| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Rack for 10 laptops? |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 17
|
|
| Author |
|
|
ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 259 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Hi Flynn,
----------------------------------------In general, to answer your first question about managing systems, I don't think there is really any management with 10-20 systems. Windows automatically installs and reboots (and you can set Windows to auto-log-in). BOINC never NEEDS to be updated but you can certainly do so if you wish. BOINC is really a set-it-and-forget-it app...using the Advanced View and options, you can easily set BOINC to run/pause whenever you want automatically...even if you use the machines all the time for work or pleasure. Now for more specifics... 1)These machines do nothing but crunch WCG....therefore, I don't need to touch them at all or do any upgrades. 2)I agree... I buy machines with the best CPU I can afford...however, all these are free laptops donated to me. :) 3)I have 10 Lenovo M710 Small Form Factor desktops that I bought on crazy sale last month for $399 each with the i7-7700 chip. These machines also are 100% dedicated to WCG. 4)Yes, the batteries will degrade over time but I find it's a few years. 5)I am not understanding what you mean about batteries and heat. Are you stating that keeping the machines plugged in and powered on 24x7 is somehow making the batteries hot(ter)? I don't think the batteries being installed is contributing to any more power drawn from the outlet but I can surely test it. I don't mind the free heat, in general, from these laptops but I also do not need the heat since these are in the basement. And the batteries do offer a few hours of run-time if the power goes out. These laptops eat 50watts of electricity with WCG running 100%...but if they will only eat 25watts (or some other great reduction) AND produce a lot less heat, sure, I'll yank the batteries and save on the electric bill and any potential risk of fire/whatever from the batteries. 6)Remember that batteries (at least on Windows) offer graceful shutdowns and/or sleep...so if the battery is 10% full, the machine gracefully gets powered off/slept. I can change this percentage to anything I want. So there is value in having the batteries installed. Anyone here have comments on #5?  |
||
|
|
flynryan
Senior Cruncher United States Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 235 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
The battery won’t generate heat by itself unless it’s being used or charged. But due to the system running at 100% 24/7, the laptop generates heat which will keep the battery at elevated temperatures as well. That’s all I was getting at. Lithium batteries don’t like to be at high ambient temperature for extended periods.
----------------------------------------Let us know how those systems work and the work they can do. Cheers. [Edit 1 times, last edit by FlynRyan at Dec 27, 2017 12:34:38 AM] |
||
|
|
hchc
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 812 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Can probably shave some watts by:
----------------------------------------1) Disabling all wireless chips (WLAN and Bluetooth) and using Ethernet only. This assumes your basement is wired and has a port. Alternately, you can still have all laptops using Ethernet-only connected to a wireless bridge that acts as a WLAN client (so 1 Wi-Fi connection total instead of 10). 2) Disabling everything unnecessary in the BIOS such as sound card, built-in webcam, Intel TurboBoost, optical drive (if it has one), touchpad, USB 3.0, GPU, any other ports.... 3) Removing all hard drives and run BOINC headless (and Command Line only) on a 8 or 16 GB USB flash drive. I just did this with a free desktop machine someone gave me, and it's glorious! Less attack surface by running machines this lean, less bloat, better performance for BOINC, etc. 4) Removing batteries completely and having the laptop BIOS turn on after AC power restoration. I'm jealous of your summer basement temperatures! 63°F (17°C for you non-Americans) is awesome. My basement gets to 88-90°F (31-32°C) in the summer without A/C, and my computers and equipment aren't very happy.
[Edit 4 times, last edit by hchc at Dec 27, 2017 3:21:55 AM] |
||
|
|
ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 259 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
1) Disabling all wireless chips (WLAN and Bluetooth) and using Ethernet only. This assumes your basement is wired and has a port. Alternately, you can still have all laptops using Ethernet-only connected to a wireless bridge that acts as a WLAN client (so 1 Wi-Fi connection total instead of 10). I've been meaning to look into this...all my laptops are using WIFI...the basement is wired for ethernet but I don't have ethernet in the particular room housing these laptops. The machines are all Win7 so if you know of a simple explanation or weblink to show me how to do this that would be great. I have plenty of 16 port switches. And yes, I'd love to be using far less WIFI! 3) Removing all hard drives and run BOINC headless (and Command Line only) on a 8 or 16 GB USB flash drive. I just did this with a free desktop machine someone gave me, and it's glorious! Less attack surface by running machines this lean, less bloat, better performance for BOINC, etc. I looked into this on another forum here and it appears nobody has a clear, simple, step-by-step instruction on how to do this with Linux booting on USB. Everyone has the "hey I did it and I love it!!!" answer but nobody has the "here's exactly how I did it" answer I need. But even so, I doubt I would go this route due my lack of Linux skills and don't know how to create linux scripts to auto-start BOINC and whatever else. On a side note, this is the kind of stuff that has prevented Linux from achieving more than 2% personal/consumer usage for the last 20 years. 4) Removing batteries completely and having the laptop BIOS turn on after AC power restoration. I'm not sure what you mean by AC power restoration. Are you talking about the machine automatically turning back on when AC power comes back in? I noticed this neat feature 10 years ago when my Mac Mini would always power itself on when I simply plugged in the power cord. Some of my desktops (but not all...even though they are 100% identical) turn themselves on when I plug in the power cord (maybe it's a BIOS setting). I'm jealous of your summer basement temperatures! 63°F (17°C for you non-Americans) is awesome. My basement gets to 88-90°F (31-32°C) in the summer without A/C, and my computers and equipment aren't very happy. Yes...I am quite amazed myself! Even before we finished the basement (simply a few lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling and the furnace and air handler), the weather was always beautiful down there. Nice and cool...very dry/not humid....any day of the year. If I really wanted to keep the machines cool, I could put them in the room that leads to the bulkhead door...that room is probably in the mid 50s during winter but I expect to be warmer than 63 in the summer due the sun beating on the bulkhead door. |
