BOINC Pentathlon 2020

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Pretty sure if I use my work email and phone number I'll be fine, problem is companies get all excited but email and phone blocking rules fix that .

Glad you have a solution for your situation. If you come up with one for mine that doesn't involve spending money I'm all ears.

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Glad you have a solution for your situation. If you come up with one for mine that doesn't involve spending money I'm all ears.

I just remembered I have a $300 Oracle cloud card in my office desk, might also be able to get more of them.

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I just remembered I have a $300 Oracle cloud card in my office desk, might also be able to get more of them.

Is this how you plan on surpassing me this year? With rental servers? 

 

I still want to pick up one of those HP DL560 servers. I still wanna play with a quad socket server. I'm now working on getting things rack mounted because I'm getting tired of shutting down servers and un-stacking them when I want to do maintenance on a server that's not on the top of the stack.

[Windows7ge]

Oh, woe is me, I've disabled NUMA Spanning for the sake of compute performance so I'm now limited to a maximum of 256GB of RAM per VM. Whatever shall I do? 

[Windows7ge]

Need a quick memory refresh. When we bunker it's Limit Upload to 1KB/s and Transfer Files Only Between 00:00 & 00:01 yeah? I think I'm remembering this correctly.

 

Did we ever come to a consensus as to weather or not increasing Store At Least # Day Of Work did anything worthwhile?

[Beowulff83]

Looks like i will be setting up my work laptops custom cooler again.

 

 

[Ithanul]

16 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

@Ithanul

 

You think it would be a good bet to presume something COVID related? Probably the marathon? 

Probably a high chance.  By the wording of the current announcement, this maybe a year where the rule of projects run previous years are not run during the next event is a rule that be ignore during this year event.

 

16 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Grabbed two new Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 240s for a great price! Not the best in the world but fore the price I can't really beat them.

 

AIO on both rigs in time for the event, tasty! 

Nice.  I should get my 5960X back up as well.  Though, I do have a water block for it, but kinda of thinking of just nabbing an AIO for the less headache of having to bend out tubes.

 

5 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Need a quick memory refresh. When we bunker it's Limit Upload to 1KB/s and Transfer Files Only Between 00:00 & 00:01 yeah? I think I'm remembering this correctly.

 

Did we ever come to a consensus as to weather or not increasing Store At Least # Day Of Work did anything worthwhile?

Yep, that is the way to limit the WUs from going out.

 

The Store At Least # Day, depending on project, will allow the manager to ask for enough WUs to crunch that many days.  Though, if I correctly recall, some projects do have limits on how many WUs go out.  Some will base it on the number cores or some other metric.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Did we ever come to a consensus as to weather or not increasing Store At Least # Day Of Work did anything worthwhile?

It does but you have to be careful not to pull too much that you can't complete it in time or you get your account rejected for new tasks because you've been assigned too many too recently. Last year I did the grab as much as a could on a single instance and let it run, this year I'll probably do the same.

[Windows7ge]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

It does but you have to be careful not to pull too much that you can't complete it in time or you get your account rejected for new tasks because you've been assigned too many too recently. Last year I did the grab as much as a could on a single instance and let it run, this year I'll probably do the same.

What I'll probably do then is set the days equal to how many days before the event begins. If they finish the queue then I'll spin up another VM and adjust the # of days accordingly.

[Windows7ge]

Alright, the VM's are up and ready for bunkering.

• Hyper-V (2x 2689v3)
  • VM1 - 8C/16T
  • VM2 - 8C/16T
  • VM3 - 8C/16T
  • VM4 - 8C/16T
• PROXMOX (2x 2670v1)
  • CT5 - 8C/16T
  • CT6 - 8C/16T
• QEMU/KVM (1950X)
  • VM7 - 8C/16T
  • VM8 - 8C/16T

Hyper-V the plan is to copy the VM virtual disk. Each time I finish the queue and don't receive new work I'll replace the VM's boot drive with another and will repeat this process till dump day.

 

PROXMOX I used Containers because they have less overhead (run off the host kernel). Here I'm just going to clone the CT each time I fill a previous one.

 

QEMU/KVM I enabled hugepages and pinned the VM's cores to the CPU's respective NUMA Nodes so it won't have to share data over the Infinity Fabric. This will yield performance comparative to native.

