Why I am never the first to buy a new technology

There seems to be several different types of people in this world, those that always want the newest of everything, and those that like to see what kinks each product has and wait for them to be either worked out or written off as design flaws.  Maybe its because I was one of the early adopters to a particular smart phone, way back several years ago, lets just say anyone that ever had one, mostly refers to those smart phones as intelligent paper weights, which barely functioned well enough to make calls 90% of the time ( if you want to do something besides make a phone call forget it nearly 100% of the time).

Since then I have learned that, I'd rather not be the first to test out a new version of a software, or buy the newest graphics card before they have been tested and been through several versions of drivers, and so on.  So why am I writing this?

nVidia recently released its newest consumer GPU the Titan, which while it is in theory a massively powerful GPU, I read of quite a few crunchers that bought them basically the second they were released, got them, put them in their computers, only to learn that due to driver issues they either did not work or worked poorly with the projects they really wanted to use them on.  Does this mean that Titan will never be a massive crunching card?  No, it simply means the kinks need to be worked out of the development process and find its way into the tweaking of the drivers before they can really shine.

In a certain sense, the people that like to hold off, like I do, owe thanks to those that want the newest items, as we learn from their mistakes, and when we do buy we have products that work near perfectly thanks to the early adopters.

Noise Concerns

For those of you that have a decent sized place to live, and your computers are no where close to your bed, this post will not apply to you.  But I live in a small studio apartment.  So basically everything I own is on one large room, and the only other rooms are a closet and a bathroom in my place.  What that means is all the computers I have on my "farm" are located in the same room I sleep in, and I hate to say this rather close to my bed.

I have recently really been working on improving my quality of sleep, and while the numbers are not certain yet, but with the Sleep Cycle application using sleep notes to monitor how my sleep is altered when I have my two noisiest computers on, computer fan noise is a big issue in affecting sleep when you computers are in your room.  While I hate to say this, but at the same time I am glad from power concerns, my solution is to power down my noisy systems every night.

This has been working wonders, while it is slightly more work for me each night and each morning to turn them on and off, I feel it is really helping.  Combine that with the fact that I am getting more and more frustrated with my optiplex system.  It has no real way to improve its cooling, and it clearly wasn't designed to have a mid to low level GPU added with its own cooling mechinisms and keep things at a nice and cool temperature. 

I try and avoid looking at the temperatures listed on my temp monitors on that computer.  My GT 440 OEM seems to be running steady at 94C while not horrible is still rather scary as 6 degrees between constant running temp and its Maximum recommended temperature is not kosher for me.  At the same time the more and more I look into that computer I see no real way to improve that situation, there are no additional fan mounts, and the after market CPU cooler is designed to basically occupy the entire frontal intake system, which then pumps hot air into the rest of the computer case.  I will repeat that, this system has basically no way to get cool air into the rest of the case that has not travelled past the CPU heatsink.

While I have not measured the temperatures coming off the CPU heatsink, understanding Thermal properties cooling, and Newtons law of cooling basically saying that the bigger the temp difference the quicker and easier the heat goes from hot to cold.  Either way it is very frustrating.

So I am planning on shutting down two computers on my farm each night for the foreseeable future. Just so I can get a nice good night sleep.

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.

Building a Computer Part 1 Finding Parts

In the past week, I sourced the parts for a new Crunching machine, had the parts arrive, assembled them and set up the entire computer.  This is going to be a post detailing my thought processes behind finding the parts.

Step 1: Find your favorite computer parts supplier.

I went with new egg because they have worked wonderfully for me in the past, and I figured "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"  Normally every time I have dreamed of building a computer, and even assembled shopping carts of what I would like to buy, it was really just that a dream machine.  Top of the line everything, including more than what I spent on this computer in Video cards alone, and nearly as much in terms of processors.

Step 2: Decide are you building a Dream machine, or a Realistic affordable machine?

This time I put together a cart, I said, I am going to do to things, look for nice parts that I like, but not top of the line parts, and if possible I am going to go for sale items that have high ratings for user reviews. As I already had the Video card I was going to use in this machine, lets just say it involves a lot of stupidity on my part, and buying a part without actually checking to see if it will fit in its intended machine, all I had to do was get a few key parts, and I even realized I could save money on an optical drive, as for the time being I do not intend on inserting any CD, DVD, etc. into this computer any time soon ( I may purchase a Blu-ray drive for this later).

