Hi guys,
I am trying to figure out what am I doing wrong all my systems got really low RAC these days.
My dual 980, dual 670 dual 690. My 1070 system. All doing really bad. Even my dual 1080ti system is doing horrible for results. What am I doing wrong?

I installed optimized apps. Tried different things, my results are still horrible.

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Hi guys,
I am trying to figure out what am I doing wrong all my systems got really low RAC these days.
My dual 980, dual 670 dual 690. My 1070 system. All doing really bad. Even my dual 1080ti system is doing horrible for results. What am I doing wrong?

I installed optimized apps. Tried different things, my results are still horrible.

1) Your not an IDIOT! Frustrated yes.
2) The gpu task times on your Gtx 1080 system seem to be running around 3 minutes per task. A very respectable time for a Windows system. It can take 6-8 weeks for your base RAC to climb those dizzying heights.

The times your gtx 670 amd 980 are amazingly slow. I had a gtx 1060 3GB running standard SOG gpu tasks taking around 7 minutes ( 420 seconds). Both of your GPUs seem to be running in thousands of seconds.

I can't tell but are you limiting your video cards to 1 task per card?
Do you have any command line parameters you are using on your gpu's?
How hot are your cards running?
How hot are your cpu's running?

Your e5-2670 should be running all its CPU tasks at sub 2 hours and it isn't. How hot is the cpu getting? How fast (in cycles) is the cpu running.? It should be running at the baseline of 2.6GHz at least. If it isn't it may be running slow due to cpu thermal limits.

I have learned lately that no Intel cpu should be running above 80 degrees C.

I am sure someone else is going to chime in and ask at least the questions I have asked ;)

HTH,
Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

I am trying to figure out what am I doing wrong all my systems got really low RAC these days.

Credit new is broken & has been for years. The Credit you get for the work you do varies, a lot.

And add to that the fact that you are running the wrong application on some of your video cards, and haven't made use of command line settings to improve performance of others that are running the right application would explain their poor performance.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Hi guys,
I am trying to figure out what am I doing wrong all my systems got really low RAC these days.
My dual 980, dual 670 dual 690. My 1070 system. All doing really bad. Even my dual 1080ti system is doing horrible for results. What am I doing wrong?

I installed optimized apps. Tried different things, my results are still horrible.

. . I would suggest you concentrate on one machine and get it running optimally. By then you will probably know what to do to optmise the others. I would suggest the most powerful as a place to start but since one is running so badly configured perhaps that would be the best one to learn on.

. . The i7 with the 2 x 680 GPUs: run or rerun Lunatics installer and select AVX for the CPU tasks (which is where it is now) but select SoG for the GPU tasks. Then try running the GPU tasks 2 at a time. In BOINC manager in Options/Computing preferences /Computing under usage limits set it to 75% of CPUs and 100% of CPU time. Then in your projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu folder find the file mb_cmdline_win_x86_SSE3_OpenCL_NV_SoG.txt and using notepad add the following line without a carriage return or line feed :-

-high_prec_timer -use_sleep -sbs 256 -period_iterations_num 50 -tt 150

. . Then let it run for a while and see how the results are shaping up. Your GPU run times should be less than the CPU run times.

. . If you have or can d/l a copy of AfterBurner it has great system monitoring tools and will let you monitor your hardware on a nice unified graph page which can help you get the settings just right for optimal operation.

Stephen

<smile>

Then try running the GPU tasks 2 at a time.

Best to start with 1 at a time to get a base line. Then see how 2 might go.

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Grant
Darwin NT

your 1080ti system's daily production does seem quite low, even though you are running the tasks quickly and receiving normal credit for each one (~50 creds).

I'm guessing that you are only running 1 task per GPU. you can increse overall production by 30-50% if you run 3 tasks at a time. the 1080ti can handle it. but even with that, your daily production is too low. Do you put run limits on the system? do you turn it off for hours at a time? that's the only thing i can think of.

my 2x 1080ti and 2x 12-core Xeon system produces 80-90k per day on windows 7. you should be close to that with 2x 1080ti and a 16 core threadripper.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

your 1080ti system's daily production does seem quite low, even though you are running the tasks quickly and receiving normal credit for each one (~50 creds).

I'm guessing that you are only running 1 task per GPU. you can increse overall production by 30-50% if you run 3 tasks at a time. the 1080ti can handle it. but even with that, your daily production is too low. Do you put run limits on the system? do you turn it off for hours at a time? that's the only thing i can think of.

my 2x 1080ti and 2x 12-core Xeon system produces 80-90k per day on windows 7. you should be close to that with 2x 1080ti and a 16 core threadripper.

I dont put any limits, right now I got 2 tasks per gpu.

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Do you notice it having trouble sending and receiving work? For example. Your 1080ti system hasn’t communicated with the project for about 11hrs. And it’s most likely out of work and sitting idle doing nothing right now.

