Back in Black

This blog is back! Though the outset will change.

I've been gain(ward)fully whisked into a world of motherboard reviews and news at http://anandtech.com.  My job there is to dissect recent news from motherboard manufacturers (and sometimes CPU, RAM and GPU news) for the public, as well as reviewing motherboards.

This blog will mainly link back to all my anandtech.com stuff, and provide some musings.  Keep your eyes peeled, dawg.

Yet another blog

Left for dust. No really, seemingly I have better things to do with my time...

Let's just leave some BOINC stuff here. Click an adsense link if you reach this page.

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boinc update

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So, a new project has come into the BOINC world:

Collatz

The Collatz project is designed to prove/disprove the Collatz conjecture through brute force techniques. The project will end when this is done.

Good thing about this project is that there are optimised apps for ATi GPUs and nVidia GPUs. The 64-bit CPU application is pretty good as well, the 32-bit one is a bit crap. But, it doesn't have the single precision requirement like MilkyWay, so I can use my two 4670 cards for it as well.

So I've put them into Dutchie, and Dutchie into the old P4 case I had. My ATi cards in HAL are now working on Collatz too, and when GPUGrid hits 1M, it'll transfer over too. My CPUs will still work on the goals mentioned in my last post. So far, time per WU looks like:

4850:
802.781 sec for 159.75 creds
780.875 sec for 149.11 creds

GTX280:
1359.91 sec for 155.14 creds
1442.56 sec for 157.38 creds
1434.11 sec for 158.53 creds

Q6600 @ 2.85Ghz, 32-bit:
32533.23 sec for 167.23 creds

So yeah, CPU is a bit crap at 2k creds per day per quad core on 32-bit. But 1M Collatz creds should take about 60 days on one 4850. Or 30 on two, 15 on four.

boinc update

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Ahh, more BOINC progress.

Just hit 13M credits total, nearly 10M in Milkyway, nearly 1M in GPUGrid and nearly 250K in SETI:

I'm hitting all my main targets here. I was wanting to pad out this graphic:

With results at each of the 10K, 25K, 50K, 100K, 250K, 500K, 750K, 1M, 2.5M, 5M and 10M milestones. Each milestone requires a certain amount of projects to reach that level, and SETI will be getting my my 250K one soon and MW will hit the 10M one soon. So that goal is done.

Well, what's left then? Gain more credits?

In respect to the fact that I'll be using a 16 thread machine at work in the near future, I've come up with the following plan:

a) Reach my main goals with respect to the second graphic. This means:
- Milkyway @ 10M
- GPUGrid @ 1M
- SETI @ 250K

b) Work on little projects where I am below 80% in terms of credit. For now I'll limit this to:
- Rosetta
- FreeHal
- Einstein
- Spinhenge
- ABC
- Ramsey
- SIMAP
- Malaria
- RCN
- SETI-Beta
And for each of them I'll get them up to 50K, and hopefully above that 80% line.

c) Now for some bigger goals - get as high as I can on each project to get 1st or 2nd in terms of 'who joined the same day I did'. This means the following projects and targets:
- CPDN @ 250K
- QMC @ 600K / 1.2M
- PrimeGrid @ 250K
- WCG @ 1.25M
- Cosmology @ 1M
- Rosetta @ 500K/1M/5M
For Rosetta and QMC, the numbers gets me into 3rd/2nd/1st but because there is such a gap it might be worth doing it in stages.

All this time, my GFX cards will be doing MilkyWay (get up to 20M or something) and GPUGrid/SETI/Aqua.

I do have a motherboard and chip here (i.e. Dutchie) not in a case or with graphics cards, so I'm deciding whether to build it up into a machine, or try and sell it on as my father is needing a new machine soon.

benchmark update

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This week I helped a friend pick out a new laptop. I picked out a few, but eventually she decided on the Acer Aspire 5536:

Specifications:

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 QL-64 2.1 Ghz
GPU: Radeon Mobility HD 3200
RAM: 3GB
HDD: 250GB
Screen: 15.6"
Price: Around 350

All-in-all, a very nice price for what is a very nice laptop. I also got to benchmark it.

The QL-64 was a never before seen chip on hwbot, so a quick request to support got it added. Needless to say, this resulted in a swathe of gold for me... :)

CPU-Z: 2118.53 Mhz
PiFast: 73.26 sec @ 2100 Mhz
1M SuperPi: 45.96 sec @ 2100 Mhz
32M SuperPi: 40 min 44.08 sec @ 2100 Mhz
32M wPrime: 39.35 sec @ 2100 Mhz
1024M wPrime: 21 min 1.12 sec @ 2100 Mhz

I wasn't able to benchmark using PC05 - for some reason it wouldn't install. Also didn't bother with the GPU due to time, and that card is hotly contested with better CPUs.

