Cutting down on crunching

[petrusbroder]

After some time of contemplation, I have come to realize, that crunching, priming, protein folding, etc, etc. has lost very much of it's fun and pleasure for me. The costs, the fun and the pleasure do not balance each other anymore.

In one way I am sad about this: it has been such a lot of fun and has given me soo much.
In an other way I am very satisfied with my decision.
I will gain a lot of time (computer maintenance takes a lot of time, down time too, keeping up with projects as well, having to decide ....) and this time will be spent to relax in other ways.

I will not stop posting or to irritate you with my sometimes inane comments. I will not leave the forum or desert all my friends here. I'll just decrease my crunching by letting all the projects run out of WUs and then shut down all my dedicated crunchers. As I see it I will sell them or take them apart, upgrade all the other computers and save the parts as spares.
The other computers will crunch during the time they are not used for work or fun. How far my ppd will drop I do not know, but that we will see in a few weeks.

I have not yet decided if I will coordinate the Annual Holiday Season Folding@Home race - because that still stimulates me. But as I see it now, I have finished racing myself.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sorry to hear that the fire is growing dim in your crunchers.

TBH, I always thought that your situation was that the crunching was just a healthy by-product of you heating your home.

Since electric heaters (computers) are 100% efficient, what will you use to heat your home, if not the computers? Gas? Oil? Electric?

I've made a similar decision, if at least only for the summer. I was using an E-350 rig, after downsizing from my hex-core w/SLI GTX460 cards. Which was nice for power consumption, and I was even doing some crunching, slowly, on that rig. But it didn't have much "oomph" for web browsing, especially with crunching taking up 100% CPU time in the background. My internet radio would skip occasionally, enough to be annoying, while I was web browsing.

So I've swapped back to my Q9300 @ 3.0 quad-core, with a single GTX460 1GB OC, at least for now. I'm not sure whether or not to crunch at all, during the summer, on this rig, considering my A/C costs. It's not much worse than the E-350 for web browsing though. KAW showed the E-350 taking up 47W while crunching. KAW shows 94-140W web browsing and idling in Win7 for the Q9300. I think if I crunch on only the CPU, and not the GPU, my power consumption will be around 160-180W. Not as good as the E-350, but not horrible for the power bill.

Edit: I'm hitting 250W, crunching on the Q9300 @ 3.0, and the GTX460 1GB OC 715Mhz card. Still fairly manageable, as long as that's the only cruncher I have running.

 

[biodoc]

Gee Peter, we will miss you and your leadership during the races.

Clearly you have given this a lot of thought and are comfortable with your decision so I'm happy for you.

It's good to hear you will keep your main rigs running though!

 

[Rudy Toody]

Sorry to hear about this decision.

The downside as I see it is that you will need to find a hobby.

I suggest knitting winter sweaters while you sit in your rocking chair by the BBQ grill.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Peter, I totally understand where you're coming from. Same thing happened to me about 2 years ago. Every once in a while I fire up BOINC to see if anything major has changed or if there's anything new.

To be honest, the thing that threw me off DC in the end was the lack of real world implications or applications. Aside from maybe some newly found pulsars or some low energy protein structures, what have we really achieved?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I completely understand. I have had to cut down a lot due to the time requirements of school and insomnia (one would think that insomnia would give me more time, but in reality I am just awake and 100 times more tired). I hope to get back into the swing of things after I graduate in December. And actually have weekends free...

Will look forward to seeing you post, and hunting for the vodkow.

 

[PCTC2]

Well, glad you're sticking around here still petrusbroder. I'm sure the rest would agree, but thanks for all you've done for the TeAm.

We all have cut back on crunching it seems. It does take a lot of time and money and the power bills can be, to say the least, tough. I remember going 100% I could hit a couple hundred dollars a month on just power. But I'm barely squeeking by now working part time so I haven't crunched in nearly two years.

But there's still BBQ. and :beer;

EDIT: It's still kinda crazy to see I'm still number #34 on the TeAm in F@H after almost a 2 year break. And over 60% of those points came from a single month (and a single painful power bill ).

