Hi all,

Ive got a perculiar issue here. Im running 4 x quadro 1700 card on 4 x almost identical systems. yet only 2 of my boxes regularily report gg wus on time, while the other two always fail to finish by the deadline. all 4 cards are identical in manufacture/make. cpus are all core2duos (some faster then others) and same amount of ram. im also using the same nvidia drivers (latest) and boinc 6.6.15. Any reason why this might be the case?

Cheers

Everything looks identical except in the OS. All the machines with these cards are XP 32-bit, but there is one difference with the cards that aren't working. They list the OS as:

Microsoft Windows XP
Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, v.3311, (05.01.2600.00)

The v.3311 portion is not in the OS listing for machines with cards that are working. Indeed, these cards are doing the same work about 20 hours faster or more than the cards in machines with the v.3311 addition. This is the only thing that I can see as different and that might be causing some slowdown in the cards. What is the difference in the XP installs?

Microsoft Windows XP
Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, v.3311, (05.01.2600.00)

good pickup fellas, totally forgot to check the service pack numbers.
never thought they would make a 20hr difference per wu crunch.

I will update the ones that have the RC version of SP3 to the new one and see what happens.

Cheers

Another thing to check is what those computers are doing ('real' work, not BOINC).

While the configurations might be the same, if some boxes are heavily loaded and others aren't, that will drastically affect the run time since BOINC tasks run at the lowest priority. Since the CPU needs to funnel data to the GPU, if the GPU isn't running GG because something else is running instead, the GPU will get starved for work, resulting in longer run times.

Mike

well all 4 are running the same boinc projects, and nothing else. ie. dedicated crunchers.

another peculiar thing is that the 2 comps that are finishing wus on time are using 0.03% cpu + 1 cuda, whereas the 2 slow comps are using 0.02% cpu + 1 cuda.

Any way to force the two slow ones to use the extra 0.01 cpu??

Can you check with cpuz what sort of cpu they have and especially look at the optimisation codes like mmx,sse,sse2,sse3 and ssse types the more the faster.
I get the feeling that even though huge amounts are calculated on the gpu some parts still are done by the cpu before being fed to the gpu.
So those codes can make a huge difference thats my 2 cents :D

Hi all,

Ive got a perculiar issue here. Im running 4 x quadro 1700 card on 4 x almost identical systems. yet only 2 of my boxes regularily report gg wus on time, while the other two always fail to finish by the deadline. all 4 cards are identical in manufacture/make. cpus are all core2duos (some faster then others) and same amount of ram. im also using the same nvidia drivers (latest) and boinc 6.6.15. Any reason why this might be the case?
Cheers

Looked a bit closer at the results. The slower boxes as expected do crunch slower, they do however complete in time. Looking across all four boxes, there are a large amount of User Aborts after a few hours / after 24 hours, particularly the faster machines, paradoxically.

What issues have you faced that caused the User Aborts well before the 4 day completion time?

Another thought - have you been overclocking any of them? Particularly the two faster boxes.

There are a significant number of compute errors well before the 4 day completion time, are they used for other tasks that have - maybe - crashed, taking with them the GPU WU?

You can get compute errors when the BOINC Manager is closed down before stopping the local host link (eg closing down or rebooting the PC without properly closing BOINC/Models) - what version of BOINC Manager do you use?

Regards
Zy

There appears to be some issue with NVIDIA display drivers and XP's RC v.3311. see here.