 

Everything is running either Ubuntu Server 19.10 or Ubuntu 18.04. If anybody wants to know how to remote manage this many machines centrally just run the commands:

sudo -i
echo 'x.x.x.x' >> /var/lib/boinc-client/remote_hosts.cfg

Where x.x.x.x is the ip of the host to manage the instances. Everything needs Static IP addresses but with it configured this way you can manage all of them from one computer through BOINC Manager:

 

[Windows7ge]

I have one AWS 4C/8T server online. BOINC CLI is kind of a pain. No wonder Leadeater fought it the entire Pentathlon last year.

 

AWS doesn't immediately tell me how far the $300 trial credit will take me so I have no idea how long I can run this instance for.

 

Now to look at Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.

[Windows7ge]

Welp, things went downhill pretty fast. Looking like I probably won't be getting many or any rental servers.

• Turns out they do human verification when you sign up for Google Cloud. If everything isn't legit you're out.
• Oracle Cloud wouldn't accept my payment method (privacy.com)
• Microsoft Azure worked for a couple hours but I just checked on it and they "...identified suspicious activity..." and disabled the account.
• Right now AWS is the only service still running and I still don't have a cost for the VM I setup. May have to downgrade.

What a disaster this was.

[TVwazhere]

-Added the "What is BOINC" from the FAQ thread and featured in the news feed-

[Perrin]

I have an old pc with a core 2 duo and a geforce 9500 gt. Is this something I can use that computer for or do I need a better one?

[Windows7ge]

34 minutes ago, Perrin said:

I have an old pc with a core 2 duo and a geforce 9500 gt. Is this something I can use that computer for or do I need a better one?

Don't know about the GPU but you could probably make the Core 2 Duo work. I'd go with Linux just because the performance won't be high to begin with may as well squeeze out every bit you can get.

[Perrin]

31 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Don't know about the GPU but you could probably make the Core 2 Duo work. I'd go with Linux just because the performance won't be high to begin with may as well squeeze out every bit you can get.

Okay thank you

[Windows7ge]

So it appears even with AWS you can only pick up T2.Micro or T3.Micro servers (1vCPU & 2vCPU respectively) on the free tier and you can only run them up to 750hrs total (so 1 month).

 

So going over all of the web hosted server options if you want to contribute anything considerable you'll have to pay for higher core count VMs. Otherwise it's arguably not worth it.

 

Better off buying a retired server on Ebay and just hosting the boinc-client yourself.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

So going over all of the web hosted server options if you want to contribute anything considerable you'll have to pay for higher core count VMs. Otherwise it's arguably not worth it.

What about https://joesdatacenter.com/dedicated-servers/ or https://www.vps-mart.com/bare-metal-server ?

 

Edit:

https://billing.joesdatacenter.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2, still $90 though but it's 2x E5-2660 so not bad for a one off thing and you don't want to keep the extra hardware.

 

Other option is you could always try Leadeater Hosting Services Ltd 

[Windows7ge]

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

What about https://joesdatacenter.com/dedicated-servers/ or https://www.vps-mart.com/bare-metal-server ?

 

Edit:

https://billing.joesdatacenter.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2, still $90 though but it's 2x E5-2660 so not bad for a one off thing and you don't want to keep the extra hardware.

 

Other option is you could always try Leadeater Hosting Services Ltd 

I was hoping to contribute servers off the free tiers. Not really looking to spend money when I already have (what was it again?) ~78C/156T to contribute. Just figured even more would be better but these online services got their systems locked down in such a way they're hard to use for BOINC without paying.

 

And yeah, LHS. I see you're already pushing 302,702 PPD on BOINCstats for WCG and I know that isn't your peak yet either. I'd take your services but knowing I couldn't sustain them long term makes me not want them.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I'd take your services but knowing I couldn't sustain them long term makes me not want them.

But you haven't seen my prices

Spoiler

 

[Windows7ge]

55 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But you haven't seen my prices

Do you accept payment in the form of Reddit Karma?

[GrockleTD]

time to boinc, seeing as i can't get much in the way of F@H

[GrockleTD]

and so it begins!

[Windows7ge]

35 minutes ago, GrockleTD said:

and so it begins!

I recommend advanced view so you can see a lot more of what's going on. What project did you pick up?

[GrockleTD]

7 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I recommend advanced view so you can see a lot more of what's going on. What project did you pick up?

I can't even remember lol