Posts by ace_quaker Universe@Home

1) Message boards : News : Pchd Chriss Belczyński passed away... (Message 6362) Posted 16 Jan 2024 by ace_quaker Post: Best wishes to his family, friends, and colleagues who all have to live life now without his presence. I have enjoyed contributing in my small way to his research, and when you make the difficult decision for whatever direction the project will take without him, know that the boinc community is here for you.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Best Bang for the Buck? (Message 5694) Posted 2 Jul 2022 by ace_quaker Post: Four DIMM Configuration (Conditionally recommended only with EPYC processors that have 128MB L3 or less ) as per AMD memory guidelines. Good point for the lower core count Epyc chips. Also for reference Tom here is a list of Epyc processors that is nice and filterable/sortable. It does not include all custom chips made for certain vendors like the 7T83 I mentioned earlier. You can use it to narrow down your choices then make some custom ebay search links in a spreadsheet so you just have to click a few links to check prices. https://www.cpu-world.com/info/AMD/AMD_EPYC.html Zen 1 Epyc in my opinion isnt really worth it from a performance per watt point of view unless your power cost is low and you find a good deal. --Edit, Tom looking at your computers it seems like you could upgrade your 7251P to a 7551P or 7601 to go from 8 to 32 cores with not that big of a TDP increase. Also do your best to make sure the used Epycs you buy have not been pulled from a Dell or Lenovo motherboard as they will be vendor locked to only those manufacturers motherboards.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Best Bang for the Buck? (Message 5692) Posted 2 Jul 2022 by ace_quaker Post: I've been pricing around some things but have yet to commit due to the high cost but here is what I found. Ebay has some Epyc 7702P (Zen2 - 64 core) for about $1500 or less if you catch a deal, Another $550 for ram (8x16 DDR4 RDIMM ECC), though you could skimp and only do 4 sticks but that seems dumb if you are going to use it for anything else, and ~500-700 depending on your motherboard selection. ~$42/core Compared to a 3950x (Zen2 - 16 core) for about $400, ram ~$125 motherboard ~$100, ~$39/core About the same until you factor in about half the power use on the Epyc, extra case(s), power supplie(s), and cooling needed for the 4 systems then the Epyc starts to look pretty good. For Zen 3, Epyc 7713 (Zen 3 - 64 core) for ~ $3000 or 7T83 (Zen 3 - 64 core higher frequency than 7713) for ~$3400. ~$64/core These are almost double the processor price for ~20-30% more performance depending on your application. Not really worth it in my opinion. The price premium for consumer parts is a lot less with a 5950x (Zen 3 -16 core) going for ~$500, ram ~$125 motherboard ~$100, ~$45/core Upcoming developments that will affect pricing in a good way: Zen4 release later this year for Epyc and consumer. While Zen4 hasn't been rumored to be some massive performance improvement, quite a few people/companies don't care and will upgrade anyway, dumping their old stock to the used market. AMD has been using most of their wafers on consoles and got caught with their pants down with huge Epyc and Radeon demand as evidenced by the huge price premium still in place for Zen 3 Epyc in the used market. Zen 4 parts will use a new socket/motherboard but have been recently rumored to come to the existing AM4 motherboards. I wont hold my breath we would get a 16 core variant of it though. Slowdown in crypto demand. Global recession on deck. Rest of year expected revenue across the semiconductor industry have been revised down by ~25%. Expect some good deals to come. Upcoming developments that will affect pricing in a bad way: Monkeypox and covid continue to accelerate and factories/provinces are shut down. (moderate price increases) China decides to invade Taiwan. Low percent chance but if this one happens 10 year old computers will turn into solid gold and current computers will be unobtainium. Notice I didn't mention Threadripper and Threadripper Pro. In my opinion these are completely not worth looking into as the costs are just insane with the small number of processors released and the absolutely abysmal release delay (Zen 3 Threadripper is just barely reaching availability years after Zen 3 Epyc CPUs came out). You can grab a usb/pcie sound card/wireless card for your Epyc motherboard if you absolutely need them. I also did not price less than full core count processors as the best price/core is usually filling the CPU all the way up to minimize platform costs. The last thing I didn't mention were any kind of Intel processors due to their high power use and high cost compared to AMD. Personally I am looking to upgrade to a 5950x later this year when Zen 4 comes out for a cost differential of ~$200. If I had more spending money right now I'd go for a Zen2 Epyc or Zen3 Epyc if prices came down.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5545) Posted 19 May 2022 by ace_quaker Post: Unfortunately, my tasks waiting for upload will start aging past their deadlines starting Saturday. This is not good for the projects reputation. I don't like donating time and then having the effort thrown away. It's going to take a while to regain my trust. Looks like there are still about 360,000 results in progress compared to pre-DDOS levels. At the current rate this metric I estimate based on the slope of the graph to be back to normal within two days so you should make it alright if current tasks in progress is a good estimation of server and network congestion. https://grafana.kiska.pw/d/boinc/boinc?orgId=1&from=now-32d&to=now
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Project has no tasks available (Message 5466) Posted 16 May 2022 by ace_quaker Post: The lesson to be learned was to remove universe from the pentathlon project list back on the 4th when it was obviously turned into a ddos shitfest. I can only cache ~1.5 days of work before I reach the task limit in progress so don't tell me to ride it out. The whole two week burst is retarded anyway as it incentivizes throwing every system under the sun regardless of performance per watt. So congrats at bursting the work done for universe but taking 2-3 times the energy to do it and pushing people out who optimize for 24/7 performance per watt. You cant even use this waste heat for your homes as once again you idiots scheduled it for almost summer in the northern hemisphere. Everything about the pentathlon is a big f*ck you to energy efficiency and yearlong supporters of each project.