And now that I look more closely, you sent in like 100 errored tasks on your last update, so I think you’ve hit the 24hr penalty.

My systems send and receive old/new work every 5 minutes. Having such long outages will prevent you from working the system to its fullest.

What are your compute preferences set to for the work cache? I set mine to hold 1 day of data and an additional buffer of 0.01.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

There is certainly something amiss with the CPU on your system with two GTX1080ti. The CPU has returned well over 100 error tasks, while the GPUs are struggling, but appear to be returning OK results, and the run times aren't too bad given you appear to be running the CUDA application.

A few questions....
What version of the CPU application did you choose when you ran the installer?
Are you running 24/7?
Are you running with "sleep" or "hibernate" active?
Are you running with any screen saver active?
Are you putting the monitor to sleep.

Obviously the number of hours running will impact on the amount of work you return, but so can setting the computer to "sleep" and "hibernate", and there is some talk that setting the monitor to sleep (from within Windows) also can have an impact on the performance of GPUs. It is worth remembering that Windows uses mouse/keyboard inactivity to trigger sleep/hibernate, and ignores computational activity like SETI.

Screensavers can be a real bag of worms.

Choosing the wrong CPU application will have a very bad impact on its ability to return valid data - I'm not sure what the correct one for a Threadripper is, but getting the error code "(unknown error) - exit code -1073741701 (0xc000007b" tells me you've got the wrong application version installed :-(

One final thing to think about is that it takes at least two weeks to get a realistic picture of where the RAC for a given set-up is going to settle, and even then it can be another four weeks or more before it has properly stabilised.

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

rob, i was looking at his daily production number, not his RAC. his daily production is still crazy low for that system. something like 10-20k. looking at his past few weeks

daily production will give you a benchmark of where your RAC should end up (all things being equal).

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Given the run times on his GTX1080ti I would expect to see a far higher daily production, so it's got to be down to not actually crunching 24 hours a day, even allowing for the use of the CUDA applicaitons I would expect a production of >30k/day rather than the ~11k being achieved. I've just looked at it again, the last contact was 9:58 UTC on the 5th, and the time as I type is 05:55 on the 6th - so certainly not doing 24hrs a day, possibly more like 6 to 8 hours.

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

I made the requested changes for the 690 system and I noticed RAC going up. For the 980 I didnt notice anything yet. Is it wrong to dedicated one cpu core for 0.5 gpu, if running 2 tasks per GPU?
Thank you

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I made the requested changes for the 690 system and I noticed RAC going up. For the 980 I didnt notice anything yet. Is it wrong to dedicated one cpu core for 0.5 gpu, if running 2 tasks per GPU?
Thank you

Not that I am aware of. Typically you want a core/thread driving each gpu task unless there is good evidence it would run just as well with less per task.

When experimenting with 2 tasks on a gpu, it is a good idea to start with a single task, establish a baseline and then go to two tasks. I have the experience of having 2 tasks take about 150% of the time that 1 task took. So it was more than twice as slow.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Hi, Glad to see someone carrying on working with a pair of 690s - I had a pair when they came out, but sadly they got flooded out and replaced by 780s when I rebuilt the system, and then more recently by 980s....
I had a lot of trouble keeping them cool enough for 24/7 operation, and ended up water cooling them (and it wasn't the water cooling that caused the flood).

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

Good Day,
i made the recommended choice for the 690s and noticed RAC going uyp by about 4k a day. The 980 didnt notice any difference --still a problem for me. For the 1080ti, I made the changes today and waiting to see the difference.
Thank you

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The 980 didnt notice any difference

Because you're still running the wrong application.

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Grant
Darwin NT

The 980 didnt notice any difference

Because you're still running the wrong application.

Yes that old ancient Cuda32 app just doesn't cut the mustard (maybe you just forgot to select the right app there) so just run the Lunatics v0.45 beta6 installer again and make sure that you select the SoG app for your 980 this time. ;-)

Cheers.

The 980 didnt notice any difference

Because you're still running the wrong application.

Yes that old ancient Cuda32 app just doesn't cut the mustard (maybe you just forgot to select the right app there) so just run the Lunatics v0.45 beta6 installer again and make sure that you select the SoG app for your 980 this time. ;-)

Cheers.

Thank you :) I made the change, lets see what happens now.

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Any other tips, tricks, I can try. I feel like my systems are pretty much useless now. I really love SETI and want to improve.

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Any other tips, tricks, I can try. I feel like my systems are pretty much useless now. I really love SETI and want to improve.

Setting
-hp -period_iterations_num 1 -high_perf -sbs 1024
would give a significant boost to the GTX 980 performance.

Edit- same for the other systems- although I would suggest only running 1 WU at time to see how well they do for a while.
Once you get an idea of those run times, then maybe try 2 at a time on the GTX 1080Tis. You could try 2 at a time on the other cards, but I would expect it wouldn't improve things- it would probably reduce their output, them being much older architectures.

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Grant
Darwin NT