Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue with Boinc that I'm hoping you can help. I've been running Seti for years, first classic and then Boinc, but in the last couple of months I've noticed that enabling GPU computing causes near-steady hard drive activity. (I can't actually say how long this has been going on, but that's when I noticed.) Fairly simple situation: With GPU enabled, hard drive activity doesn't stop; suspending it from the activity dropdown, and it stops. Is this some kind of known issue, and is there some way to stop it aside from just not using the GPU?

Relevant info: Running Boinc 7.14.2 (x64), exclusively Seti@home. I have had other projects running but they've all been suspended for months. Running on an i5-6600K, all four cores enabled, not overclocked, 16GB RAM, GTX 980Ti GPU, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.

Any info or ideas are welcome. Thanks!

Not sure why you consider it to be a problem, however
The more work you do, the more Seti has to read & write to the HDD. If you have your AV programme set to monitor the BOINC folders, then that would result in a lot of HDD activity. Whitelisting the BOINC programme & data folders & their sub folders would stop that from occurring.

However I find it odd that running the video card significantly increases the drive activity, as CPU crunching would actually result in more disk activity as you have 4 threads on your CPU, so if all are being used, that's 4 times the disk activity compared to the 1 video card.


To find out what is actually doing all the disk activity, start up Task Manager, select the Performance tab, and down the bottom is "Open Resource Monitor", click on that, then click on the Disk tab to see what's going on there.

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Grant
Darwin NT

when you start and complete a WU, there is some disk reading and writing that happens and it records the results, writes some info about the WU, and then the files get deleted when you send them back to the project, and files created when you download more.

CPUs are relatively slow, so the amount of disk activity is rather low. but GPUs are several orders of magnitude faster so all of those previous activities just happen more often, leading to more disk activity.

try have several very fast GPUs on single system with highly optimized apps. I have all this happening every few seconds lol.

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

I would try in BOINC client Options > Computing preferences > Computing tab setting "Request tasks to checkpoint at most every [x] seconds" to a value longer than the longest GPU work unit completion time (not Astropulse.) I see from your computer that the longest was 602 seconds, so I would set it to 700 (or the highest BOINC allows.) Then the GPU tasks won't write to disk midway, or at least will do so minimally.

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My only concern is that it's putting undue stress on the drive, and I'd rather avoid any unnecessary wear and tear. Interesting idea about whitelisting the folders - I had to do that quite a long time ago with my Thunderbird folder, I forget exactly why but it was really hammering performance, and I can see where this could be a similar issue so I've whitelisted. Got the resource monitor running too, so we'll see what that reveals. Thanks!

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I'm learning things! I'll give this a try as well, thanks for the suggestion.

I'll report back in a few days, hopefully with good news.

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My only concern is that it's putting undue stress on the drive, and I'd rather avoid any unnecessary wear and tear.

If you were running database queries, that would be working the drive hard, but with the reading and writing that Seti does, even when running a dozen GPUs & 30+ CPU cores, it really is a very, very, very low workload for a HDD.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Okay, I'll take your word for it. I tried running it with the data directory moved to a flash drive, to alleviate the load on the HDD, which seemed to work at first - but I very quickly started getting computation errors on units being worked out by the GPU. Issues with reading/writing to the slower media? In any event, I've moved it back to the HDD so we'll see how it goes. I may be back with followup questions. :)

Thanks to everyone for all your help!

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I tried running it with the data directory moved to a flash drive, to alleviate the load on the HDD

HDDs are built for lots of activity, USB flash drive's aren't.


Your driver version (v441.41) will result in errors on some Arecibo WUs. The last driver that worked with all WUs was v431.60

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Grant
Darwin NT

@ Andy Chalk
Has any other change been made that has resulted in over-committing RAM? Page thrashing could result.

Not that I'm aware of, unless it was something that could have changed in a Win10 update. But no hardware changes (in years) and I haven't noticed any other performance changes. I think the great likelihood is that it's always been like this (or at least for quite a long time) but I only just noticed recently.

Moved Boinc back to the HDD and the frequent reads/writes have resumed, but it's not doing anything "alarming" I guess. My only concern was that it's putting undue strain on the drive (plus a little surprise that GPU computing would be so much more R/W intensive than standard CPU computing) but the general consensus is that it's perfectly normal, nothing to worry about, so that's where I'll leave it.

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True, but flash drives cost five bucks and take two seconds to swap out. :)

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