So as I was going for affordable, and did not need an optical drive, and had a GPU, I needed a Processor, Memory, Mother Board, CPU, Hard Drive Disk, and Power Supply.   Honestly that is it.  ( I should note I also already had the cable to hook the computer up to my TV for graphics.)

Proceeding by my intentions,  I am a major Intel fan, but instead of going for the i7, I decided go for something about half the price, but still incredibly powerful, with an i5 quad core processor.   Then the rest was more down to personal preference, of course making sure each of these parts was compatible.  That being said prior to any mail in rebates I had saved 50 dollars on this computer, for a total price of just under 600 dollars, nearly 700 dollars if you factor in the GPU I already had.

Now I make no claims that 700 dollars is a small amount of money, but I did scope similar systems from large computer companies that make hundreds of identical computers, and I even looked at companies that custom build PCs to specs.  In the first case through large companies like Dell, and HP, a similar system would cost at least $1,000.  While the custom build to design were somewhat close ( of course you realize you pay them for putting it together for you, but at least they take responsibility for that), and for having them take on those burdens, you pay them an extra $100-$200 dollars.

Stay tuned for Part II featuring the actual build.  ( I took pictures, I hope some of them are good enough to post!)


  

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!

World Community Grid Badge System

Based on a post on the World Community Grid statistics system, I have decided to write this post hopefully starting a discussion on the pros and cons of each system.  World Community Grid uses total run time dedicated to each project instead of relying on the point system that basically every other badge awarding project uses ( though there seems to be no firm set standard for what gets a point/ credit between projects).

While World Community Grid attracts a different type of cruncher rather than the point based crunchers of several other well known projects. In theory total run time helps put everyone on an even playing field, where it really just measures how many hours each core has been logged on and crunching.  So the amount of money people pour into their machines, or spend on building farms for crunching, does not make as large of a difference on other projects.  I.e someone with a 10 year old machine, can not lag far behind someone with a 3 year old machine, even though the 3 year old machine has a far faster and more efficient CPU.

My issue, is that World Community Grid minimally takes into account how much work someone is actually doing towards their projects.  I have a GPU that has crunched quite a few of World Community Grids Help Conquer Cancer's GPU tasks, which from what I have read is roughly the equivalent of 2 of the CPU tasks for Help Conquer Cancer.  A HCC CPU task takes about 2.5 hours on average based on the statistics on the World Community grid site, while the run time awarded to an HCC GPU task is the total run time of that task, so for me it would be about 30-40 minutes.  This seems very odd as for the same amount of work towards the project, one person can be awarded 5 hours, and another person can be awarded half an hour towards a badge.

I see both sides of this argument, in GPU Grid people basically buy their way to the best badges, and into places of high recognition, though having several of the top of the line graphics cards.  So I understand why World Community Grid wants to try and avoid that, but at the same time I feel they fail to properly acknowledge someone actual contribution to a project in terms of work done.

Thoughts?

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.

Always Check Your Machines

I feel like I have taken for granted the fact that computers have gotten to the point where they basically just work, and just work wonderfully at least 90% of the time.  Well I recently got back from a trip to my parents in which I had my tower turned off the whole time. One of the first things I did upon returning was turn the machine on, which is basically set up to not require any other assistance from me besides that.  Not that I care about credits but 2 nights later and there seems to be little to no projects, especially no big projects that should have found their way through from my GPU.

Getting slightly concerned, I decided to pull up the computer and look at what is going on.  I was greeted upon opening BOINC with the following message next to the GPU Task: "GPU MISSING."  I am not entirely as two the cause, I have two guesses based on what had been going on.

Guess 1:  I am not absolutely sure about this but there could be something weird in how BOINC handles expired tasks for GPU's.  I had imagined it would handle it much like it handles any other expired task, abort it, or just run it to completion and continue crunching it to completetion.


Guess 2: The much more likely of the two, but still somewhat confusing in how I think computers work ( most of the time).  There was apparently an update for my NVIDIA drivers.  My guess is upon having the update register, even though I did not run the Ubuntu updater yet, it possibly caused my GPU to register as Missing from BOINC's perspective.


In either case running the updates, aborting the expired project, and restarting caused the problem to go away.  Has anyone had something similar happen? If yes, do you have any better idea of what the cause was?