However, I still have a mountain of graphics cards and processors to bench. Lets see how far I get.

designing a benchmark

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So, this new benchmark I'm making. Let's call it gpuCompute.

The idea is to have a benchmark that exploits the capabilities of GPGPU and have nothing to do with graphics. So mathematics.

I did some tests designing a program that goes through every number from 1 to N, and determines if N is prime. This means, in general:

for i = 1 to N {
  if isPrime(i) {
    //prime++;
  }
}

isprime(k) {
  for i = 2 to k {
    if k%i == 0 {return false;}
  }
  return true;
}

However, this can be shortened to go from 2 to sqrt(k), to make it go faster.

Well this benchmark checked 160 billion numbers in 3.3 seconds on my GTX280. If I stuck in an output (i.e. de-commented the prime++;) then it did 1 million in 0.2 seconds due to bad memory coalescence. When overclocking the GFX card, it only responded to an OC on the Core frequency. Hmm, not good.

Here's how it looked:

After conversing with the guys at BenchTec, they wanted a 2-3 minute benchmark. So utilising some functions I've done at work with 2D finite element simulation, I programmed some of that in.

In a nutshell, a 2D finite element simulation takes a grid of R*Z nodes, then computes each note in a new timestep as the average of the nodes around it of the previous timestep. So a grid of 1000x1000 has one million nodes - or one million threads for a cuda device. Then to increase the length of the simulation, add more time steps or increase the grid size.

This kernel function uses liberal amounts of texture memory, and 2*4*R*Z bytes of graphics memory. So I need something for the smaller CUDA cards to run, so I've limited the grid to take up at most 64MB of graphics memory and just increased the timesteps. Due to the liberal use of memory and reasonable levels of calculation per thread, this system responds very nicely to any sort of core or mem overclock. Niice :)

So all that's left to do is:

a) Change the program so multiple GPUs can be used.
b) Implement some sort of checksum to stop cheating.
c) Move it to OpenCL so ATi cards can use it too.

a haul in the mail

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Today I went to my college post box to receive an awesome haul:

Celeron 1.7Ghz (Costa Rica)
Celeron 1.7Ghz (Malay)
Celeron 1.8Ghz (Malay)
Celeron 2.2Ghz (Costa Rica)
Celeron D 2.66Ghz (Malay)
Pentium 4 1.6Ghz (Costa Rica)
Pentium 4 1.5Ghz (Costa Rica) x 2

All for around £1.50 each.

Some pure socket 478 benching ahead at some point.

benchmark update

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I took a bit of a detour this past couple of weeks. I'm doing a big round up of all the latest Catalyst driver releases for ATI cards on all the 3D benchmarks. There are some significantly surprising results! I'm less than halfway through as the testing is quite rigourous, and the results will be put up in the members section of BenchTecUK forums. Not a member? Join the team at HWbot, put up 3 scoring results (which isn't that hard) and start posting on the forum.

I've actually been quite generous to myself recently, and picked up some more equipment:

ATi 2400 Pro
nVidia 7800GS
5 Socket A processors, from Duron 700 to Athlon 1400
Socket A motherboard and cooler w/VGA port (1.5V and 3.3V)
Various Socket 478 processors from ebay

I took apart my old P4 mobo from its case so I could mess around with it. I took the cooler off, and the P4 proc came off with it! Looks like they'd used 3g of thermal material to seat the proc, and it'd set. I had to douse the area with TIM to help dissolve the thermal material, then use two screwdrivers to seperate the proc from the cooler. But I reseated it the way I wanted, hopefully I can push that beyond 3.6Ghz now.

I bought the Socket A procs and gfx cards from the BenchTec forums. I didn't have a socket A motherboard, but the procs were cheap, so I picked up a mobo/proc/cooler combo off ebay for under 20 notes. Got the mobo combo in the mail yesterday, only to find they'd used EVEN MORE thermal material on the proc... it hadn't even set properly. So I cleaned that up, and I'll test it soon after my Catalyst round up.

As far is BOINC is concerned, I'm atm only running 2 ATI cards on Milkyway - it'll be four when I've finished the Catalyst roundup. Aqua isn't giving out as much work, or credit, as before - but I got enough WUs to push me over 1m this week. GPUGrid climbed over 750k and is onto 1m fairly soon. SETI is being very awkward, and is having trouble getting to 250k. I may swap my nVidia card on GPUGrid over to Seti when GPUGrid reaches 1m - maybe get SETI to 1m. We'll see what happens.

At the minute, Dutchie is laying without power supply or graphics cards. I'll sort that soon.

On a bright note, I'm being commissioned to design a couple of websites. No doubt you can guess where that cash is going.

