The aborted tasks will get resent to other hosts to crunch, no harm done. The project is designed to face these events.

Performance per watt is a real issue. Old hardware burns through a lot of juice and produces little work compared to modern machines. Your fleet of computers is not that old but there are a lot of them. Noise and clutter are also issues in your case.

It could be easier for your heart and wallet to keep your very favorite cruncher, recycle the rest, and use the funds freed up on the 'leccy bill to buy your old pal a GPU, provided the power supply is up to it. If you ever do get a new computer the GPU could be transplanted into it.

I still run some old hardware myself but winter here means if I don't put the watts through the computers I'll have to put them through the heaters anyway. I'm pretty much using the clunkers as space heaters and doing science as a happy byproduct. That stuff gets turned off in the summer.

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mambo

Aborted and reported tasks are sent on to a new cruncher PDQ. Abandoned tasks have to sit around until they time out.

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How large are the caches on the machines you want to retire?
If you only have a day or so of work on each box, just set "No New Tasks", finish what youy have, then shut down.

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Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

If you were to retire all but one of those computers, and use approx one months present electricity bill on a Scan - Nvidia 960 in it, your RAC would be about the same.

The only computer I am running at the moment, my sons, because my graphics card decided to stop working, has about same RAC as your total, it doesn't run 24/7 and is mainly used for games, of which, the graphics intensive ones are set to stop BOINC running, when in use.

It uses about 170 watts when crunching.

I am at the minute Crunching on over 10 machines and my oh my how I have had my moneys worth out of these machine since I bought them. Mostly second hand but they have worked non stop 24 hours a day for over a year straight.

The main reason is my Electric Bill is threw the roof Crunching on over a dozen machines. I could tell you the amount I'm paying but you know what I'm just not going to bother simply because you will call me utter crazy. Put it another way. I could use that money to build a bigger batter machine with in 2 Months of saving that will blow everything I have out the water. all 12 machines.

The sooner I shut down the sooner I save money so I wanted to ask if I abort all tasks being VLARS I think as I'm primarily running stock CPU App what will happen to those tasks. I know I'm not as Clued up as some people but I ;love being apart of this Online Community and checking the boards every day.

I'll make a donation next week when I get my wages, my pay so I'll not be going any were but I will be bowing out for a while.

I looked at your computers. That's a lot of old kit running. I retired my old P4 because it was wasting electricity for a small RAC.
I would suggest that you get either a new AMD or Intel chip and what ever new GPU card you like, Or can afford.
Ive never used AMD so I cant speak for what rac they can get. But My now old I7 3770 with a 550Ti Nvidia card gets close to 20,000 Rac. So does its twin.
Well, Not now that V8 came out but that's just a hiccup until V8 gets sorted out.
So don't get discouraged. But I do agree that you need to retire just about all of those machines. Don't take this wrong but running 12 and getting a 5800 RAC is not good.

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[/quote]

Old James

Well my total power bill is about the same as yours, I run 4 much more modern PCs, and before the introduction of v8 my RAC was heading towards 200k. So why not consider replacing all your PCs with a single modern one?

Something like http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7085153, but with only one GPU would more than quadruple your RAC while knocking your power bill down to something more manageable, I estimate that each of my PCs costs about £45 a month to run, and as a rule of thumb the CPU + motherboard takes as much power as each GPU. If you wanted to knock the power bill down even further go for a GTX750 or GTX750ti which would give a substantial hike in RAC over your current setup, but cost even less to run.

Another advantage, already touched on is that by having only one PC your "admin time" would be vastly reduced.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I am running 8 BOINC projects plus a CERN Challenge on 3 PCs, two Linux and one Windows 10. BOINC is not limited to SETI@home. Only 2 out of eight use GPUs, Einstein and SETI. Five of them use VirtualBox, which is a software.
Tullio
My electric bill is about 70 euro/month

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The days of CPU crunching have gone.

Have been seeing this a lot recently, while it may be true, there are many out there who use computers for what they were meant for.

Boinc was created to use unused cycles to process scientific data & until that changes, many are not interested in becoming credit hounds.

This is not true. CERN is putting much emphasis on distributed computing. Projects like LHC@home, vLHC@home, Atlas@home, CMS-dev and others to come are highly valued by the CERN staff. They don't use GPUs since they all run the same scientific software, developed not for BOINC in Scientific Linux environment by scientists, using VirtualBox. This also avoids the problem of confronting numerical results obtained in different OS and different CPUs, which has convinced scientists at climateprediction.net to assign some models to Windows, some to Linux and some to MAC OSX.
Tullio

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+1

+1

+ something:)

I am running V8 tasks with no problem on all my PCs.It looks like they made a good app.
Tullio

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other fair weather friends will disappear.

So are you implying that CPU crunchers are unloyal & fair weather?

Sorry not biting. Some previous GPU crunchers may decide not to bother any more.

This isn;t a game. Your attitude towards other crunchers on this project is dispicable. There's more than just you where this project is concerned. You have already been asked that if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.

It seems you cannot understand the Queen's English.

Sorry not biting. Some previous GPU crunchers may decide not to bother any more.

This isn;t a game. Your attitude towards other crunchers on this project is dispicable. There's more than just you where this project is concerned. You have already been asked that if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.

It seems you cannot understand the Queen's English.

+1

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Like you Spud I had to cut back too. At one point I had a farm of 12 Intel Quads. This was before GPU crunching. My electric bill topped $2k one month so I slowly cut back. I now have a single 8 core AMD and two 750ti graphic cards. I am very happy with the rac per watt.

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What I don't understand is why people don't just contribute as was originally intended. Crunch when your computer is on. Turn off your computer when you're done. You're still contributing to SETI@home, and you're not having to pay a high electric bill. You don't have to be a 24/7 cruncher to participate.

What I don't understand is why people don't just contribute as was originally intended. Crunch when your computer is on. Turn off your computer when you're done. You're still contributing to SETI@home, and you're not having to pay a high electric bill. You don't have to be a 24/7 cruncher to participate.

We are trying to be one of the luck winners of the toaster.
You know it's a ego thing. We each want to win. We want to be the 1%. I invested tens of thousands in my farm at it's peak. Mostly because I could and it was fun. It was my hobby. Today, I have a single machine and don't run it 24/7. I do run it as intended. But it sure was fun seeing my name in the top 20 back when the quads were screaming.

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Sure, I get the whole ego thing. But if you can't afford it, that doesn't mean you have to bow out entirely.

Sure, I get the whole ego thing. But if you can't afford it, that doesn't mean you have to bow out entirely.

And why not? Seems sensible if you can't afford to run 'em.

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Member of the People Encouraging Niceness In Society club.