Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Medical Research from On-Prem to Off-Prem
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Medical Research from On-Prem to Off-Prem

Hi Everyone, thanks for hosting this epic site I've seen it a few times and I noticed a lot of people use BOINC on here. I don't use it for mining however I'm more interested in helping society with some extra doh and I really appreciate IBM's Philanthropic Organization: World Community Grid.

So anyway, I have aboot 40~50 computers at home all 2006-2010 lineage server blades and "thick" clients processing just under a million points a day. At least I did have that until my partner and I decided a year of it was enough in our home. I love computer science and network engineering, both are apart of my academic background and I was fortunate enough to receive all of these computers for free.

However, it's time I look at moving them to a new space and pay for the electrical there or to rent a VPS with lots of CPU, very little RAM and very little bandwidth. So let's say 40-100 Modern CPU cores, 2-6GB of RAM, 20GB HDD, and 50GB monthly bandwidth @ 100Mbps Down, 10Mbps up. Even that is a little overkill for network.... Thanks everyone! I pay about $60CAD/Month is my electrical bill and my network is 170Mbps-Down, 17Mbps-UP (advertised as 150 and 15 but they over deliver and under promise like a good business company). Oh and no I won't be changing my internet unless I chose a faster account so I'm not factoring that into my costs.

Comments

  • Honestly, with your electricity usage, you are probably contributing more to global warming than to whatever cause you think you are helping... Just sayin'...

  • What are the modern cores you are looking out for?

  • TmanokTmanok Member
    edited May 2018

    @jiggawattz said:
    Honestly, with your electricity usage, you are probably contributing more to global warming than to whatever cause you think you are helping... Just sayin'...

    I'm in BC, it's Hydro and Solar. My community runs on solar however my office where I work and the rest of the province is Hydro. Cough

  • TmanokTmanok Member

    @subhojitdutta said:
    What are the modern cores you are looking out for?

    I'm looking for honestly anything Xeon but the older the more cores, the newer the less need for cores (makes sense due to architecture design and efficiency right?).

  • williewillie Member

    What kind of computers do you have at home now? If they are as old as you say, you're unlikely to get the equivalent of 40-100 modern CPU cores from 50-60 of them. Before you can compare hosting costs to your current $60 CAD of power costs, you have to scale by CPU accordingly.

    Anyway, 40-100 cores is a hell of a lot of CPU that (if loaded all the time) is not cost effective to do with VPS. You want dedicated servers or colo. It's hard to say but the cheapest CPU dedis are probably Hetzner auction servers, at about 22 euro for 4 fairly fast E3 cores, and you get a lot of disk space too. Given that an E3 core is at least 1.5x the speed of a still-"modern" E5 core you can have the equivalent of 40 "modern" cores with maybe 6 of those E3 servers, but you're still at around 130 euro or $200 CAD.

    If you have your own hardware and the space for it and cheap power to run it, that will always be cheaper than paying a data center to host it for you. So if you're willing to keep running stuff at home, maybe you could look into getting newer and more efficient hardware on ebay or something. Then it's a calculation of how long it takes for the power savings to recoup the hw purchase cost.

    I wonder how many World Community Grid problems can really be helped by home computers these days, especially without GPUs. Also the idea of WCG is to put "free" surplus computing capacity to use. Once you're using hosted services it's no longer surplus capacity and it might no longer be the best expenditure for the project you are trying to help.

    I.e. rather than spend $2000 CAD on a year of hosted computing to help some research project cure cancer, it's probably best for everyone involved if you just write a $2000 CAD check to the research institution. I suspect WCG is of more value to cancer research as a public awareness tool than as an actual source of computation.

  • rpflibrpflib Member

    I am familiar with the situation of the O.P. and I see he left out a happy complication. Every watt that goes into the computing at home is a watt that goes into heating his home! Not efficient for the next few months obviously, but come winter...

  • WilliamWilliam Member

    willie said: Anyway, 40-100 cores is a hell of a lot of CPU that (if loaded all the time) is not cost effective to do with VPS.

    Not with 6GB RAM.

    40 cores is a damn nice dual E5 (10+10 each CPU) which below 128GB is absolutely wasted as single tenant system, and not available for below at the very least 150$.

  • TmanokTmanok Member
    edited May 2018

    @willie said:
    What kind of computers do you have at home now?

    HP DL360's Mostly with real beefy Quad Core dual Socket HW. Too much RAM and Disk for my purposes but they do BOINC and a couple of easy services around the house such as local DNS, NAS, SFTP/FTP, Apt-Mirror, etc.

