Goals and achievements

[PoppaGeek]

Thought I would start a thread where EVERYONE can post their Goals for the future and what achievements thay are proud of. (Thay is Irish for they) This is not a Who Gets Pie thread. No comparison of badges. It is just about you.

As we speak I have my 50 year badge for AIDs. SO I am now concentrating on Mapping Cancer Markers. Combined I have 54 years in the three Cancer projects. Only 13 right now in MCM. My goal right now is 100 years total on Cancer so that includes any new cancer projects that might come along. I also have 5 and 10 year badges in several other projects but my focus now is cancer.

My hopes for future projects are more from the children's cancer project and a GPU project specifically AMD GPUs.

The problem for most of is these projects take a long time to set up and plan. run and then process the results so it's success can be determined.

[stoneageman]

My near term goal is to get the 50yr badge for MCM. Long term, just to maintain my #11 WCG position until the next GPU project arrives, if it ever will

[OldChap]

Goals:
200 years..... just 2 to go so next week sometime

50 years MCM and 100 years FA@H will take a while.... 15 and 30 ish to go still.

The last one is one I want but at the same time I don't and that is ddtung's 9th place on the team. I bow to his achievement when the hardware was so much more inferior to that which we run today.

[PoppaGeek]

I was pretty proud of my first 1 million points. I got there with a single core AMD XP and a Mac Mini single core @ 1.2 gz.

[Otis11]

I'm pushing for my 5 year badge in CEP2 - really wish I could do more for that project because it's an area that fascinates me - device physics is amazing! - but sadly my computers HHDs aren't fast enough to handle more.

A parallel goal is my first 50 year badge with MCM, and I'd like to get my 20 year badge with FAAH but they have so many errors it drives me nuts! (and I'm only at 13 years, so that's a long time of tolerating errors!)

And a long, long term goal is to be #1 for my start date - I gotta catch bomucha, who's currently 11M points ahead of me... and pulling away. I'll get him some day...

As for what I'm proud of:
I'm proud of my 100 year run time.
I'm proud of my 100M points to qualify as a supercruncher on PG's website (old goal - though the requirements should probably be raised for technology improvements. Ya know, cuz if this Texan can do it...)
But most of all, I'm proud of my original 1M points I achieved with 3 little single core computers. Boom. That's right. 1 Million on 3 cores. First million I ever got.

I was pretty proud of my first 1 million points. I got there with a single core AMD XP and a Mac Mini single core @ 1.2 gz.

[masterg]

My next goal would be to somehow make a dent in the XS WCG and MW@H numbers without breaking my budget which doesn't exist.

[Red Maw]

Short term: Get 2 years runtime on CEP2 - need to actually get CEP2 units for that to happen though so this isn't looking good

Ultra long term: #1 for my join date (~103 million to go).

[josh1980]

I racked up 10 computing years of CEP2 in like 4 months when CEP2 first came out. I remember when I hit 10 computing years there were only like 5 people higher than me for CEP2 on the planet. Haha.

For those that remember I had a setup that was running all ram drives so I had no problem dealing with the high write rates that CEP2 generates.

[Otis11]

I racked up 10 computing hours of CEP2 in like 4 months when CEP2 first came out. I remember when I hit 10 computing years there were only like 5 people higher than me for CEP2 on the planet. Haha.

For those that remember I had a setup that was running all ram drives so I had no problem dealing with the high write rates that CEP2 generates.

You happen to know where we can find some decently cheap ram drives? And if power fails, do they back up? (or batteries more likely?)

[josh1980]

There's no such thing as "decently cheap RAM drives" anymore. Even mine, in used condition, are worth $500 with no RAM per ebay.

They do have a battery and backup to a CF flash card on a loss of power of >60 seconds or so.

If someone is serious about buying one, I do have 3 or 4. PM me for more. They will include RAM (one is maxed out at 32GB too).

[OldChap]

It is my trumpet and I will toot it when I want !!

List this one under achievements, it has taken a while



200 Years

[stoneageman]

Slacker!

[PoppaGeek]

It is my trumpet and I will toot it when I want !!

List this one under achievements, it has taken a while



200 Years

TOOT that trumpet!!!

200 years! WOW!

[yojimbo197]

Short term goals: To hit 100,000,000 points and move up to #80 in XS

Long term goals: To hit 500,000,000 points and move up to #50 in XS

[Otis11]

There's no such thing as "decently cheap RAM drives" anymore. Even mine, in used condition, are worth $500 with no RAM per ebay.

