Berkeley Down?

[TC]

I've been trying to reinstall seti on a server for the past few days while I have some vacation time. I can't pull up the seti pages at all. Anybody know of an outage planned or otherwise?

Another question related to hardware. I've been away from seti while gpu crunching got underway. I'm setting up a new vmware server for the business and wondering if I should go for high end xeons so I can get 16 instances running, or install a couple high-end video cards and get better results than dropping more cash on the cpu's. Any thoughts on that?

 

[Sir-Epix]

I've been trying to reinstall seti on a server for the past few days while I have some vacation time. I can't pull up the seti pages at all. Anybody know of an outage planned or otherwise?

Another question related to hardware. I've been away from seti while gpu crunching got underway. I'm setting up a new vmware server for the business and wondering if I should go for high end xeons so I can get 16 instances running, or install a couple high-end video cards and get better results than dropping more cash on the cpu's. Any thoughts on that?

Welcome Back Tim!

First Answer: They are currently doing a planned 24 hour power down. Which generally means >24 hours but we shall see.

Second Answer: GPU crunching will totally out preform the Xeons. 16 thread 8 core Xeon systems will produce about ~16,000 RAC if I recall running 24/7. While having a GTX series 260-285 will produce by itself 9,000-12,000 RAC. A single 295GTX will produce about 24,000 RAC. Note: leave one core open to feed data to graphics card. So I would go the couple high-end video cards rather than the super xeon's. My 2 cents at least. You could always PM or list here specs and I can tell you an approximate RAC for the system based on hardware.

Good to see you back... oh BTW I *think* I passed your old account a while back lets see if you can catch me.

 

[TC]

Welcome Back Tim!

Thanks - I finally have my servers in a colo facility, so heat and power consumption isn't a concern anymore. I'm upgrading my vmware box and will probably go with a supermicro 7046 and was thinking about a pair of E5520's just to get the base model with HT. Don't have a clue about video cards as I haven't been gaming or doing anything video intensive for a number of years. Any suggestions you may have would certainly help.

While we're on the subject of hardware, has anyone ported seti to PS3 yet?

 

[Sir-Epix]

Thanks - I finally have my servers in a colo facility, so heat and power consumption isn't a concern anymore. I'm upgrading my vmware box and will probably go with a supermicro 7046 and was thinking about a pair of E5520's just to get the base model with HT. Don't have a clue about video cards as I haven't been gaming or doing anything video intensive for a number of years. Any suggestions you may have would certainly help.

While we're on the subject of hardware, has anyone ported seti to PS3 yet?

The best bang for the buck would be the 260 GTX (216 unified shaders). They can be had for sub 200 and put out near 10,000 ppd.

The 275/285 GTX have (240 unified shaders) and cost much more.

No one has ported seti to the PS3 yet as no one has volunteered to program it. ATI hasn't even programmed a seti@home app. The current ATI app was developed by a member of KWSN (I think) and is not stand alone.

How many gpus were you planing on going with?

Seti Setup 1 (E5520 x2 + 1 260GTX) = ~20,000-25,000 ppd
Seti Setup 2 (E5520 x2 + 2 260GTX = ~28,000-32,000 ppd

Any more GPU's and I might just go with a 295 GTX if you can find one (to keep case temps down as the cards run very hot).

These numbers are with all optimizations and having some load being taken up from the server doing its actual job.

PS... I did pass you now try and take it back (oh and Seti@home is now up and running).

 

[TC]

(oh and Seti@home is now up and running).

Yeah I managed to get the client installed, but it's saying 'project has no jobs available' at the moment. Thanks for the hardware tips. I'll keep you guys posted on my progress. I'm sure I'll need some help somewhere with all the latest enhanced clients, etc.

 

[Sir-Epix]

Yeah I managed to get the client installed, but it's saying 'project has no jobs available' at the moment. Thanks for the hardware tips. I'll keep you guys posted on my progress. I'm sure I'll need some help somewhere with all the latest enhanced clients, etc.

The server is getting bombarded right now as I am having trouble even uploading my results.

The unified installer makes it sooo easy...you just have to click the button pretty much.

 

[eaglescouter]

I just got two of my fastest rigs to upload. Things are improving again.

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

I never saw my 295s get to 24k RAC each. My best was about 12k per card.