 

[blckgrffn]

Gee Peter, we will miss you and your leadership during the races.

Clearly you have given this a lot of thought and are comfortable with your decision so I'm happy for you.

It's good to hear you will keep your main rigs running though!

All of this +1.

Sad news, but your contributions have been awesome so far. Looking forward to seeing what your output is even at your "reduced" levels. Too bad you are across the pond, other wise I would be interested in some of your parts

 

[ZipSpeed]

Your contributions will definitely be missed Peter but I'm glad you're still sticking around!

To be honest, the thing that threw me off DC in the end was the lack of real world implications or applications. Aside from maybe some newly found pulsars or some low energy protein structures, what have we really achieved?

I too, wonder about that sometimes. I am hopeful that something will come to fruition one day and go beyond the annals of academia.

 

[Assimilator1]

Hi Peter, sorry to hear you're scaling back, but I can completely see why, that's a lot of PCs to look after! Glad you're sticking around though .........& err probably around here alot more than me these days :$

IIRC you used to feed the heat from the PCs into your heating system, what will replace this lost heat in the winter?

 

[petrusbroder]

Some of you ask about the heating system - now that the computer generated heat is going to be less.
Well, as you may remember, I had a major break-down this winter. While repairing the system, I exchanged the heat exchanger (it was more then 9 years old ...) and put in one with better efficiency and much better regulation and steering. This means that I need much less energy input now. The freezers (we have two big ones), refrigerator, washing mashine, dishwasher, cooking range and oven supply approx. 75% of the needed energy; the rest comes from the deep well geothermal pump ... which I upgraded too - the old one was from 1992, with an efficiency of 55%; the new one has an efficieny of more than 80%.
The calculations show, that most of the heat generated from my farm (which I am shuttting down) would not be used ... unless the out door temps drop below -30ºC. I can live with that ... ... since the geothermal pump can provide the rest without problems.
To heat my house of approx 3850sq.feet in northern Sweden, where we have more than 60 days of out door temps below -17ºC/year, I will use approx 2500kWh/year for the pumps and compressors - all the rest will be geothermal heat and what others call "waste heat" from my appliences and remaining computers. That I would call energy saving ...

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

That is so awesome... I wish you could send some of that cold here -- this summer in Texas is going to be brutal.

 

[Sunny129]

today Nicklas Lidstrom, 4 time Stanley Cup winner and 7 time Norris Trophy winner (and a Swede to boot!), retired from my beloved Detroit Redwings :|. just when i thought the day couldn't get worse, i catch wind of this :'(. sucks to lose the production of our current top cruncher, but i can't argue with what you feel is best for you. anyways, i'm glad you'll continue to hang around the forums...

 

[blckgrffn]

I am pulling for you to reinvest from the sales of your current crunchers a portion into a dense (easy to manage, relatively power effecient) dual G34/LGA 2011 platform that will allow you to continue to contribute in a big way with a very minimum of hassle. Surely you could find room in your little cottage somewhere?

That aside, you decision is still very understandable. DC is mainly an excuse for me to stay involved in hardware/read up on HPC news as gaming has not been providing that push for me anymore. If it is providing very little utility to you at a high cost of time and money, then obviously another hobby is calling.

I think in the long term I am going to focus on WCG as its projects seem well vetted and results oriented. Particular Go Fight Against Malaria, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well (IIRC) and that organization is very results oriented. If it is good enough for Big Billy G., I feel confident it is good enough for me

The upgrades to your heating and cooling systems are very impressive! May they work as promised and without hassle

 

[petrusbroder]

The upgrades to your heating and cooling systems are very impressive! May they work as promised and without hassle

It most certainly does work well!

 

[Pokey]

petrusbroder

You have contributed more than your share to our DC community. But everyone needs to strike a balance between DC and real life.

So thanks for all you have done and good luck going forward.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

As they say, "we have the watch".

