Is there any effort underway to calculate on an ongoing basis what platform/OS/client combination offers the best bang for buck. It seems like a valuable bit of knowledge. For instance I am curious if a $500 Mac Mini can crank out more WUs than $500 worth of x86 hardware running Darwin/BSD or Linux (I don't do Windoze no matter how much faster the client is). Or for that matter the Mini running Linux. Of course many of us run Seti on existing hardware we have laying about, but those considering purchases either for other needs or for a cruncher might choose differently given this knowledge. My 1.33 Ghz Powerbook is surprisingly close to my 2.8 Ghz P4HT (per cpu) in benchmarks. Is the Mac client that much better? Will the Mac client be an awesome cruncher monster when the client gets Altivec optimized (I understand it not to be now)? I have not benchmarked my dual 1.1 Ghz G4 yet. Is AMD 64bit any sort of advantage now or is hyperthreading much more useful? And last but not least is anyone looking at using GPU hardware for crunching? It seems to be the only thing that continues to ramp up in speed. That's why Apple is offloading so much to the GPU in OSX. And I know there are cluster efforts going on using game consoles for the same reason.

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Mark Moorcroft (Mac geek)
ELORET Corp. - NASA/Ames RC
AIM - ssevenup
YIM - mntbighker

<blockquote>Is there any effort underway to calculate on an ongoing basis what platform/OS/client combination offers the best bang for buck. It seems like a valuable bit of knowledge. For instance I am curious if a $500 Mac Mini can crank out more WUs than $500 worth of x86 hardware running Darwin/BSD or Linux (I don't do Windoze no matter how much faster the client is). Or for that matter the Mini running Linux. Of course many of us run Seti on existing hardware we have laying about, but those considering purchases either for other needs or for a cruncher might choose differently given this knowledge. My 1.33 Ghz Powerbook is surprisingly close to my 2.8 Ghz P4HT (per cpu) in benchmarks. Is the Mac client that much better? Will the Mac client be an awesome cruncher monster when the client gets Altivec optimized (I understand it not to be now)? I have not benchmarked my dual 1.1 Ghz G4 yet. Is AMD 64bit any sort of advantage now or is hyperthreading much more useful? And last but not least is anyone looking at using GPU hardware for crunching? It seems to be the only thing that continues to ramp up in speed. That's why Apple is offloading so much to the GPU in OSX. And I know there are cluster efforts going on using game consoles for the same reason.
</blockquote>

You can't really compare clockrates between a mac and a PC, and the price of the new G5 macs are kinda high compared to the run of the mill PC's. Look for the new dual-core AMD chips that are coming out later this year. They are supposedly the fastest so far in the benchmarks. HT is somewhat useful but it doesn't do much for seti. True you can run two WU with HT tech, but each WU runs slower than if you just ran one at a time. On the other hand, you do seem to crunch more WU when you take advantage of the HT technology. I'm not sure about the 64bit thing, as I don't think seti is optimized or programmed to take advantage of 64bit processors.

As far as biggest bang for yor buck, a barebone system with a crap video card ~10$, no sound, just enough high quality RAM just to run SETI and CDPN, a good motherboard, a decent power supply, ethernet card and the AMD FX-55 or Intel P4 560 (currently the fastest in the benchmarks I think that is on the market). But the AMD 64 X2 isn't that much far behind. So I think the entire system should cost at most 1500$. Ofcourse if you are willing to shell out some more money then go for the CPU cluters you can use in supercomputers

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-ChaoticBlue
<img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=996&amp;trans=off" />

<blockquote>You can't really compare clockrates between a mac and a PC, and the price of the new G5 macs are kinda high compared to the run of the mill PC's.</blockquote>
You can't compare clock rates but I was suggesting comparing WU output rates. And I suggested the G4 Mac Mini (essentially a laptop without the screen) that sells for $500. It still has Altivec incase they ever optimize for it.
<blockquote>Look for the new dual-core AMD chips that are coming out later this year. They are supposedly the fastest so far in the benchmarks.</blockquote>
Presumably they will be expensive.
<blockquote> HT is somewhat useful but it doesn't do much for seti. True you can run two WU with HT tech, but each WU runs slower than if you just ran one at a time. On the other hand, you do seem to crunch more WU when you take advantage of the HT technology. I'm not sure about the 64bit thing, as I don't think seti is optimized or programmed to take advantage of 64bit processors.

As far as biggest bang for yor buck, a barebone system with a crap video card ~10$, no sound, just enough high quality RAM just to run SETI and CDPN, a good motherboard, a decent power supply, ethernet card and the AMD FX-55 or Intel P4 560 (currently the fastest in the benchmarks I think that is on the market). But the AMD 64 X2 isn't that much far behind. So I think the entire system should cost at most 1500$. Ofcourse if you are willing to shell out some more money then go for the CPU cluters you can use in supercomputers</blockquote>
The Mac Mini is $500 with small footprint, advanced processor, network and decent video. I imagine 3 of them would leave egg on the face of any single Intel or AMD bare bones system. Of course you can build them for that cheap if you ratchet down the specs. But the power utilization is nowhere near as efficient in quantity per WU crunched. This was why I started this thread in the first place. Exactly these issues. Of course my P4HT is my primary cruncher at the moment because it needs to stay on anyway and it's dead quiet in it's wonderful Antec Sonata case (try one, they rock).