 

[QuietIce]

Yeah I managed to get the client installed, but it's saying 'project has no jobs available' at the moment. Thanks for the hardware tips. I'll keep you guys posted on my progress. I'm sure I'll need some help somewhere with all the latest enhanced clients, etc.

back to the crunching world, TC!


I know some of this will be redundant to you but all the links are in this thread as well ...

SETI Installation and Optimization

 

[nzaneb]

I never saw my 295s get to 24k RAC each. My best was about 12k per card.

Rufus, did you ever cut back on the CPU usage when you had those things running? Multi GPU crunching really needs much more CPU time, then they account for. Single GPU setups (from what I've seen) can still benefit from reduced CPU usage, but not as much as the multi GPU setups. Your dual 295's should have been up towards 40,000 RAC.

@TC (Nice to meet you, I'm Nick) The server board you chose, has slots for 4 GPU's. Do you plan on populating all for slots? If so, 4- GTX260 216's would be the most economical solution, but 4-275's would produce higher RAC. Trust me when I say the 4- 260's would be no slouch though. It would wind up being one of the top producing machines in the world

 

[TC]

@TC (Nice to meet you, I'm Nick) The server board you chose, has slots for 4 GPU's. Do you plan on populating all for slots?

Hi Nick -- The barebones model I'm looking at is the 7046a-t, which I believe only has 2 x16 slots, and 1 x4. Which model did you see with 4 x16? Another potential issue is this server will be running vmware esx, so any crunching I do will have to be under vm's. Does anybody have any experience with gpu crunching under a vm? Don't you have to put some dummy caps on the gpu's to make windows see all of them, or something of that nature?

 

[nzaneb]

Hi Nick -- The barebones model I'm looking at is the 7046a-t, which I believe only has 2 x16 slots, and 1 x4. Which model did you see with 4 x16? Another potential issue is this server will be running vmware esx, so any crunching I do will have to be under vm's. Does anybody have any experience with gpu crunching under a vm? Don't you have to put some dummy caps on the gpu's to make windows see all of them, or something of that nature?

My bad. My google search wound up showing me a 7046GT which shows 4 slots, and is a full server setup. I don't have any experience with VM's, but I do run a headless GPU cruncher (using a DVI dummy plug) Torin3 makes them and they work great.

 

[TC]

I looked that server up. The base system is about $500 more than the other one I was looking at. I really need to find out about gpu crunching under vmware before I commit to the hardware.

 

[Sir-Epix]

Tim is there anyway you can test this in a system. I can't find anyone running a vmware + seti@home. Some talks about it but no evidence to back up the talk.

 

[QuietIce]

One thing for sure - if you'll be running Linux in VM then you'll only get about 80% (if that much!) of the crunching power out of the CPU these guys are talking about. Linux optimizers are terrible compared to their Windows counterparts. Something to keep in mind while you're thinking all this through ...

 

[TC]

If I'm not mistaken the gpu clients are only available for windows, so I intended to setup a dedicated windows vm for crunching. Although I do recall seeing a message in the linux client about not finding any suitable gpu processors, so maybe it runs under both? In terms of testing I really would like to bring up a vmware box and see if it will allow proper hardware access to the gpu. I know you can do cpu crunching under a vm. I'm currently folding under a vm as well. The only serious issue I see is with the video card crunching under a vm. I'll see if I can round up a box to try it on before sinking any serious money on it.

 

[JAWS]

Hey guys! Is anyone able to upload any Wu? Nice to see some old names in this thread. lol

 

[nzaneb]

Hey guys! Is anyone able to upload any Wu? Nice to see some old names in this thread. lol

The upload server is down, as well as, pretty much everything else. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_status.html

 

[eaglescouter]

Scheduled Power Outage - Update
We mostly recovered from our scheduled power outage this weekend, but due to minor problems we decided it would be best to keep the projects offline another day - however we're folding in the usual Tuesday outage today. So if all goes well we'll be fully up again by tomorrow (Tuesday) morning (if not sooner). 4 Jan 2010 22:19:26 UTC

 

[Jolly-Swagman]

It seems that just as many severs for Seti are down as same for Rosetta and no work since 28th Dec2009

Thats a big Pretty Major Blow to two of the best DC Projects!