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[Nitroblast]

I'm thinking of deploying two dedicated servers for Boinc on the LTT team, however I need some advice on what specs I should be looking at i.e. how much ram and CPU cores as I am fairly new to his.

 

Thanks

[olback]

I'm thinking of deploying two dedicated servers for Boinc on the LTT team, however I need some advice on what specs I should be looking at i.e. how much ram and CPU cores as I am fairly new to his.

 

Thanks

Well.... If you want to go all out, 5960x or some Xeon 8 core 8gb ram. Some projects use CUDA some use the AMD version of that.

 

[Extingquish]

Tagging some of the Boinc guys so hopefully they can add some input to this @alpenwasser @Imakuni @tobben

 

I'm not going to say much here, as I'm really only familiar with Folding@Home and would hate to overlook something that reduces performance by a lot, although what you'd probably be looking for are lots of GPUs as they will give many times more points than CPUs for the same price. (Of course that's if you're going for points)

[tobben]

It really depends on what you are planning to do. Before making dedicated machines i would look at 

what projects you want to contribute to, not every project supports all pieces of hardware, be it gpu's

cpu's or even nvidia/amd. 

 

Find out what you want to contribute to, then spend your money where it matters, be it an exotic cpu

solution or multiple gpu's. The ram usage also most likely varies depending on the project, but it is

worth noting that ram usage, while nearly irrelevant in folding seems to be much higher in boinc. 

 

Here is a list with some projects the boinc team considers accurately described and somewhat

trustworthy i guess.. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

 

Here is a bigger more complete list, i don't think all projects necessarily are that active though, LHC

for example rarely releases tasks, atleast from my experience https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Project_list

 

Personally i mostly prefer projects related to physics and/or space.

[alpenwasser]

I'm thinking of deploying two dedicated servers for Boinc on the LTT team, however I need some advice on what specs I should be looking at i.e. how much ram and CPU cores as I am fairly new to his.

 

Thanks

As @tobben has said, it will depend a bit. In general, a "reasonable" amount of RAM should

suffice in my experience. Right this moment my machine is using 8 Gigabytes and is running

some cosmology@home and Einstein@Home tasks on the CPUs and four GPUGrid units on

the GPUs, though those don't use that much RAM. This is on the upper end of the RAM usage

scale on that machine in my experience (12cores/24 threads, 2 GK110 GPUs), most of the time

it uses less.

Generally, the more compute power you throw at it, the better. It will use everything you throw its

way, basically (unless you restrict resource usage, obviously). So if you decide to focus on

CPU projects, [ more cores && higher clocks ] == more better. The limits will be set

by your budget for the hardware and the power bill. If you decide to focus on GPU projects,

make sure to pay attention to which GPUs are supported by the projects you're interested

in, not all projects support both Nvidia and AMD (and I wouldn't advise mixing brands of

GPUs in the same machine, that sounds like a recipe for horrifying driver issues). And again,

same for GPUs as for CPUs: Faster chips, and more of them, will yield more results;

BOINC will just use what it can get its hands on.

So, I guess the first question you need to figure out an answer to is: What's your budget

for the machine, and how much power should it draw from the wall at maximum? There isn't

really anything special about BOINC machines per se, they are in the end still just pretty

normal computers, albeit maybe expensive ones if the budget allows for it.

EDIT: Of course it's totally possible to use a machine for both CPU and GPU projects, I'm

doing that with mine. But if you want to really focus on CPU projects, spending money on

GPUs doesn't make that much sense, you'd be better off buying CPUs with as many cores as

possible (so, Xeons, maybe even a multi-socket system, which can get pretty expensive).

And if you want to focus on GPU work, then you don't need a super high-end CPU, just something

fast enough to keep the GPUs supplied with work (which isn't all that demanding, an i5

or even an i3 would probably suffice for that).

[Imakuni]

I'm thinking of deploying two dedicated servers for Boinc on the LTT team, however I need some advice on what specs I should be looking at i.e. how much ram and CPU cores as I am fairly new to his.

 

Thanks

Just a bit of clarifying: when one says "Boinc server", it means a computer designed to store tasks (and all necessary files) and serve as a host to send WUs to other members that decide to help in whatever project you are creating / aiding. If that's what you actually intend, congratulations, you used the correct terminology, and all advice above is useless.

 

However if you intend to get a machine to aid doing WUs for other projects, then what you want is a Cruncher, not a Server. In Folding, there's just no way regular people can create servers, so when we hear "server" we just straight up assume a cruncher.

 

This may not be your case, though, so I'd like to make sure what's your goal before I keep on typing.

 

Oh, and btw, if you are the Cruncher guy, do you have any specific projects in mind or would you like suggestions?