They do have a battery and backup to a CF flash card on a loss of power of >60 seconds or so.

If someone is serious about buying one, I do have 3 or 4. PM me for more. They will include RAM (one is maxed out at 32GB too).

Gee wiz... $500? Man...

I'd love those, but I can't afford anywhere near what they're worth and wouldn't want to low-ball. If you have some gathering dust that I could borrow though...
(I won't be in the same city as my crunchers till mid-December though, so it'll be a bit of time. - I'd really love to make a dent on CEP2 though...)

BTW, how much faster are RAM Drives than, say fast, small SSDs?

Edit: looking online it seems like it might be better for me to get a software RAM drive? Since I'm not using an application that requires that much RAM, could put in 32 GB RAM, use 12 for System, 20 for Disk... but would probably need a UPS unless I can get the RAM drive to cache every hour or so... Will do some research when I have more time.

[D_A]

Goals? Crunching goals?

Help make the world a better place. All the numbers and pretty badges don't mean that much to me in the end.

[Otis11]

Goals? Crunching goals?

Help make the world a better place. All the numbers and pretty badges don't mean that much to me in the end.

Haha, well, while the badges aren't my main goal, they do help keep things interesting... I'm a very goal oriented person, (And ADD) so it helps keep my attention.

[josh1980]

Gee wiz... $500? Man...

I'd love those, but I can't afford anywhere near what they're worth and wouldn't want to low-ball. If you have some gathering dust that I could borrow though...
(I won't be in the same city as my crunchers till mid-December though, so it'll be a bit of time. - I'd really love to make a dent on CEP2 though...)

I'll come back to this in a sec...

BTW, how much faster are RAM Drives than, say fast, small SSDs?

Well, since it is only SATA2 they have limits. Their real power is that they are writeable an unlimited number of times and have absurdly amazing random I/O performance from the benchmarks I've run. But with CEP2 you don't need high throughput. You just need high I/O.

Edit: looking online it seems like it might be better for me to get a software RAM drive? Since I'm not using an application that requires that much RAM, could put in 32 GB RAM, use 12 for System, 20 for Disk... but would probably need a UPS unless I can get the RAM drive to cache every hour or so... Will do some research when I have more time.

CEP2 uses a lot of RAM. Each thread used something like 2GB of RAM. So you can see that using a software RAM drive has limits. Even more so if things become unstable or you run out of RAM and CEP2 WUs start terminating in a bad way. From my testing a few years ago this didn't work well. I tried it. The only way to really make this worthwhile would be to load an absurd amount of RAM in your system. Something like 64GB of RAM would be a good start. Naturally, in 2010 the cost was definitely a limitation. That was probably like $2k of RAM or something without considering the motherboard and CPU that would have been required.

Now for a secret...

You ready for a secret...

I hope I don't blow this for myself since I do this...

If you are okay with buying used ebay SSDs, you can buy Intel SLC drives used. If you search ebay for the Intel X25-Es, these were circa 2009 and 2010. They use SLC so they should last damn near forever. I've bough 5 or 6 from ebay and the "most used" had SMART parameters indicating that the useful life remaining was "just 97%". LOL. Drives that are 4 years old, used in servers that were on 24x7, only 3% used and pretty cheap!? Yes please!

The 32GB can often be purchased for $30-40 and the 64GB is $60-90. If you are patient and watch ebay they *will* come up at these prices. They aren't always available at that price and a few sellers are trying to sell them at far more than the prices I quoted. I've never paid more than $40 for a 32GB and never paid more than $65 for the 64GB. These are SATAI, but they have very good performance for CEP2, shouldn't be able to be worn out in any reasonable period of time, so they are a darn good alternative. You do have to be somewhat fast because they are useful for quite a few other high-write functions and others know about this little trick. You might be able to find other SLC-based SSDs that are used. But I haven't looked. Back in the 2008-2010 era SSDs were stupid expensive, often manufactured by companies trying to maximize profits to the extreme, and weren't always very reliable. I went with the Intel because that's all I recommend myself and these X25-Es were billed (at the time) as high end enterprise/industrial endurance drives.

Putting 1 32GB drive in your cruncher should allow you to do all the CEP2 you want on that cruncher.

Now watch, I'll never be able to find them on ebay at these prices again. :P

I keep a few spares around that are SLC because there are certain times where SLC SSD just can't be beat.