Intel p4 3.2GHz prescott with 1MB L2 cache taking 9 hrs/wu

[kasperlindvig]

I am wondering why my cpu is taking 4-5 times longer to complete a wu than it should be according to the calculator in setispy. So far I have completed 7 wu's in 60+ hrs and the speed is ranging from 10 to 150 Mflops - averaging 70 Mflops. 3 Years ago on my 1.4GHz athlon I was getting speeds of 200-250 Mflops. This I don't seem to figure out. According to setispy the efficiency should be around 5 CpF and I am getting 40+ CpF. This seem to be wery inefficient. The processor supports HT, but there is no difference whether it is turned on or off. The OS is win2k3. The platform is an intel server motherboard: SE7210TP1-E. RAM is 4*512MB pc3200. According to sandra benchmarks the processor is doing 3182mips and 1142/1781 mflops and the RAM is doing 2735/2686 MB/s without HT and 3200/3200 MB/s with HT. I am running the newest version of seti@home.
Any help appreciated
Sincerely Kasper

 

[Confused]

Are you running the GUI (screensaver) or the CLI (text client)?

If you are using the GUI, then you really need to swap to the CLI, as it is MUCH faster.

Take a look here and follow these instructions to set it up so that it is the most efficient

Welcome to the forums, too


Garry

 

[kasperlindvig]

Thanks for the tip
It seemed to be me running the GUI version that caused the slow timing. After changing to the CLI all the problems were solved. I certainly think that it is strange how the GUI can be more than 4 times slower than the CLI. Couln't it be more optimised? I recall that there were no apparent performance difference between the GUI and CLI when I was running seti@home on my 1.4GHz athlon (in 2001). But now it is definitely noticeable. Is this caused by the requirement of drawing the object on the screen by the cpu or gpu. If so would a faster gpu make the GUI faster?
Kasper

 

[Confused]

If you have the GUI displaying the graphics, then yes, it can make that much difference. The graphics are purely drawn by the CPU, and are not GPU accelerated at all.

Even in it's most optimised format (don't ever display the graphics, screen saver on blank screen), the GUI is still about 25% slower than the CLI!


Garry

 

[BadThad]

You definately want to have HT on for running SETI. You'll produce almost twice the wu's. I recommend using SETI Driver with the CLI. More info here!

 

[Wiz]

I set up a Prescott for a client and using Seti Driver set to run 2 processes I was getting an average of about 1 WU / hour. This was a 2.8 that was running at 3.6Ghz - nice machine, sad to see it go but that's business! They use it for graphics etc so I dropped it back to 3.4Ghz & removed Seti before delivery.