PowerMac G5 / BOINC Question

Questions and Answers : Macintosh : PowerMac G5 / BOINC Question
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Martin Punton

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Message 787432 - Posted: 26 Jul 2008, 9:03:39 UTC

Hello all!

I just started running the SETI@Home project again after a very long break - basically I ran it years ago on a P2 Xeon 450MHz and it took an eternity.

Now, at work I have a Quad Core (Q6600) XP PC which runs 4 'threads?' at the same time and these take roughly 3-4 hours to complete. A colleague has my old P4 HT 3.0GHz XP PC and that's taking about 6-7 hours.

However, at home I have a dual 2.7GHz G5 PowerMac and the time remaining on the two 'threads' is 17 1/2 hours! I thought the G5 would keep up with at least the P4 and probably closer to the Q6600.

Does the Mac do more work or is the G5 just too slow, because at 17 hours per thread I'd just abandon it on this Mac.

Please help.

Krgds,

Marty
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Robert Smith
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Message 787532 - Posted: 26 Jul 2008, 15:10:43 UTC
Last modified: 26 Jul 2008, 15:34:05 UTC

I'll wager, if you watch the time remaining, that the finish time is decreasing quite rapidly.

All new BOINC/SETI installations misreport finish times in the beginning. The reason is that it needs to complete a few workunits in order to learn how long these things should take.

If you want to give your G5 a boost, you could also have a look over in Number Crunching and give it an optimised app to play with.
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Martin Punton

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Message 787593 - Posted: 26 Jul 2008, 16:56:39 UTC

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the info. You're totally right, it completed the 2 work threads/units in ~5 hours.

Due to the OS X bug though, I can't get more work to get the numbers to average out.

So just now I'm hanging in for this patch.
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Questions and Answers : Macintosh : PowerMac G5 / BOINC Question


 
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