Welcome Back SpeedRaider!

[pinhodecarlos]

Can I suggest running SRBASE project instead of SOB? With such power on SOB with such errors it will cost SOB more doublecheck effort in the future.
http://srbase.myfirewall.org/sr5/index.php

The invitation code for creating new accounts is pillepalle

[guru]

Can I suggest running SRBASE project instead of SOB? With such power on SOB with such errors it will cost SOB more doublecheck effort in the future.
http://srbase.myfirewall.org/sr5/index.php

The invitation code for creating new accounts is pillepalle

Does it support proxy, Linux, and command line?

[pinhodecarlos]

Does it support proxy, Linux, and command line?

I don't know if BOINC supports proxy server as dnet but it runs under linux, GUI or command line.

About your calculations, you need to determine the specific energy consumption using the same batch of candidates, you can't compare watts to watts.

Specific energy consumption=(Watt per hour) / (candidates tested per day)

[guru]

Watts are watts! What you are talking about is watts/work unit or efficiency. Yes the 4770K is more efficient than the 2700K but not by a lot.

Getting back to the two 2700K vs single 4770K output. That is 258 watts vs 142 watts. With power at $.064 a KW here that comes to $63.91 a year extra in power but it also outputs more units. The added bonus is the two 2700K's will crush the 4770k in other work. SOB is one of the few workloads that has a big advantage on the 4th generation core processors.

[pinhodecarlos]

Watts are watts! What you are talking about is watts/work unit or efficiency. Yes the 4770K is more efficient than the 2700K but not by a lot.

Efficiency is one thing, specific energy consumption is another thing.
When you are on a site you look at a efficiency of a boiler but for a production line you look at the specific energy consumption. The latter is what you need to be use to compare your computers. Your computer is a production line where you feed with energy (electricity) and it produces X candidates per day. The efficiency is measured on the power supply (consumed/feed)_energy.

Also that unit KW doesn't exist because the K (capitalize letter) is Kelvin, for absolute temperature, what you mean is kW, where k is a SI prefix and it is named kilo. Second you pay energy (kWh) not power (kW). Third you need to consider the overall investment for each case, you can't only compare the energy you pay, you need to determine the ROI (return of the investment). This is what you do in the real world.

[tim]

Sounds like you two guys know a lot more about this than me. So, if I'm following, I'd need to look at how much work gets done per kilowatt/hour used. Or kW/h if I have the nomenclature right. And for me the initial cost of the system does have a bearing. Looking at cpuboss, the 2700k is behind the 4770k, but not by a lot. 2700k vs. 4770k: AVX vs AVX2, DDR3-1333 vs DDR3-1600, $83.22 vs $73.58 annual cost. Clock speed and turbo speed the same, memory cache amounts the same. $400 through amazon vs. $345 at newegg. If I understand right, for SOB I'd want to look for a 4770k?

[guru]

If you are buying new the 4770k or 4690K are good choices. The 4960K should be cheaper with very similar performance. If you shop used and can get a good deal(say half of the price of 4770k) on the 2500k, 2600k or 2700k they will give good results.

I'll be out crabbing tomorrow so no new updates until Sunday.

[guru]

Here are the power number comparing the 2700K to the 4770K. Both are very similar and basic systems.

2700K
850W power supply
Intel SSD
2 x 4GB 1600 Memory
DVD
Intel DZ68BC motherboard
OpenSuse 13.1
HT off
4 Cores
Turbo disabled

4770K
610W power supply
Intel SSD
2 x 4 1600 Memory
DVD
Asus Z87-Expert motherboard
Windows 8
HT off
4 Cores
Turbo disabled

             Idle   SOB   TT small      TT blend       TT large      OGR   RC5
2700k        42     129   124           122            129           104   104
4770K        66     142   142           129            140           97     95

Take away: 4770K with avx2 is faster but requires more power to do it(nothing for free). I suspect the extra power is the stress on the memory system due to the increased throughput. FFM3 instructions use more power than AVX. Makes sense given the larger registers.

99% sure the difference in idle power has to do with the c-states in the bios. I believe they are disabled on the 4770K(something we normally do for testing) but enabled on the 2700K after the last bios update. This would not affect the power usage under load.

[tim]

Thanks for clarifying that. Electricity isn't as big a concern for me, we have plentiful hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest. But the dollars remain one.

Looking at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Size=30&Page=5 just daydreaming. I'm thinking I'm better off sticking with multiple quad core boxes, since I'm clueless about server maintenance, costs and requirements. A quick google search on "servers vs quad core distributed computing" and nothing looked pertinent. There was a thread from a guy in England considering getting some for his flat; seems like he found more problems than he could take on. I've built home machines, but it looks like servers are a whole different thing. Is it hard to jump from building my own boxes to mounting, powering and maintaining servers?

[guru]

You must not be far from where I am. I get 80% of my power from the Columbia River. Desktops are much cheaper than a server. The servers advantage is power density and large memory. I use the waste heat from my systems to keep my shop warm during the winter. HT doesn't help with SOB but the i7's usually have 8MB cache vs the i5 with 6MB. I haven't done a comparison to see how much it affects performance of SOB. I suspect as the FFT size goes up there is a cutoff where the 6MB cache performance drops off. Having high speed memory becomes more important at that point.

[tim]

I'm in eastern WA near Moses Lake. I heat my basement too, but less so than years ago. Back in the days of SETI classic, I used to have stacks of mobos booted from linux off floppies. I learned some about scripting and the command line. It was fun. When it went to boinc is when I changed to SOB. So I'll keep my eyes open for i5 or i7 with large cache and pair it with fast, low latency memory.