Has anyone bought a computer purely to crunch on? If so, what is it?

<blockquote>Has anyone bought a computer purely to crunch on? If so, what is it?</blockquote>
I have never bought one as purely a cruncher. I have taken computers from my network and dedicated them for crunching.
All my computers have been DELL.

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I have a spare computer I built out of left over parts,just for DC projects, an
Asus A7n8x Mb,Athlon Xp2500 oc'ed to 2700, 512 Megs Geil PC 4400 ram running 5,3,3,2 timing settings, connected to the net by a Linksys router to a cable modem. I run Boinc and Folding at Home on it.I run the optimized seti client for P3 and my Seti times are around 7000 seconds average.

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<blockquote>Has anyone bought a computer purely to crunch on? If so, what is it?</blockquote>Apple is loaning me a Mac Mini for the express purpose of evaluation for cruncher use. I am looking for the cheapest practical hardware to crunch the most WU's (excluding Windoze which I won't even evaluate). I plan to test OSX standard and optimized (possibly Darwin bare) and PPC Linux (if I can locate a client) and compare with some x86 low cost options (Linux, BSD).

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

I built 3.
Based on ABit NF7-S boards with XP2100+,XP2400+,XP2600 processors.
One died and is now a ABit XP64/3000+, another is err.. doing nothing - switched off.
They do have one other use - disk servers. Between them they carry over a over a tera-byte of 80/100Gb discs - but that hardly impacts their crunching ability - honest ;)

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I bought 4 dual cpu servers on eBay just for crunching. they're all dual p2 450-P3 600 right now, but will be dual 800s soon

Compaq proliant 1850
HP netserver lpr
HP netserver LC3
and a whiteBox tower

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<img src="http://teamstarfire.org/boinc/summary.php?name=Dwarlock&amp;team=Kansans%20Searching%20for%20a%20Planet%20With%20People%20More%20Interesting%20Than%20This%20One&amp;seti=7832952&amp;cbg=grey">

Hello all,

I have 8 full time seti boxes, 2 4 box nodes on kvswitches. I also have 2 home computers crunching when not being used.
The crunchers were all assembled by me and are all
pent hpt processors except the first which is now a p III box, I sort of got the seti bug and really enjoy putting a new computer together setting it up then starting seti up. Im now running linux on some of my newer boxes and it is the way to go if you want mutiple boxes at a reasonable expence.
My most productive box is a p4 hpt 3.4 e, a very good choice for a single box cruncher that can be assembled for a reasonable price if you can get a deal on processor and memory.

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I've been looking at the Mini-MAC also. It also consumes very little power at 30 watts. And the price is right too. Can't wait to hear Mntbighker's results. Another great thing about the Mini-Mac's are, hey! It runs OS X!!! That would be cool. Reading the reviews so far though, they really ought it sell it with 512MB instead of 256, 256 is barely enough.

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Mac mini as crunching box:

I own a Macmini as my everyday task box.

The Clients currently available for PPC/Mac are less optimized than the ones that become now available for X86/Win and X86/Linux.

There was an "Altiveced" Seti cruncher available over at Team MacNN but currently I cannot access the download link...

I have been compiling some optimized clients for PPC myself here the results:
setiathome_4.02 Berkeley reference OsX 10.3: 23627s
setiathome_4.07 optimized with FFTW for OsX 10.3: 20006s +18%
setiathome_4.07 optimized with FFTW for Linux/PPC: 31250s -25%

So if you use a Mac I would certainly recommend running OsX since even an optimized seti client will run slower under Linux/PPC.
I am still working on better clients but do not know if more can be done...

My Macmini is getting around 120 average credit per day which is not too bad.
But even my P3 server box with 1GHz processor and optimized client does 150 credits per day...

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Chris Bosshard
Visit my homepage
astroinfo SETI page

My Macmini is getting around 120 average credit per day which is not too bad. But even my P3 server box with 1GHz processor and optimized client does 150 credits per day...

P4 Wilamette 2GHz, 100MHz FSB, Linux 2.6.8, optimized client

These parts can't be bought for retail anymore and it still maintains an RAC over 200 (still climbing).

Macs are nice (I have two) and are great for a lot of things, but they don't stack up for crunching when it comes to cost. You can get good deals on dual P3 boards and processors on eBay and running Linux with an optimized client on that setup will probably give you a very good [i]bang-for-buck[/url] ratio.

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7,049 S@H Classic Credits

ampoliros

I absolutely agree any x86 AMD or Intel has a better "Price/Crunch" ratio than any Mac on the market. The Macmini is currently the best PPC to get to a reasonable ratio...
If you want to use it only for crunching it is certainly not the right choice unless we find some good way to optimize the clients.


I just had a look at your completed WU's.
The completion times look quite OK but the claimed credit is way low.
Maybe have a look at Metod's or Ned's site to grab an optimized boinc client to get higher benchmark scores. You should be around 30 credits/WU, currently you are only around 15.

http://mkx.feridot.com/boinc/
http://www.pperry.f2s.com/downloads.htm

CU

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Chris Bosshard
Visit my homepage
astroinfo SETI page

I just had a look at your completed WU's.
The completion times look quite OK but the claimed credit is way low.
... You should be around 30 credits/WU, currently you are only around 15.

I know, believe it or not, I am using a compiled and optimized BOINC CC (currently self-compiled, but have used Ned's CC to compare). The problem is that while my completion times for seti are great, I can't get a good benchmark score to claim credit against no matter what client I try.

I think it has to do with the fact that the processor is one of the first P4 processors on the market (it's now 5 years old). It has so little cache on the processor that I can't get a good score. The BOINC CC reports 976.56 KB but that is an error. There have been multiple threads about misreported cache size and how the benchmark is almost unrelated to the calculations done.

Sometimes I look at the benchmarks and marvel at the fact that I picked up about 25% and 50% over when that computer ran Windows XP. It's funny how BOINC will estimate almost eight hours for a WU but complete in two. Because the computer is on dial-up (until next week), I have to keep the WU cache set high to avoid running out of work. A side effect of all of this is that it is always in panic mode about deadlines. *rolls eyes*

Until there is a new benchmarking scheme, I think that's the way it has to be.

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7,049 S@H Classic Credits

Hello again

I would suggest to try one of our new boinc clients, they could give you an additional boost. I would recommend to try our i686 client and compare it with your current client, the result could be surprising... :-)

Sometimes a client which was not compiled for your own processor can give a better result. As you mentioned the benchmarks are not related to real calculation times at all.

Good night.

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Chris Bosshard
Visit my homepage
astroinfo SETI page