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Thalus
BAM!ID: 1731
Joined: 2006-06-06
Posts: 4
Credits: 2,937,987
World-rank: 115,956

2006-06-21 13:04:38
last modified: 2006-06-21 13:05:30

I´m crunching atm with 1 AMD64 3500+ and was doing very well at Seti and Einstein. Now i want to share my ressources with more projects as well.
Therefor i created a BAM account and added my PC for all projects. Shouldn´t be a problem with deadlines of the projects. But now my problem: I attached 20 projects with BAM and now only 10 were downloaded by Boinc Manager. 10 are ignored. Don´t know how to manage to get work from all 20 projects.
Please help.

Sorry for my bad English :p
Honza
BAM!ID: 109
Joined: 2006-05-10
Posts: 154
Credits: 7,659,205,616
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2006-06-21 15:21:20

Hi Thalus,

you've described your problem pretty well.
There is a problem with attaching/detaching project via BAM on some machine/connection. See this thread for more - http://boincstats.com/forum/forum_thread.php?id=1112
(it might be connected).

Having numerous project running at once may not be good idea.
You may be unable to run project without check-pointing (i.e. BURP, uFluids). To prevent from loosing progress while switching apps (between project), it is good to have preempting (keep in memory) but with plenty of projects, you memory may get full quite soon.
For resource demans of each project see my table here - http://www.boinc.cz/img/BOINC_Projects_table.png

So, I would suggest to attach to project of your desire, but set "suspend" to those you are now actually running and have "work enable" only for 3 of them (or so) and switch among them.

Sorry for my bad English - not native english - but hopefully you got the idea.
Thalus
BAM!ID: 1731
Joined: 2006-06-06
Posts: 4
Credits: 2,937,987
World-rank: 115,956

2006-06-21 16:04:24

Hi Thalus,

you've described your problem pretty well.
There is a problem with attaching/detaching project via BAM on some machine/connection. See this thread for more - http://boincstats.com/forum/forum_thread.php?id=1112
(it might be connected).

Having numerous project running at once may not be good idea.
You may be unable to run project without check-pointing (i.e. BURP, uFluids). To prevent from loosing progress while switching apps (between project), it is good to have preempting (keep in memory) but with plenty of projects, you memory may get full quite soon.
For resource demans of each project see my table here - http://www.boinc.cz/img/BOINC_Projects_table.png

So, I would suggest to attach to project of your desire, but set "suspend" to those you are now actually running and have "work enable" only for 3 of them (or so) and switch among them.

Sorry for my bad English - not native english - but hopefully you got the idea.


I told BAM to left data in memory while not working on it and checked all projects if the preference worked there. Does Boinc write files in a paging file? If it does I wouldn´t have a problem with memory size. And even without a paging file from windows... 1GB RAM should be able to save more than 10 projects.
I think i will shut down a few projects but i don´t understand why i can´t run e.g. 15 projects on 1 PC...
Honza
BAM!ID: 109
Joined: 2006-05-10
Posts: 154
Credits: 7,659,205,616
World-rank: 456

2006-06-21 16:54:20

I think i will shut down a few projects but i don´t understand why i can´t run e.g. 15 projects on 1 PC...

I did not say that you will be not able but that it's a bit tricky. Memory and disk usage, deadlines and cache size and run estimation times and scheduler, all interconnected.

If you looks at the table, you can see that Rosetta takes up to 160MB or so and SAP ~420MB. When I run one SAP climate model and 2 Rosetta WUs on dual-core, it takes 420 + 160 +160 (while switching between SAP and Rosetta), plus ~ 20 MB for BOINC itself, so it 3/4 GB for BOINC, plus rest for Win XP, antivirus and mail server - and no user's application running. Easy to fill-up 1GB memory with jsut two projects, heh?

I'm not big fan of swap file but you can (*should*) set your preferences as of memory, swap and disk usage.
Guest

2006-06-22 08:30:48

I'm not sure I would run 15+ at one time (though I do manually activate/deactivate projects to give them turns on my Athlon 64, which is incidently also a 3500+). However, you can definitely run more then 2 projects and not run into problems. 5 or 6, or maybe even 8 wouldn't be a prob on that proc.