    It is true that being the the great white north of Canadia (heh) has it's challenges and heating is a given during the winter so really the cost is the same as my baseboard heaters 8 months out of the year.

    I suppose there's another thing I haven't mentioned. I am quite content to utilize my CPU time creatively with radio astronomy projects and random tracking projects so while I'm not processing science or hosting services for the community I run BOINC. Having a VPS has been an interest for the sake of saving myself the physical storage space but also so that I'm not taking away energy from one project for another... If that makes sense anyway.

    So far, after researching and thanks to Willie, I believe that my dreams of VPSs running humanitarian research may be incomplete. On the bright side I did find some interesting digital storage posts which may save me the hard drive expenses I often find with my NAS setup. On the other bright side, if I start up my own VPS then I could easily have all my servers running BOINC while my clients aren't utilizing them!! Hint hint to any VPS owner that actually wants society to get somewhere.

  • TmanokTmanok Member

    I think the sad part is, I'd be happy to pay for even DDR2-3 ECC with good processing and next to no storage and next to no network capabilities just to run these projects. So if a VPS Entrepreneur happened to have old machines nearing or surpassing EOL and the spare space I'd still offer to pay for them! I don't need a dashboard, just SSH and maybe a VNC would be fun.

  • WilliamWilliam Member

    Problem is power tends to be not cheap where servers are massively cheap available.

  • williewillie Member
    edited May 2018

    Tmanok said: Quad Core dual Socket HW

    What cpu models? Take a look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php to get speed ratings for them. A current quad core E3 or i7 is around 10k passmark and those ratings are pretty meaningful.

    Yeah if you're getting free winter heat from those servers you might as well keep running them at home, instead of paying for heat AND paying to host the servers someplace else. In fact maybe you could just run them in the winter and shut them off in the summer. So your computational computation is half as much, but your costs (taking the value gained from winter heating into account) are lowered by much more than that.

    Are you srsly using electric heat in Canada?! Not even with a heat pump? That is surprising.

    VPS with the amount of cpu capacity you are describing basically don't exist at any reasonable cost. You want dedicated servers for that much computation.

  • TmanokTmanok Member

    @William said:

    willie said: Anyway, 40-100 cores is a hell of a lot of CPU that (if loaded all the time) is not cost effective to do with VPS.

    Not with 6GB RAM.

    40 cores is a damn nice dual E5 (10+10 each CPU) which below 128GB is absolutely wasted as single tenant system, and not available for below at the very least 150$.

    This does make sense. So you can sell your 128GB RAM Machine with Dual Socket 40 Cores to say well 20-40people each paying between $10-$30 for a high end network connection, some shared disk space on an SSD and the power bill of the 200-300 Watt machine (yes the rating on the PSU is far greater but even my 700Watt Dual PSU server blades full dual socket CPU and RAM 32GB ECC usage is about 178Watts using a power meter between the blade and the outlet. However I don't use PCIE for GPU's just Quad NICs). Anyway so you have say $5/month power for the whole machine, $150/month Gigabit network connection for the machine and an $6000 machine on sale. You're breaking even at about 13.5 Months. That's one machine covering that network connection, imagine a datacentre full and every additional 5 machines needs another network connection. So really I don't blame them for charging me 155 or 200$ for a dedicated machine. But if they have a hefty datacentre then I start to wonder when the price will drop.

  • TmanokTmanok Member

    @willie said:

    Tmanok said: Quad Core dual Socket HW

    Are you srsly using electric heat in Canada?! Not even with a heat pump? That is surprising.

    Actually anywhere north of BC/Alberta/Saskatchewan/Manitoba/etc, heatpumps aren't as efficient as resistive heat. Fortunately I live on Vancouver Island so I'm exaggerating the cold we face but yes we use resistive heat here too for reasons unknown. I believe the developers of modern houses decided heat pumps were more expensive then they were worth or something silly along those lines. But my friends in NWT and the Yukon have both told me Heatpumps aren't an option, mostly because they aren't effective when the temperature drops below ~25º celsius.

  • williewillie Member
    edited May 2018

    Dual E5-2670v2 is 20 cores, not 40. The hardware threads don't count as separate cores when figuring total computational speed. In practice a thread can be as good as 60% of a core, i.e. a hyperthreaded core (2 hardware threads) is about 1.2x the performance of a non-hyperthreaded one (single thread) on a good day. It's not anything like 2x. The 20 E5 cores might be comparable to 12 or so E3 cores, depending.

    That's interesting about the heating but I'm still amazed anyone uses electric heat at all in that climate.

Sign In or Register to comment.