 

[Uppsala9496]

Sorry to see you are retiring.
I myself started the shut down for the summer. Sold 2 cpu's and won't be replacing them. Had a nice temperature drop the last 2 days so I fired up my remaining 3 machines for SIMAP. The two dedicated crunchers will most likely be going down Sunday when it gets warm again and won't come back on until September or so. Looking to sell my condo, so that is going to impact my DC contributions as well.
Hopefully you will still organize the F@H holiday race. That is always a fun time and you do an excellent job running it and keeping everyone involved.
Enjoy your summer.

 

[somethingsketchy]

Just as the others have said, I'm saddened to hear that retirement has come. I'm very certain it was never easy to manage dozens of crunchers at once (heck I do the same thing every day at work). Perhaps this can be the launching point for what blckgrffn had alluded to (a few multi-socket builds, rather than dozens of single socket builds) in the future.

 

[Neurodog]

I don't understand why you are leaving us...did we forget to put the seat back up?

We can change you know.

But seriously, Thanks for everything Peter!

See you around!

 

[mk]

Thank you for all your contributions, Peter. In your situation scaling back is quite understandable. Having a farm of dozens of computers must be terribly time consuming and expensive to maintain and manage. I do second the idea of having one or two dedicated high end crunchers, though. Glad you're not planning on leaving the forums.

 

[Fardringle]

I'm in a somewhat similar situation. Over the years, most of my production has come from my office machines running BOINC when they aren't busy doing actual business stuff. However, many of those machines are quite a few years old now and simply don't do enough to justify the significant power bills so I plan to be gradually shutting off BOINC on the older machines soon. I'll still keep my home computers and some of the newest office computers running BOINC but I just can't rationalize the power costs to keep the dinosaurs crunching when the budget is so tight for things that I really need...

 

[Assimilator1]

I don't understand why you are leaving us...did we forget to put the seat back up?

We can change you know.

But seriously, Thanks for everything Peter!

See you around!

He's not leaving us just scaling down, did you not read his post? lol
Good to see ya btw

 

[petrusbroder]

I don't understand why you are leaving us...did we forget to put the seat back up?
We can change you know.
But seriously, Thanks for everything Peter!
See you around!

As Assim said: not leaving; just cutting down on computers. When at the peak I had 26 computers (2 core-, 4 core-, 6 core- and - 8 core-systems) running simultaneously - 114 cores + 11 GPUs. Those comps heated my house well ... but now, after a upgrade, I have a much more efficient heating system and I don't need that many comps to heat the house. Also the cost (in time - mostly, and somewhat in money) is no longer defensible.
At that time i produced more than 1 M boinc-credits/day with a mix of projects: Seti@Home, PG, WCG, Collatz, Malaria@Home, GPUGrid, SIMAP, and some others - som high-yielding (PG, Collatz), other much more normal-yielding (Malaria@Home, WCG).
I am in for the long haul. I've been in DC for more than a decade (Seti since Dec., 2 2001) and plan to contiunue in DC, but at a lower and more economical output.

I may very well go for one high-end, dual socket, dual or triple GPU-system. Depends on how much I sell my old systems for ... but it will be fun to plan, build and OC such a system.

 

[blckgrffn]

As Assim said: not leaving; just cutting down on computers. When at the peak I had 26 computers (2 core-, 4 core-, 6 core- and - 8 core-systems) running simultaneously - 114 cores + 11 GPUs. Those comps heated my house well ... but now, after a upgrade, I have a much more efficient heating system and I don't need that many comps to heat the house. Also the cost (in time - mostly, and somewhat in money) is no longer defensible.
At that time i produced more than 1 M boinc-credits/day with a mix of projects: Seti@Home, PG, WCG, Collatz, Malaria@Home, GPUGrid, SIMAP, and some others - som high-yielding (PG, Collatz), other much more normal-yielding (Malaria@Home, WCG).
I am in for the long haul. I've been in DC for more than a decade (Seti since Dec., 2 2001) and plan to contiunue in DC, but at a lower and more economical output.

I may very well go for one high-end, dual socket, dual or triple GPU-system. Depends on how much I sell my old systems for ... but it will be fun to plan, build and OC such a system.

Wow, 26 computers. Yeah, you deserve a break and a :beer: or :beer: :beer: or whatever your taste is!