i should also add that a SSD would also be a good addition to a boinc machine.

why would you want a ssd on a boinc machine? boinc in general, and seti in specific 9since this is a seti forum) do not do frequent reads and writes to the main drive. random access times and sustained transfer rates are of no consiquence to boinc or seti. they also do not care about seek times.

multibeam workunit is under half a meg. you could fit a few of them on a floppy. apastropulse is a bit bigger, but still its not like we are dealing with gigabyte size files here.

why would you want a ssd on a boinc machine? boinc in general, and seti in specific 9since this is a seti forum) do not do frequent reads and writes to the main drive. random access times and sustained transfer rates are of no consiquence to boinc or seti. they also do not care about seek times.

multibeam workunit is under half a meg. you could fit a few of them on a floppy. apastropulse is a bit bigger, but still its not like we are dealing with gigabyte size files here.

Ditto that......

I don't think anybody on Seti has been able to show an improvement in crunching performance with the addition of SSDs.......
Sure, they may help overall system performance, and could appear to make the rig faster by speeding up booting and running other programs....but nobody has documented a crunching boost.

Correct me if I am wrong.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

I don't think anybody on Seti has been able to show an improvement in crunching performance with the addition of SSDs.......
Sure, they may help overall system performance, and could appear to make the rig faster by speeding up booting and running other programs....but nobody has documented a crunching boost.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Hmm, I came to think about the issue with a large cache causing massive boinc slowdowns...did that ever get traced back to HDD writes? Could an SSD help out in a case with say a 4000 unit cache?

I don't think anybody on Seti has been able to show an improvement in crunching performance with the addition of SSDs.......
Sure, they may help overall system performance, and could appear to make the rig faster by speeding up booting and running other programs....but nobody has documented a crunching boost.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Hmm, I came to think about the issue with a large cache causing massive boinc slowdowns...did that ever get traced back to HDD writes? Could an SSD help out in a case with say a 4000 unit cache?

Dunno....but it's a very good question.
I am not sure if the high-cache congestion that occurs in Boinc is actually due to disk read/write times or just the CPU processing time that it takes for Boinc to gather it's thoughts when dealing with 1000's of WUs.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

I am not sure if the high-cache congestion that occurs in Boinc is actually due to disk read/write times or just the CPU processing time that it takes for Boinc to gather it's thoughts when dealing with 1000's of WUs.

The latter, I think. It's the sheer number of RPC calls that can't be finished within a second. No disk I/O at all.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

SETI@home classic workunits 3,758
SETI@home classic CPU time 66,520 hours

I am not sure if the high-cache congestion that occurs in Boinc is actually due to disk read/write times or just the CPU processing time that it takes for Boinc to gather it's thoughts when dealing with 1000's of WUs.

The latter, I think. It's the sheer number of RPC calls that can't be finished within a second. No disk I/O at all.

Gruß,
Gundolf

If that is the case, then a SSD would not help Boinc there either. So, at least for a dedicated Boinc rig, looks like skip the SSD.
For a multi-purpose rig, there may well be some benefits in speeding the rig up doing other things.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

when i have tousands of work units and boinc would hang up for a few seconds at a time, i never see the hard drive led on.

The latter, I think. It's the sheer number of RPC calls that can't be finished within a second. No disk I/O at all.

Also, depending on the screen you sit on, that List control w/sort columns updating every second doesn't help when you have 2000+ WU's ;-) Newer Boincs have a "Show Active Tasks" button, and you can watch the impact from TaskMgr (boincmgr & boinc.exe), memory footprint drops a few meg and CPU % drops from 3+ to 0.

I got here a RAID I Raptor HDD Setup, which should be very quick and still get slowdowns with a lot of WU in the cache.

A test on a SAN Storage results in the same, too.

So, it is not an HDD issue...

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- Member of the Midna - True Form - Defense Force -