Help me plan my next DC project

[kranky]

With RC5 winding down I want to start thinking about what I might switch over to. Because of how I have to run things, not every project makes sense.

My herd has no net access. I have a pproxy internally and the herd connects to it to fetch/flush, but the pproxy can't get its own blocks or flush them. I have a personal proxy at home which I have to use to get a week's worth of blocks, email them in, and manually set up the file for the pproxy running the herd. Flushing the pproxy is the same way - email the finished blocks home, fiddle with the files for the home pproxy, then flush them.

Right now I have about 40 machines (90% Pentium 2 at 266mhz or 300mhz, and 10% Pentium 4's). But in a few months, all the machines will probably become Pentium 4's at about 1.8ghz. Once that happens, I'm probably going to be just on the brink of not being able to get enough RC5 blocks in and out via email. I would always have the option of just not using all available machines, but that's not very appealing.

Using CD-Rs is possible so I'll edit my original post to clarify that also. My only concern there is being able to fetch and flush work in a reasonable amount of time. Right now I can fetch and flush a week's worth of work in an hour or two from home (56k dialup), which is fine. Something in the range of 2-4MB a couple times a week is about as much as I could manage. Even if I could use a CD-R to move the work around, I can't take three hours a day to download/upload.


So I'm wondering, what other DC projects do this:

• works without net access
• one pproxy to serve the herd
• easy to get a week's worth of work back and forth via email and the files can't be huge. For RC5, I can sometimes get a week's worth of blocks (60,000+) in a file that's under 1MB. I can't live with 5MB files that I have to send back and forth every day. [edit: CD-Rs are possible but I have to use a 56k dialup to download/upload, so I can't afford three hours a day to keep things going]
• client runs as a service under NT (nothing in the systray) (pproxy doesn't have to be a service)
• client never requires attention
• has a tool like the cool rc5desstats program that scans the pproxy log files and gives me stats by machine (I guess I could live without this)

I can live with the emailing of files back and forth because I have no choice. But I want to be able to grab a week's worth of work at a time and flush it all at once also to keep the amount of manual intervention low.

If I knew which DC projects worked that way, I could start researching more details now while I have time to plan.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Migroo]

Bump for kranky.

Would ECCp be suitable? You dont have to download WUs as the program generates a 'list' of some sort to crack. Not sure wether it runs as a service or not though.

I would say that your requirements rule out SETI almost cirtainly (depending upon the speed and number of your crunchers). If you dont have too many crunchers then it would probably be OK, especially if you could burn WUs to a CD (they are 330~ kb each) and then distribute them. Results tend to be about 15kb each, so they are less of a problem. Everything else fits SETI - you can run it as a service etc.

HTH

 

[Robor]

Any way you could get internet access to just one of those machines? If cables are a problem maybe a wireless card? If you could you'd have a lot more options open.

 

[nagger]

The ECCP-109 client works as a service if you use something like FireDaemon to install the client as a service.

It doesn't need permanent internet connection and you can read more about this in our team's FAQ here:

Running the ECCp-109 Non-networked

Hope this helps

 

[MereMortal]

ECCp is your best option, since all of the things in your list are possible. Unfortunately, it may finish about the same time as RC-5.

Have you considered just running OGR? I don't remember how large the stubs are, and if this would be prohibitve. You already have the clients in place to do this project.

 

[kranky]

I appreciate the feedback so far.

Robor, I cannot get net access.

Migroo brings up a good point that I should have clarified - how many machines are going to be in use. I edited the original post to put that information in.

 

[Robor]

Awww, no net access? That's too bad. Makes things harder that way. I take 'net access for granted I guess. I helped a buddy setup a small office this past Sat. Everything was going fine until we went to get the clients talking to this medical program on the server. Kept getting error messages. Well, we call tech support and the guy wants to Email us a file. OOPS! No net access there yet. :disgust: His wife had to drive like 30 minutes each way to her parents place to get the file and bring it back.

Dunno if you considered using a laptop rather than a CDR or CDRW to transfer data for whichever project you choose. Sounds like ECCp might be the best option though. SETI would require too much data transfer for 40 machines. Even with your current setup you'd do about 50 WU's per day and (by my math) that would require 15+ MB of downloaded data for WU's. After your PC's are upgraded you'd easily do 150+ WU's per day if they're left on 24/7 and you'd be nearing 50MB of data required.

BTW - You might want to edit your original post to reflect your PC's. You'll probably get better responses that way

 

[kranky]

I added the info about the PCs to the original post. Thanks for that suggestion.

 

[Migroo]

You might want to split your herd into projects.

Doing solely SETI would require a lot of WU based maintenance on your part - something that I assume you would rather avoid. If you could manage doing a little every week, and say put the rest of the machines on ECCp, you would be sorted. You could have the ECCp machines dump to one machine (This is an assumption - I'm not an ECCp expert by any means) and then send yourself the results once a month or something. The machines running ECCp would carry on regardless (this is a rather attractive feature of the ECCp project).

See how much you could deal with in the way of SETI WUs and give it a go

 

[daweasel]

ECCp is your best bet until you go p4's. Then it's probably DF.