As to memory, it depends what programs you're also running, and the system setup. I just went from Windows XP Pro, to now running Windows Vista Ultimate, beta 2. I can say first hand that Vista uses a crap load of memory compared to XP. Rather then booting up using 250 MB or so (on a clean install); it's closer to 800-900 MB. When people get Vista, they're likely going to be wanting 2 GB of RAM. With dual core procs and running DC WUs on both CPUs simultaniously, I could see them wanting more. AKA, seasonal attribution on one core, and CPDN coupled ocean on the other

Projects can be written out to the paging file, and in this way it can help. The inactive WU can be paged out, and because it isn't being worked on, it doesn't have to be in system RAM. There is still load times, but eh... Now, looking at things on Vista, I can say that when things go a few hundred megs over physical RAM (not difficult even with a gig, when the system boots up using over 800 MBs to itself), that things can become a bit slow/unresponsive. Now that might be a Vista thing, could also be a beta thing. As long as it's below system RAM, it's actually a bit more responsive then winXP, probably in part because I'm using Vista-64 bit beta, rather then the 32-bit variant.

More readily, yes there's a lot of computing power on the A64, but it isn't inexhaustible. And yes now, with the projects I have (and certainly not everything), an x2 (dual core) would help :rofl For now, I just micro-manage things a bit to cycle through some projects I want to run at the time, and set others to no new work, until I get back to them. I do run groups of projects at a time however...
Fuzzy Hollynoodles
 
BAM!ID: 2423
Joined: 2006-06-21
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World-rank: 239,792

2006-07-14 06:03:38

If you keep a very small cache - like 0.1 - and are prepared to miss some deadlines, you may finish some WU's in time.

And Rosetta doesn't need to stay in memory while preempted anymore, BTW.

But my guess is that your client has calculated that you wouldn't be able to finish more work, even it will go into panic-mode.

I don't think that 15 - 20 projects on one computer is a good idea either. Pick the 10 you like the best, or assign to all of them, but let them take turn.

I have one computer myself which I have attached to 6 projects at the moment, and one of them is LHC, where there's rarely work, and one another is Pirates, which has very small and fast WU's and also very rarely. So effectively I crunch 4 projects at the same time and this seems fine to me, also RAC-wise to the single projects.




Shann
Volunteer tester
BAM!ID: 82
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2006-07-14 18:13:50

I run 25 projects on my computer. It works fine, no problem with deadlines.
Of course, with ressource share combined with Boinc debt system, some projects are not run for a month sometimes but it's ok for me
DoctorNow
 
Volunteer tester
BAM!ID: 261
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2006-07-14 19:49:40
last modified: 2006-07-14 19:51:40

Yeah, me too.
Got 23 projects running on my machine (CPDN not counted as I'm crunching no more) and no problems with it.
However, I regulate them all manually. One day/week this project, the other day/week another or so... it depends on the remaining work on the client and how I like them and how are the credits etc.
The only problems sometimes are the projects with longlasting wu's without checkpoints like BURP, RCN etc.
They force me to let my computer run mostly on times I don't want to...
BOINC@Heidelberg & BOINC Confederation-member

My BOINCstats/[url=http://signature.statseb.fr/sig-335.png]My badges
phusg
BAM!ID: 21216
Joined: 2007-03-16
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2007-03-17 17:43:32


Got 23 projects running on my machine...


Guys, seeing as you have lots of experience running many different projects I was wondering whether one of you could comment on the differing memory bandwidth uses of the different projects/clients. Or even better point me to a site where all this information is available? I can't find one...

My main reason for asking is so that I know what clients to run on old dual CPU machines that have severely limited memory bandwidth.

Cheers, Pete
zombie67
BAM!ID: 1560
Joined: 2006-06-04
Posts: 606
Credits: 178,109,873,194
World-rank: 45

2007-03-17 18:37:10

Guys, seeing as you have lots of experience running many different projects I was wondering whether one of you could comment on the differing memory bandwidth uses of the different projects/clients. Or even better point me to a site where all this information is available? I can't find one...

See here. This thread has pointers to a summary doc. Not sure how accurate or up-to-date it is. But it's a good start.
Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA
Ken Vogt
 
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2007-03-18 00:23:25

And Honza has an excellent table, recently updated, here.
Ken


phusg
BAM!ID: 21216
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Credits: 134,908,398
World-rank: 8,738

2007-03-18 15:50:08

And Honza has an excellent table, recently updated, here.


That's a nice table. Memory footprint and network bandwidth are useful things to know (thanks Honza). Only I'm looking for information on <b>memory bandwidth useage</b>, which isn't included, and I doubt this scales linearly with memory footprint size. Is there any way to meaure this from within windows (apart from those memory modules with leds)?
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