

That is the point I called it quits last night.  Talked with a few people, and decided a fresh install might be the way to go.  This morning I wanted to give things one more try, so not using the guide any more, I simply logged in and went to the Additional Drivers and installed the drivers, and the updates.  Getting ready to try and find the guide to compiling the SDK and using the CUDA Toolkit, that I had previously used that worked out.  I decided to check boinc, and low and behold, some how my GPU was crunching away.

So it appears the purge command does not do what I thought it does and it somehow left the SDK and Toolkit installation perfectly in place, and it must have just been a bad path name that was fixed upon re-installation of the drivers.

Optiplex 745 Signing on

In my very first blog post I mentioned that I was expanding my "farm" and the first machine I got almost solely for the purpose of crunching number ( will likely be used as a back up machine too), is an Optiplex 745 which in among itself is not the highest powered tower available. But as my second post indicated I got a CUDA enabled GPU with 144 CUDA cores, a nvidia GT 440, which at 80 dollars seems quite resonable, especially for a GPU that can still be used on a Machine that has only a 305 Watt PSU. As I also needed to buy a hard drive for the machine which otherwise I got for practically free due to some wonderful friends in IT, I needed to equip this machine with a brand new OS, what better than Linux? Swayed in my linux choice from my long time tech mentor and college roommate for 3 of 4 years of undergrad, I of course went with Ubuntu, and booted it from a flash drive.

The installation process, went easy. Way too easy, until I thought I got everything up and running, and BOINC could not recognize my graphics card. I was about to be PO'd because everything said this card should work, and I did not spend 80 dollars just so I could use HDMI cables rather than a Dell specific DVI format. Well a little bit of Google foo, lead me to a page that was incredibly helpful, but somehow I can not find at all when searching from my Windows PC. I swore it was under the Ubuntu help forums.

Well, let me just say getting CUDA up and running took my otherwise pain free set up and start up process, and turned it into a major pain. I have no problem working with a terminal, but so much of everything I had form the page to set it up was type these two commands, then wait 5 minutes, type two more commands, and wait another 5 minutes, until eventually you get to the compiling process of the entire SDK, which I almost wish I timed it, well lets just say for anyone that goes through this process, when you set it to compile, you might as well find something else to do for awhile, and just make sure you can look at it every 10 or so minutes to see if it is done. Sadly though the first and second time I tried to go through and get everything working, it failed. When I went to test to make sure the install worked properly I got an error. Thankfully the third time is the charm, and it is now happily crunching away.

While I personally love linux, and while it is becoming more and more user friendly, so much so, that I think the average user could get around and navigate just as well on a linux PC as they can on a Windows or a Mac ( after the brief adjustment phase), it sadly is still true that you can not really do any sort of heavy lifting in Linux without a little bit of knowledge in using the Terminal/ Command Line. Whereas Windows and Mac have gotten to the point that most people with those machines do not even know those things exist on their machines.

Why you should care about CUDA

I by no means started crunching projects expecting to get any sort of reward out of it other than knowing that I helped progress science. But lately I have found I have gravitated towards projects that offer some sort of reward, even if it is a measly graphic "badge" recognizing some level of accomplishment in the crunching. I do not know why but its nice to feel like you are getting recognized even with relatively little effort from the people running the project. A step up, is GPU grid offers two types of badges, level badges, which are based solely on credit towards the project, and publication badges, something that appeals to the academic in me, as these badges link to a specific scientific publication, and let you know how much you helped contribute to the science in that publication.

Possibly the most substantial reward I have yet to come across directly to the owners of the machines crunching the projects is done by Einstein at home. If you are the discoverer of a new pulsar you get rewarded with a nice framed certificate. For example a picture they shared from the last batch they sent out is here.

So I actually encourage projects to find some way you can quantify and reward their participants, even if it is in some completely small way. Also in my personal opinion the more you can tie it to success in a project the better. Currently the only badge I have is one for Harmonious Trees under Yoyo@home which appeals to the graph theorist in me, and I actually know some recent Ph'D students whose dissertation is in a closely related area of graph theory. Instead of just giving me a badge based on the number of credits crunched, it would be nice if they could "estimate" how many trees I found a Harmonious coloring for. Granted based on the projects this can get quite hard as I understand for some topics it may split that one task into many many projects to send out to the participants.