Also as a side project, as I've been learning CUDA and dabbling in OpenMP, I've been thinking of writing a benchmark program. The guys at BenchTec are being supportive - it probably wont be used at hwbot, but might use it in some form of competition at BenchTec. I'll post it here too :)

Take care, I'm back to benching.

belated update

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So - not much happening. Until later today.

I'll finally get around to benching that 4850X2. Since then, I picked up the Gainward GS GLH 4870X2 (retails at £420) for £200 on the BenchTec website as well, so I'll be benching that too (and in CF). I expect some global points here, so wish me luck.

In terms of moving computers around, I finally organised the machine I'm selling to a mate - yes, I'm selling HarukaKanata in the CM 335 Elite. As such, my PC situation is being completely moved around (also so I can get my i7 out for benching).

JC now has a 550W PSU and the GTX280 in it. It's now my purely CUDA machine (BOINC and work).

HAL is now up and running - as a 2x 4850 in CF crunching machine AND my network storage:

E6400 @ 2.4Ghz
4GB DDR2
MSI Platinum PowerUp
700W PSU
2x4850 in CF with Akasa Nero Vortexx VGA Coolers
Antec 300

A few points about HAL - with two GFX cards in there always at full pelt, with the extra coolers, the temps are sort of in reasonable levels. The card on top never goes above 60C, however the card at the bottom hits 90C. While better than the 110 I was getting before, I'd like that 90 to be 80. Though I have noticed that if I overclock the cards, they actually use less shader cores on BOINC, and are cooler, but still crunch faster. Weird that. So the top card runs at 800/750 (mem speed doesn't matter for BOINC, so it's underclocked), the bottom at 730/750. Given that 3D speed is meant to be 625/1000, I reckon that's quite good.

In terms of Dutchie, well at the minute it has not got a PSU, and is going in my Verre v770. It'll get a couple of graphics cards (if at some point my 4670s become useful...) and a PSU as and when.

HELLFIRE is going into the Thermaltake Armour. It's big, roomy, and I've been spending money on things like the 4870X2 rather than on a case. I've changed the fan on the CPU cooler to an AC-Ryan 80CFM one rather than the Delta - I think it was going too fast for optimal air contact.

So today, my benching will hopefully consist of:

4850X2
4870X2
4850X2 in CF (i.e. a 4850X2 and something else)
4870X2 in CF (again, a 4870X2 and something else)
4850 in CF if I get around to it...

Maybe sort out my overclock on HELLFIRE, too.

In terms of BOINC update, well the ATI cards are doing wonders at MilkyWay. I'm now 6.3 million credits there, 9mill total on BOINC, top 1000 in world, top 50 in UK. I dabbled a bit with a project called Aqua@Home, which were giving very good credits per CPU time. But now their credit system is being moved around, so I'm doing a bit more on SETI to get it up to 250K, and Aqua to 1M. Would like GPUGrid on 1M too, with MilkyWay on 10M.

mk-36 laptop benching

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I was lucky enough to get hold of a friends laptop these past couple of days, to replace a hard drive. Needless to say, benchmarks were forthcoming!

The system is best described as:

Acer Aspire 5051
AMD Turion 64 MK-36 - 2Ghz stock
1GB RAM
Radeon Mobility 1100

For both the CPU and GPU, there were less than 20 results for each benchmark, so I was guaranteed some points.

(Actually, as I'm writing this, I forgot to do some stock benchmarks for the CPU. Damn - that's for tomorrow then.)

Overclocking the CPU involved some SetFSB - managed 2213Mhz stable, and 2100Mhz for benching.

So, 2D results:

CPU-Z: 2213Mhz
PiFast: 57.97s @ 2100Mhz
SuperPi 1m: 41.11s @ 2100Mhz
SuperPi 32m: 35m 39.88s @ 2100Mhz
wPrime 32m: 1m 19.06s @ 2175Mhz
wPrime 1024m: 43m 50.33s @ 2100Mhz
PC Mark05: nothing, couldn't get it to work

Overclocking the GPU was a hard task. Hard enough that all I tried didn't work. So these are all stock scores, on an overclocked (2100Mhz) CPU:

Aquamark 3: 14207
3D Mark 01: 6008
3D Mark 03: 1523
3D Mark 05: 685
3D Mark 06: 186

So that's a nice haul of a bronze cup and 3 medals.

In other news, I ordered a 4850X2 today. So that means I can post some scores in the 4850X2 category, and the 4850X2 in CF (I'll team it with a 4850) categories. Also, the added bonus of crunching = win.

I've noticed I didn't put my 2x 4850 in CF scores up on the bot. And I can't find copies of them anywhere. So I'll do them again. It's a damn shame the UK is SOOO HOT AND HUMID at the minute. The results might be mediocre... at best.