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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Should I run at 100% 24x7 or a little less? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 14
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 259 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi all. I've been running the Cancer projects on WCG for over a decade and always been running my various Wintel i7s, Mac Intel, and Mac M1/M2 machines at 100% 24x7.
----------------------------------------I was wondering if there's any real energy savings if I were to set them to 90% (for example) AND only take a very small hit on WUs complete. So for example, if my X machine was returning 150 WUs a day at 100% but would return 145 WUs at 90% while also decreasing the power consumption from 100 watts to 50 watts, yes, to me that's a win. This question might be too open ended but my main array of Wintel machines are: • 10 Lenovo P330 desktops with Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores) • 10 Lenovo M710 desktops with Intel Core i7-7700 Processor ( 8 Threads 3.6GHz ) I could try plugging in a wattage meter/kill-a-watt thingy on 1 machine and try some tests but was hoping there might be a straightforward answer with the info I've given. Thank you in advance for any advice.  |
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thunder7
Senior Cruncher Netherlands Joined: Mar 6, 2013 Post Count: 232 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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If you can set anything about the CPU in the BIOS, that might be worthwile.
----------------------------------------I have played with a 7950X for some time, and setting the TDP down from 170W to 115W gives about 90% of the performance, for example. But you have business machines, where BIOS settings are often sparse. Just saying 'well, I have 8 cores so if I run 7 tasks at a time I will save on electricity but keep up my speed' will probably not be true. [Edit 1 times, last edit by thunder7 at Dec 5, 2023 9:39:48 PM] |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7687 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The Kill-O-Watt meter and completed data will be your friends. Let us know how it turns out.
----------------------------------------Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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bikeaddict
Cruncher Joined: Apr 11, 2020 Post Count: 32 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Could try the Windows Control Panel power options and limit the CPU frequency.
Or Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) may offer a way to underclock the CPU. My experience in the past with running fewer than the maximum number of threads didn't show much in power savings, but it may vary by CPU model. And on Linux, you can set the maximum boost frequency with /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq |
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flynryan
Senior Cruncher United States Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 235 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Agree with thunder7.
Reduce it by a bit if possible. Best/easiest way on a homebuilt system is to just reduce the clock multiplier in the bios by a few and let the motherboard reduce the voltage as necessary. This typically results in a good amount of power savings for not much performance losses. Depends what settings your bios has, it may or may not be an option for you on premade OEM systems. |
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TonyEllis
Senior Cruncher Australia Joined: Jul 9, 2008 Post Count: 261 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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bikeaddict scribbled
----------------------------------------And on Linux, you can set the maximum boost frequency with /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq This is exactly what I do. Reducing electricity usage is a by-product, but not the main goal. It gets very hot here in Australia. There is no air-conditioning, so a user-written program monitors the cpu temperature and makes changes as necessary to maintain a preset temperature. Fine control is by changing boinc cpu usage within a very few percent Next if above is insufficent - change cpu frequently, but not below a certain limit Next if above is insufficent - change number of active cpus The aim is to run as close to 100% as possible without going over the limit. I notice on my i7-3770 there is a very big difference in heat produced between 3.7 and 3.9 GHz.
Run Time Stats https://grassmere-productions.no-ip.biz/
----------------------------------------[Edit 1 times, last edit by TonyEllis at Dec 6, 2023 2:02:09 AM] |
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hchc
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 805 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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You can save some power by turning off Intel TurboBoost in the BIOS while still keeping BOINC set at 100%. I do that in the 6 months when electricity is on the more expensive summer rate.
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by hchc at Dec 8, 2023 10:07:35 PM] |
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Link64
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Feb 19, 2021 Post Count: 129 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I was wondering if there's any real energy savings if I were to set them to 90% (for example) AND only take a very small hit on WUs complete. So for example, if my X machine was returning 150 WUs a day at 100% but would return 145 WUs at 90% while also decreasing the power consumption from 100 watts to 50 watts, yes, to me that's a win. In general yes, but as you see from the answers above, not by setting BOINC to use 90% of CPU time but by limiting the CPU speed. Setting BOINC to 90% CPU time will result in crunching @100% 90% of the time (and of course using same power as when crunching @100%) and breaks the other 10% of the time, when the computer crunches nothing but still uses some power. That would lower your power usage, but also your efficiency. So instead of 150 WUs you'll return 135 WUs/day, but your power usage will drop more likely from 100W to 95W per hour or so and not 50W. Best results (i.e. higher efficiency) you'll get by underclocking AND undervolting your CPUs and crunching 100% 24/7 from BOINC's point of view, but finding the sweet spot isn't easy, in particular if the computers are not just dedicated crunchers.  [Edit 1 times, last edit by Link64 at Dec 8, 2023 2:25:04 PM] |
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bikeaddict
Cruncher Joined: Apr 11, 2020 Post Count: 32 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Setting BOINC to 90% CPU time will result in crunching @100% 90% of the time (and of course using same power as when crunching @100%) and breaks the other 10% of the time, when the computer crunches nothing but still uses some power. This is not how the BOINC CPU usage setting works. It just reduces the number of simultaneous tasks that run. On a 8-core with 16 threads, for example, setting CPU to 75% will run 12 tasks at 100% and leave four CPU threads idle. Setting to 50% will run eight tasks and leave eight threads idle. The tasks may still be using more than four CPU cores, depending on how the threads are distributed across the cores, unless you use a utility to set affinity and pin threads to cores. On some CPUs, at least in my experience with v4 Xeons, this does not cut power use by a huge amount. |
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BobbyB
Veteran Cruncher Canada Joined: Apr 25, 2020 Post Count: 609 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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You are both correct.
----------------------------------------He (Link64) talks about CPU time and you (bikeaddict) are talking about CPU usage. Two different settings in BoincMgr. I've tried both and they operate as you both say. [Edit 2 times, last edit by BobbyB at Dec 8, 2023 3:11:13 PM] |
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