Once of my six core systems is now a five core system - at least according to BOINC. The system monitor shows all six cores up and running with work cycling through all of them.

BOINC is set to use 100% of the cores. No non-BOINC applications run in the system.

I have recycled manager and client but that was no help.

All worked fine before a dirty shutdown behind a power outage. This hardware looks good (which is more than I can say for one of my other systems)

Any hints other than reinstall? The "slot" directories per chance?

Never mind - after watching it for nearly two hours, it just started a sixth task. Did not do anything, always had plenty of tasks in the "ready to start" status.

One of life's mysteries I guess. Or PFM.

It is possible it was temporaly shortages of RAM to run the 6-th job?
3.5 GB of memory(if boinc report is correct on two of your 6-cores machines) can sometimes be not enough for 6 tasks in parallel (when client got a few WUs with a high consumption of memory at a one time)

It is possible it was temporaly shortages of RAM to run the 6-th job?
3.5 GB of memory(if boinc report is correct on two of your 6-cores machines) can sometimes be not enough for 6 tasks in parallel (when client got a few WUs with a high consumption of memory at a one time)

this man here is correct.

edit: jesus christ, you are going to pass me in a few months D:

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It is possible it was temporary shortages of RAM to run the 6-th job?

Hey, you are exactly right, but in the past when I have seen that situation instead of being flagged "running" it is flagged "waiting for memory"

But that might be if the task had already started and needed more memory.

In any case, since we saw the "waiting for memory" a few weeks ago I did go out and get another 4 gigs for each of the 6 core machines. But I have only had cause to crack open the case and install it on one system - the one which is unstable and "offline" right now after todays power issue.

(I have nice surge suppressors but no UPS)

jesus christ, you are going to pass me in a few months D

Not to worry - from my perspective the true value of a participant is not measured in daily output but long term persistence. And you have been a strong contributor for a lot of years.

That counts for a lot in my book.

I have been debating if I should toss my Mac Pro with its Xeon processor into the fray - I only use it a couple of evenings a week for Photoshop in support of my hobby.

But I seem to have some emotional hangup with going public and showing the world that I do in fact run something other than AMD/Linux.

I have been debating if I should toss my Mac Pro with its Xeon processor into the fray - I only use it a couple of evenings a week for Photoshop in support of my hobby.

But I seem to have some emotional hangup with going public and showing the world that I do in fact run something other than AMD/Linux.

Hey if had one of those newer Mac's with the Intel chip you could run Linux on it!

Hey, you are exactly right, but in the past when I have seen that situation instead of being flagged "running" it is flagged "waiting for memory"

Make sure you have gone into the Boinc Manager and changed the setting under Advanced, Preferences, processor usage and changed the line that says "while processor usage is less than" to zero. This means your processor will no longer wait for non Boinc things that are using your system before it runs. Boinc will give that "waiting for memory" message, if this is set at the default of 25, anytime your system resources get down to that level. By changing it to zero Boinc will always run, although still at the lowest priority. This setting only showed up in the last couple of versions.

Hey if had one of those newer Mac's with the Intel chip you could run Linux on it!

Mikey, you are so right, but Photoshop does not run on Linux and while it is good for casual work, the GIMP does not really cut it for serious compositing (or green screen removal)

Dual boot would work, but it is a "Pain in the Arse" for EFI based machines. And I would have to suspend all Rosetta work and reboot to use Photoshop.

I guess a VirtualBox solution might work ...

Hey if had one of those newer Mac's with the Intel chip you could run Linux on it!

Mikey, you are so right, but Photoshop does not run on Linux and while it is good for casual work, the GIMP does not really cut it for serious compositing (or green screen removal)

Dual boot would work, but it is a "Pain in the Arse" for EFI based machines. And I would have to suspend all Rosetta work and reboot to use Photoshop.

I guess a VirtualBox solution might work ...

Sounds like you need one more computer then!

Sounds like you need one more computer then!

I put Rosetta up on the Mac Pro this morning running under Snow Leopard - set to 50% until I see how it does and how much heat it generates (a real consideration mid-summer here on the Gulf Coast - the room already runs about 12 degrees hotter than the rest of the place because of my Linux cluster)

I just hope that no one at the office notices the GenuineIntel tag - the shame of it all ...

Sounds like you need one more computer then!

I put Rosetta up on the Mac Pro this morning running under Snow Leopard - set to 50% until I see how it does and how much heat it generates (a real consideration mid-summer here on the Gulf Coast - the room already runs about 12 degrees hotter than the rest of the place because of my Linux cluster)

I just hope that no one at the office notices the GenuineIntel tag - the shame of it all ...