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Mark Moorcroft (Mac geek)
ELORET Corp. - NASA/Ames RC
AIM - ssevenup
YIM - mntbighker

Have you considered a Pentium M, basically a P3 but with 2MByte L2 cache and desktop motherboard, Aopen has new one with DDR2 533MHz memory slots. I don't know costs but that should do a seti unit in under 2 hours.

Andy

<blockquote>Have you considered a Pentium M, basically a P3 but with 2MByte L2 cache and desktop motherboard, Aopen has new one with DDR2 533MHz memory slots. I don't know costs but that should do a seti unit in under 2 hours.

Andy</blockquote>
Crazy expensive compared to even a hyperthread capable P4 2.8Ghz. Nice big cache though. I take it your thinking in terms of power efficiency. Seems the G4 in the Mac Mini still probably beats the pants off it though. I need to borrow a Mac Mini and benchmark it myself.

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Mark Moorcroft (Mac geek)
ELORET Corp. - NASA/Ames RC
AIM - ssevenup
YIM - mntbighker

The best you can do with $500 dollars of x86 hardware (in my opinion) would be an AMD Athlon XP setup.

Get an AMD Athlon XP 2800+, mobo, RAM, HD, case, etc. It will cost around $500 total. Overclock the thing, and it should complete WU's in the 2-3 hour range (Well, I dunno yet, but this is what I am expecting. I'll let you know when the parts get in). If I didn't have to pay shipping for every little part I bought, I think I could have built a crunching system for around $350.

How fast do you think the $500 Mac mini crank the WU's out?

For best power consumption, nothing even comes close to the Pentium-Ms. 35Watts max power consumption(LCD screen off). My 1.6 Ghz cranks out the WUs in 2-2.5 Hours. I'm told that the 2.0 GHz Pentium-M will do it in less than 2 hours.

Also, don't rely on the benchmarks. They are WAY-OFF on some computer setups. Best to crunch 5-10 WUs, and take an average (throw out the ones take take a few seconds to do). Based on the benchmarks, my Sempron 2500+ is twice as fast as my Athlon XP 1700+. My Sempron does a WU in 4-5 hours, my XP1700 does a WU in 5-6 hours!!! Turns out it's a crappy mobo on the Sempron, it should be able to run faster. Weird tho.

Among the x86 crowd. The Pentium Xeons are the king of the hill in speed and throughput. I do not think it will last though (for our application) when the Athlon X2s come out. As far as I know, they are not out yet.

I've been toying with the idea of using an X-box as a cheap dedicated cruncher. After researching how much effort it would take to trick it into thinking it's a computer (without trashing it, that is), I thought it wasn't worth it. Anyways, first thing it would need is a RAM upgrade as it only comes with 64MB.

Jimmy

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<blockquote>How fast do you think the $500 Mac mini crank the WU's out?</blockquote>
I'll let you know if I evaluate one.
<blockquote>
For best power consumption, nothing even comes close to the Pentium-Ms. 35Watts max power consumption(LCD screen off). My 1.6 Ghz cranks out the WUs in 2-2.5 Hours. I'm told that the 2.0 GHz Pentium-M will do it in less than 2 hours.
</blockquote>
Just the CPU is over $600!
<blockquote>
Among the x86 crowd. The Pentium Xeons are the king of the hill in speed and throughput. I do not think it will last though (for our application) when the Athlon X2s come out. As far as I know, they are not out yet.
</blockquote>
Probably cost a mint and eat power like mad though.

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Mark Moorcroft (Mac geek)
ELORET Corp. - NASA/Ames RC
AIM - ssevenup
YIM - mntbighker

Actually,

You can pickup a Pentium-M 2.0 Ghz for about $400, they still cost more than almost anything else out there.

You are the first Mac guy I have met that actually cares about $$$.

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One main thing about the processing speed of SETI WU is that it is heavily affected by the speed of the FSB, which most macs that aren't a G5 systems are fairly slow compared to the current intels and AMD systems. This also means that your RAM speed will affect it as well.
Even then a 800MHZ G3 still outperforms a 800MHZ pIII even though the FSB is slower on the g3's.

The FSB on the Mac Mini's are only 167MHZ which is very slow compared to G5 systems and comparable to other desktop g4 systems. While some of the new AMD FX systems are pushing 2000mhz on their FSB clock rates. But at those FSB speeds, it doesn't matter much as it won't be much of a bottleneck. I think anything higher than about 500mhz FSB is pretty fast so even the iMAC G5's are really fast with SETI WU times.

despite the disappointing specs of the Mac mini it does seem to do fairly well on synthetic benchmarks, especially with CPU only ones. so maybe the MAC MINI will do fairly well as a WU cruncher, but since I havn't found any speed comparisons on SETI I can't tell. http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/comparison.html

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-ChaoticBlue
<img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=996&amp;trans=off" />

<blockquote><blockquote>Look for the new dual-core AMD chips that are coming out later this year. They are supposedly the fastest so far in the benchmarks.</blockquote>
Presumably they will be expensive.</blockquote>

More than a Athlon64, less than the FX series.

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Grant
Darwin NT

<blockquote>You are the first Mac guy I have met that actually cares about $$$. </blockquote>
:-)

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Grant
Darwin NT