Best day ever!

I got the grand total of 14 987 credits yesterday (22nd April) which is the higest I have ever recorded. Of that 12 428 came from the Geforce 9800 GT (83% of total). Lets see a PS3 beat that ;-)

GPU Credit

The PC with the Nvidia 9800 GT has been running for a few days now and the increase in credit is amazing. A single GPU worth $175 is out-performing a brand new computer that I would have paid over $1000 dollars for.




This graph from BOINCStats gives an indication on how the credit/day has improved from the standard AMD Athlon X2 4000+. Mention must be made that I am only only running BOINC projects on one CPU due to the high usage problem with the Linux CUDA client. Things will get even better once this has been resolved.

Teething problems

The Geforce 9800GT has been running for 24-hours and two issues seem to have arisen. The first was a "stalled" SETI work-unit, while most of them are taking around 18 minutes, one took over 8 hours with no evidence of a problem. The CPU time taken was just over the 18 minute mark but when looking at the start and finish times, the wall time was over 8 hours. It wasn't even a VLAR work-unit. I have no idea what the problem is/was but will watch and see if it happens again.

The other issue is something I should have thought about before installing the GPU ... the UPS!! I have the two "local servers" plugged into a Powerware 3105 UPS. The idea at the time was to even out any power spikes and have around 60 seconds to power down the two machines in the event of a power failure. With the addition of the 105W GPU, I am now over the UPS's limit when the SATA drives are running in the file server.
As a short term solution, I have taken the hub and router off the UPS to give me a little more capacity but am going to have to think of a more elegant solution to this problem.

19 minute work-unit

For once I was proven wrong, with the knowledge gained when installing the 8600GT card under 64-bit Ubuntu, the 9800GT wasn't a challenge. I installed the new 460W power-supply and was pleased to see that it had a 6-pin power connector that would plug directly into the 9800GT without an adapter.

I was initially confused by the air-flow in the Nvidia card, but discovered that the fan pulls air into the card housing and it vents near the blanking plates on the back of the case. As a result, I pulled the two neighboring blanking plates out (not shown in picture) and it seems as if a fair amount of heat is now expelled out of the case despite the power supply fan trying to pull it in. There is no case fan in this PC and I will monitor temperatures carefully for a couple of days. At the moment, the GPU's core temperature seems to sit around 62'C with an ambient temperature of 50'C.

Once again I have run into the anomaly where the Boinc client wont recognize the CUDA card when it starts. I have to close the client and restart it with a "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client start" command (the same as the 8600GT installation). This is a minor irritation as the 9800GT machine will run for the entire work week before being turned off. I have a suspicion that this may have something to do with the user "boinc" being added to the "video" group but not having sufficient rights.

Anyway, put the case back together after checking to see if it all started and booted OK, and am happy to see SETI work-units being dispatched in 19 minutes on average. This is under half the time taken by my 8600GT with the same OS.

On a different topic, Ubuntu officially release their 9.04 version in 13 days. I am running the beta 32-bit version on the IBM server and it appears to have some nice features and refinements over the current 8.10 version. I will re-do the OS on my home computer (the AMD X2 with the 8600GT) but will leave the 9800GT's OS on 8.04 as it is a "Long term support (LTS)" version and it is very rare that I even log into this machine. The proxy and backup functions can all be controlled via an Apache webserver interface.

Galaxy GeForce 9800GT

When the whole "SETI on CUDA" idea first came about I bought a second-hand 8600GT just to see how the concept worked. A couple of months down the line, I have come to realize that ordinary CPUs aren't going to keep pace with CUDA (and other future GPU standards). So when the Australian government recently announced their financial stimulus package, I decided that this was a loop-hole I could use to upgrade the "farm" without a budget.


A brand new Galaxy branded GeForce 9800GT is the result! The specs are as follows:


Stream Processors: 112
Memory: 512MB
Texture Fill Rate (billions/sec): 33.6
Memory Bandwidth: (GB/sec): 57.6

As the majority of my PCs still use AGP slots, the options of where to install the new card are limited. As a result, I also bought a 460W power-supply to upgrade the 64-bit AMD based Linux machine at the office. This system runs the Squid proxy as well as an anti-virus proxy and does the backups of the file server each night. For this reason, it runs 24/7 and has a fast ADSL2+ internet connection.

The down side so far is that the Nvidia drivers for this OS only go up to version 167, so after some time on Google, I found a site that allowed me to download 180.44 drives for amd64 architecture.

As I cant take this machine down during office hours as I risk the ire of the Facebook junkies in the building, I am hoping to spend an hour or two at work over the Easter weekend and see if I can get it up and running... but have learnt from experience that these things are never as easy as they seem!

Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 beta ... Beware!

I have, in the past, just gone for the "upgrade to new version" in Ubuntu's Update Manager and have been lucky. Version 8.04 to Version 8.10 was an example of this. I wasnt so lucky this time around as my IBM x-Series got as far as "Starting HAL" and then died a horrible death.
I downloaded the ISO file and re-installed from CDRom but in the process lost a notable amount of half processed work-units (mainly SETI Astropulse).
All is up and running again and the new version does look good, but this is a lesson to back up regardless of how well things have worked in the past

April Fool

I ran the cache of SETI work-units down and then detached and re-attached to the project with the view to download the 64-bit Linux CUDA client. The reason for that is that the optimized client from Crunch3r uses 100% of a CPU core while it runs. I was hoping that SETI's own client would use less and enable me to get some productive crunching out of the "wasted" core.

What I didn't realize is that SETI still haven't released a client ... well, I was unable to find one or get it to download...

So back to to Crunch3r's client and now just a bit of a delay to get full-time work for it. SETI have had a hardware problem this week and as a result have run short of work to distribute.