LHC@home

Sprouted a new addition to the farm.

Scored a dual proc P3 Xeon 500 HP Kayak server.

Let the old iron prevail !!!!

Conratulations, Ive got two Kayaks and they run nicely and stay real quiet unless they overheat when the motherboard runs the fans up to full power.

If it is the one I've got, with the slot processor, keep your eyes open for faster cpus - mine came with a paper stuck inside the lid showing what settings to use for which speeds so I knew what to look out for. I dropped a pair of 665's in for a 33% boost (actually gave me ~15-20% more crunch).

And changing processors is really easy with a slot, it is easier than changing memory over! (Why Intel moved away from the slot interface I don't know)

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I asked for a BOINC farm for Christmas. And all I got was this sweater :)

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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System
More BOINC information than you can shake a stick of RAM at.

I asked for a BOINC farm for Christmas. And all I got was this sweater :)

I did not get a Quad G5 either, nor even a lousy sweater ... :)

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River said :
Conratulations, Ive got two Kayaks and they run nicely and stay real quiet unless they overheat when the motherboard runs the fans up to full power.

I was wondering about that. My mobo fans are idle. I was concerned that something was wrong with the fan or connection.....since there is no real documentation available for these I 'ass'umed these fans where thermostaticly controlled.

These Kayaks are older, but the fit and finish of the case is superior.
The interior cable routing and plastic molded fan ducts and cards slots, along with the drive mounts and framewerks.
Very impressive.
Must be why these things weigh in at about 30 pounds each.

I have been eyeing another HP......... the X4000.
It is a dual P4 gighz machine. I think it would be a nice addition to the barnyard.

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running and xp 3200+ and an athlon64 3700+ right now. the 3700+ doesn't run all the time, sad to say. Plan on building a dual proc, quad core opteron when they get on the market next year. I figure 8 cores will be like having a mini farm in 1 box!!!!

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Happy new year.

I dream of finally building a 8 proc system.
Be it a older proliant or poweredge or a new dual core setup.

Dunno about calling it a "mini farm" tho.....wouldnt that be more of a 'greenhouse' ?

I just upgraded the xeon Kayak to 500mhz cpu's with 2 meg L2 cache and uppped the memory to 512k of pc100 ecc ram.
go go ebay, that cost me a whopping $33 dollars with shipping for ram and cpu's

time for more champagne !!!

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Just added me new AMD X2 4400+ to me farm :D

Its going through 300 creds/processor/day = 600 creds/day. ATM all on CPDN until I can get that LHC file d/l!

BOINC@Hull

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BOINC@Hull . xfire . mySpace

Congrats.

These 4400's are amazing, and now there is a dual core AMD FX60 chip.
The numbers from the new Dual Core Opterons are impressive as well.

The boinc farm has changed yet once again.
I donated the HP dual 500mhz xeon Kayak to a local cafe to host their website and network.
Everyone is really nice and the place is a nice hangout for us " digital hippies ".
The Club sandwichs they make are incredible!!!
I am also upgrading a system from a Athlon 2.0 to a Pentium 3.0 with HT.

keep crushing

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Amazing stuff guys! Especially all these old p3 500 - 1000MHz machines. Although I think I'd rather go with used parts for 130nm AXPs / Semporns and clock them somewhere over 2GHz. That should crunch at least the same amount of work and eat considerably less electricity. And then there's dual core Yonah nowadays, damn efficient but expensive because it's new.
I'm keeping an eye on the Playstation 3. It's supposed to be available with a hdd and linux on it, so even if the compilers are not top notch, it could just crunch 8 (7) different tasks and should have one hell of a throughput. That would temp me to get another box again :D
Oh, and when will someone develop a client for graphics cards?! The rumors for the new ATI look sweet: 48 pixel shader units, 32bit fp and relatively fast dynamic branching. Not that I want to start a huge discussion on that now, but that's what keeps me from building another system these days!

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

However long you wait, there will always be a faster machine just around the corner. So, get what you can when you can ...

Like I will be probably upgrading my 2.8, 3.0, and 3.2 GHz HT machines to at least dual core, and if I can get a good AMD configuration working stablely, probably with 4000+ dual cores.

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However long you wait, there will always be a faster machine just around the corner. So, get what you can when you can ...

Like I will be probably upgrading my 2.8, 3.0, and 3.2 GHz HT machines to at least dual core, and if I can get a good AMD configuration working stablely, probably with 4000+ dual cores.