Meanwhile I cross the 3k RAC, Chris Holvenstot adds a Xeon CPU to it's army.

Have you thought of water cooling? I remembered of a college that heated some parts of it's infrastructure using the hot cooling liquid coming from their servers. There's got to be a way to take the heat to the outside, or maybe I'm just dreaming too big.

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There's got to be a way to take the heat to the outside, or maybe I'm just dreaming too big.

You know, I thought a bit about that but there are several issues I would have to consider.

First, the systems (mostly built with unloved second-hand parts) would have to be pulled apart so I could get access to install the water blocks.

Second, in order to fit a number of systems in a small area I used low profile cases - I would have to put the heat exchanger on top of each system. I could make it look good, but it would still dump the heat into the room (but with a lot less fan noise - each system currently has three case fans, a CPU fan, and a power supply fan)

If I were to get real fancy I could try and route into a common heat exchanger located outside, but I live 20 meters off Galveston bay and the afternoon temps here are right around 100 degrees F,

I am not sure how a heat exchanger would work under those circumstances without some sort of water drip.

So yes, I've considered water cooling but if worse comes to worse, I will likely just distribute the systems around the house to "spread" the heat a little more evenly.

There's got to be a way to take the heat to the outside, or maybe I'm just dreaming too big.

You know, I thought a bit about that but there are several issues I would have to consider.

First, the systems (mostly built with unloved second-hand parts) would have to be pulled apart so I could get access to install the water blocks.

Second, in order to fit a number of systems in a small area I used low profile cases - I would have to put the heat exchanger on top of each system. I could make it look good, but it would still dump the heat into the room (but with a lot less fan noise - each system currently has three case fans, a CPU fan, and a power supply fan)

If I were to get real fancy I could try and route into a common heat exchanger located outside, but I live 20 meters off Galveston bay and the afternoon temps here are right around 100 degrees F,

I am not sure how a heat exchanger would work under those circumstances without some sort of water drip.

So yes, I've considered water cooling but if worse comes to worse, I will likely just distribute the systems around the house to "spread" the heat a little more evenly.

That PC farm would come in handy here. We had -2C today!

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We had -2C today!

Damn - high or low temp for the day? I know it is "winter" down there but are you up in the mountains?

We had -2C today!

Damn - high or low temp for the day? I know it is "winter" down there but are you up in the mountains?

Low fortunately (I still have to endure it on my way to college).
No, I'm actually located right next to the pacific. High enough to be tsunami-safe tho.
Summers are pretty comfortable tho, much better than the 100% humidity and 100+F back in Georgia :P

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The Chilean said ...

I still have to endure it on my way to college

College? Damn, my daughters both graduated years ago - you're making me feel old. No ancient would be a better word.

From time to time you have made comments about my RAC but in my eyes a student that has the commitment and the resources to swing a 16K+ cross-project RAC is more impressive.

I guess the Lone Star influence shows no matter where it flies!

The Chilean said ...

I still have to endure it on my way to college

College? Damn, my daughters both graduated years ago - you're making me feel old. No ancient would be a better word.

From time to time you have made comments about my RAC but in my eyes a student that has the commitment and the resources to swing a 16K+ cross-project RAC is more impressive.

I guess the Lone Star influence shows no matter where it flies!

Funny how I got into Distributed Computing when I saw my dad's really really old laptop with the SETI@Home Classic screen saver (I'm talking, like 7-9 years ago).
Then I guess I became addicted for credits, now not so much since I'm more involved with the science of rosetta more than anything else. Since I'm the guy that "fixes" PCs in my family, I install BOINC on them. Sorta the payment I get for fixing computers.

The majority of my credits come tho from my two fastest PCs, my OC'ed laptop and my OC'ed Desktop (Both have an ATI HD3600 card, thus the high collatz RAC). Both are pretty old by now, but they still give a good punch.

The College I go to created the NQueens@Home project. The whatever solution they were trying to find was found, so the PCs now sit idle D:. God it'd be great to run rosetta on the hundreds upon hundreds of them PCs. Ha!

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Chris said ...

From time to time you have made comments about my RAC...

Your RAC is quite impressive. BOINCstats says, you're already going to overtake me in 131 days (it took me 4 years to pass the 3,000,000 credits mark). But I guess it's going to take you a couple of weeks longer. ;)

cu Joe

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... you're already going to overtake me in 131 days ...

It's down to 120 days in just 4 days. I didn't realize that your BS-RAC is still increasing... Well, I surrender. ;)

Happy crunching,

Joe

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