Dream Machines

One of the few magazines I subscribe to is MaximumPC, and I got around to reading part of the latest issue, which is this Dream Machine issue.  I could not help but imagine how incredible such a machine would be or crunching BOINC projects, though at about 14-15 thousand USD, it is definitely completely out of my price range.   It used an 8 core Xeon chip, which some googling indicates that it should have Intel's hyper-threading technology, meaning it can process 16 tasks at once.  In addition to that it has two double core GPU's making it a quad SLI set up.

The GPU configuration raises quite a few issues in terms of crunching.  Some googling seems to indicate that the later versions of BOINC disable SLI while in use, so each GPU should run independently.  Though I am not sure if this is true for the somewhat recent Dual GPU video cards.  Even with all my reading on those, I am still not sure if both of the GPUs on one card, could in fact operate completely independently of each other.  Either way I am sure as they are top of the line video cards ( though definitely aimed more towards gaming use) they can crunch away incredibly effectively to no end.

While for any intents and purposes I would want to use for the system, nearly all of it would be excessive, except or maybe half the RAM and the liquid cooling.  Though I have always been incredibly skeptical of liquid cooling, while I know it cools far more effectively, I am just incredibly worried about a leak and basically ruining the entire system.  But the items such as 12 TB or Hard drives, not counting the storage in the form of SSD's.

While I have started, and am working on building up what I have dubbed my "Technology Play Fund" it had been completely wiped out when getting all the necessary items for the Optiplex 745.  Though one push in this Dream Machine issue is the fact that technology is advancing so fast, and a fixed performance level is always becoming less and less expensive, that its not uncommon for some key components and high priced performance pieces to only 4 or 5 years later to not just be affordable, but practically standard.  So in 5 years will a good number of BOINC crunchers have similar machines?

While I do not quite have the technology background to do this, seeing how effective a video card can be at computing/ crunching these BOINC projects, my Ideal computer may be a cluster type system in which each  board has one or two graphics cards.  Better yet is this type of system could be modular allowing it to be expanded by adding new boards one by one, to increase its computing power.

What is your Dream Machine?

I Created a Monster

The very first project given to my GPU was a GPU grid long run project, which it says top notch cards could crunch in 8-12 hours. Well I knew for certain my card is not "top notch" especially with the price I paid. But after a little more than 39 hours of crunching it completed a project whose BOINC credits amounted to about 5 months of credits with the typical running of m other two machines. The photo above shows the day that project was completed, with basically every day before that dwarfed almost to almost nonexistence on that chart.

Another fun chart is shown below, it is my world position on Boinc based on Total credit, while I was slowly making progress, the day that project validated and posted, BAM! my world position jumped off a cliff! While I want to see if I can find a Linux tool which will let me benchmark my GPU, it seems the 144 CUDA cores and 1.5GB of RAM are kicking @$$ and taking names, even if it does not have the quickest clock speed of GPU's out there in a similar price range.

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.

Expanding the Farm

If you want to use GPU's to crunch projects, and are a fan of NVIDIA graphics cards, then CUDA is essential, and might as well be your best friend for your crunching projects. CUDA is a parallel computing architecture which makes programs written in higher level languages (C and above, but mostly C) to be able to be executed on a GPU easier than it ever has been before. If you have a CUDA enabled GPU there is one more important bit of information which you should look for. This is the number of CUDA cores. As I do not yet have a GPU crunching projects yet, I am a bit unsure if CUDA cores behave similar to CPU cores for crunching BOINC projects. ( Intuition tells me no, but if it is yes I will be pleasantly surprised, as it is very easy to get GPUs with a substantial number of CUDA cores).

I've spend some time Googling, but sadly I can find no direct comparison for ATI/ AMD graphics cards. But this does not mean that they can not be used for crunching projects. For anyone looking to use GPU's to crunch projects there is this very helpful resource. In case anyone didn't really want to click the link, it sounds like it is mostly any AMD R600 or R700 platform GPU or later.

One last thing to note, not sure it matters with most semi-recent GPU, but for BOINC projects the card will need to have 256MB or memory designated to the card itself. This memory limit is the bare minimum for most projects ( even for standard CPU processing), with some projects needing more than to run on any given processor.

One more small fun fact about GPU and crunching projects. Most commercial CPU on the market today if not all of them top out at less than 100 GFLOPs even with overclocking. While it is easy to find a GPU for around 100 dollars that easily breaks 100 GFLOPs, if not several times that. A small reminder a FLOP is a floating point operation, the small s denotes that its a measurment of how many of them per second, and the G is Giga with the typical meaning of that prefix in the computing world.