Paul, I would love to have your (computer) table scraps. :)

right now, I am not building or buying anything until I get 2 more bills paid off. After that, I will be debt free! With that, I should have more freedom to spend my money the way I want to spend it. But, before I can start getting too serious about building my farm, I first have to find room to grow my farm. Maybe I could move my daughter's toys and bed out of her room and use her room as the computer room! ROFL

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I'm sure she will appreciate it if you let her do her rendering batch jobs and stuff on your farm ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Paul, I would love to have your (computer) table scraps. :)

Sad news, unless you manage to get adopted into my family it is not likely. :)

When I am done with a computer it goes to one of my family members. What I consider obsolete is as good or better than what most people buy ...

right now, I am not building or buying anything until I get 2 more bills paid off. After that, I will be debt free! With that, I should have more freedom to spend my money the way I want to spend it.

That is a great feeling. We paid off the house and it is sure nice to not have to send in that payment. Sadly, to help our youngest daughter buy her first house we had to pull some cash out. Now we have a mortgage again (ugh!). Of course, by remembering the lessons of the past, we are well on the way to having it paid off again by the end of the year (we hope!).

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I'm keeping an eye on the Playstation 3. It's supposed to be available with a hdd and linux on it, so even if the compilers are not top notch, it could just crunch 8 (7) different tasks and should have one hell of a throughput. That would temp me to get another box again :D

Getting a PS3 would be the cheapest crunch option available. At CES they announced that of the Cell Processors eight cores (they say eight, its prob lots of hyper threading), seven will be available to the PS3 due to architecture.

Assuming they come out at no less than 300 quid (~$550) it'd be great as a cruncher.

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BOINC@Hull . xfire . mySpace

Yep, relatively cheap yet very powerful. It's architecture would deserve its own thread, so just briefly: the current Cell has a simple dual thread PowerPC core for general tasks and feeding the "SPU"s. These 8 synergistic (or so) processing units are responsible for the high bandwidth number crunching. They're fairly simple (no multi threading here, 8 of them is enough already) in-order cores, specialized on vector operations.
In the PS3 they'll be using only 7 of them to improve yields. The tough job is to program that monster properly. I can imagine that in the worst case it could work on 7 seti-WUs seperately and should achieve an enormous throughput (for the price and it being only one single chip). Hope I my memory didn't fool me here ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I think the RAM bandwidth or FSB (if that CPU is using such) would be quickly bottlenecked, but we'll see as soon as the first Units ship and people actually test them ;)

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Scientific Network : 45000 MHz - 77824 MB - 1970 GB

It's got a RAMBUS XDR mem controller integrated, so no FSB there. Connection to GPU is done over another very high bandwidth RAMBUS link (with some fancy name :D ). They knew they'd need an enourmous bandwidth to feed a beast like the Cell and this XDR gives them ... uhm, something around 50GB/s? I think it was said to be scalable up to 100GB/s, but they're not using the absolutely most expensive version. Oh, and I'm NOT talking about Mega-BITs.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I am jealous :(. All i got is this rusty bucket that calls it self a PC which i got in 2002 (1.6 ghz and 256 mb of ram). I wish i could spend thousands on pcs like you guys. I guess i will have to keep on dreaming until i get out of my parents house and start to work.

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Contributing to the science of the project and the sense of working on something bigger than yourself in alliance with others, thats what boinc provides.
Spending thousands to buld PC's to dominate the stats isnt the goal of BOINC or of the science projects.
Building a new dual core dual proc for boinc is fun, rescueing an old server from a dumpster and rejuvenating it ...that is a hobby or borderline sickness, I havent figured that out yet.....but its fun. 8]

Feisal! The contribution of your 1.6 is as important as some modern dual core.

Being part of this is whats important.
Whether its a Pentium Pro 100 or a quad dual core opteron......
.........fire up that BOINC and get crackin!!!

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I am jealous :(. All i got is this rusty bucket that calls it self a PC which i got in 2002 (1.6 ghz and 256 mb of ram). I wish i could spend thousands on pcs like you guys. I guess i will have to keep on dreaming until i get out of my parents house and start to work.

Yes, it helps to have money ...

And it does not happen overnight for any of us. It took me a decade to build up to a farm. I started with one computer and slowly added new ones on top. Then upgraded as money was available.

Lots of things that you can do to contribute, read the wiki to find errors, help people with problems on the forums, etc.

Oh, and do work ... every bit helps ...

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