||
|
|
hchc
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 812 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
1) Disabling all wireless chips (WLAN and Bluetooth) and using Ethernet only. This assumes your basement is wired and has a port. Alternately, you can still have all laptops using Ethernet-only connected to a wireless bridge that acts as a WLAN client (so 1 Wi-Fi connection total instead of 10). I've been meaning to look into this...all my laptops are using WIFI...the basement is wired for ethernet but I don't have ethernet in the particular room housing these laptops. The machines are all Win7 so if you know of a simple explanation or weblink to show me how to do this that would be great. I have plenty of 16 port switches. And yes, I'd love to be using far less WIFI! I bought a Ubiquiti NanoStation locoM2 on Amazon for like $46 and it's been running for the last month without any issues. It's enterprise-grade, discontinued (2.4GHz 802.11n), and way overpowered to use in a house since it's really designed for outdoor bridges that are several miles. I cranked the power down to minimum and it's still overpowered. Anyways, you can get one of those and hook it up to a switch, and there's a "station" mode where it just acts like a glorified Wi-Fi client, and everything you plug into the switch via Ethernet gets sent over that Wi-Fi link. It's pretty set-it-and-forget-it. If you have an old wireless router lying around, you can do the same thing using dd-wrt or something and just set it to Client Bridge mode. 3) Removing all hard drives and run BOINC headless (and Command Line only) on a 8 or 16 GB USB flash drive. I just did this with a free desktop machine someone gave me, and it's glorious! Less attack surface by running machines this lean, less bloat, better performance for BOINC, etc. I looked into this on another forum here and it appears nobody has a clear, simple, step-by-step instruction on how to do this with Linux booting on USB. Everyone has the "hey I did it and I love it!!!" answer but nobody has the "here's exactly how I did it" answer I need. But even so, I doubt I would go this route due my lack of Linux skills and don't know how to create linux scripts to auto-start BOINC and whatever else. On a side note, this is the kind of stuff that has prevented Linux from achieving more than 2% personal/consumer usage for the last 20 years. I'm a Linux beginner myself and barely know my way around. You're right -- there aren't a ton of how-to guides online. Maybe I can throw something together and make a new thread here. Or go full overachiever and make a YouTube video. In a nutshell, I went with the Debian "netinstall" and the ISO is available here: https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst I used amd64 architecture (for modern Intel and AMD CPUs). Compared to the full-blown ISOs (or even the minimal images), this gives you the bare minimum you need to install Debian Linux and you only add on exactly what you need such as BOINC. Super lightweight! I see a ton of people here using Ubuntu or Mint images with all the graphical things and other apps, and I'm like "Pffft, there's 1000 apps there you won't even use just cluttering stuff up and making it easier to hack, more to keep updated, etc." I basically: 1. Download the Debian netinstall ISO. 2. "Burn" the ISO to a USB flash drive using something like Win32 Disk Imager or Rufus, or just burn the ISO to a CD. I had issues when I put it on USB flash drive 'cuz I'm a Linux beginner and the paths weren't right, so I just burned it to a CD and booted from that. I had a USB flash drive plugged in and basically installed from CD --> USB flash drive, and the computer boots from USB only. 2. Boot up and install Linux. Set country/time zone/keyboard etc. Set up a strong root password (you'll never need it). It'll make you create a regular account and password. It'll ask you exactly what parts of Linux you want to install. Uncheck everything except the core system and the SSH server. Don't need the graphical desktop like KDE or Gnome. Don't need print server or web server, etc. Since it's a "netinstall", it will require an Internet connection and will download whatever it needs during the setup process. 3. "sudo" isn't installed by default, which stumped me as a beginner. I had to use "su" to install "sudo". 4. From there, I could do "sudo apt-get install boinc-client" (lots of instructions here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Installing_BOINC_on_Debian then "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" to update everything. I log in once a month and do this just to keep stuff updated. I know there's a way to set up automatic updates, but I'm a noob. 5. BOINC 7.6.33 is installed by default, since Debian stable doesn't 100% have the latest versions since it prefers "stability", but I just recently figured out how to add the Debian-backports source. And now it's on BOINC 7.8.4. Whole process took like 2 minutes to figure out! 6. We'll need to add your World Community Grid account to BOINC, and there's ways to do that using the "boinccmd" attach command. I started playing with this but it got annoying, so I ended up using BOINC Manager from another Windows machine and just setting up the machine remotely just like you do in windows. Piece of cake this way. I had to add my Windows machine's "hostname" to remote_hosts.cfg so that it authorizes my Windows machine to manage the Linux box... FYI: The BOINC package in Debian and many other Linux distributions automatically sets up BOINC to start up when the machine boots, and it automatically creates a BOINC user and permissions. No thinking required. This is totally a rough draft watered down version and I left out some steps, but overall even for a beginner it took an hour or two to figure out the first time. Now that I know how, I bet it's like a 30 minute job. :) I'll try to throw together a good, detailed How To guide in the spring. 4) Removing batteries completely and having the laptop BIOS turn on after AC power restoration. I'm not sure what you mean by AC power restoration. Are you talking about the machine automatically turning back on when AC power comes back in? I noticed this neat feature 10 years ago when my Mac Mini would always power itself on when I simply plugged in the power cord. Some of my desktops (but not all...even though they are 100% identical) turn themselves on when I plug in the power cord (maybe it's a BIOS setting). Yeah, that's what I meant. So if the power goes out and comes back on, the laptops will automatically turn themselves on. You'll lose the last 5-10 minutes of work though since the last checkpoint... ----------------------------------------
[Edit 5 times, last edit by hchc at Dec 27, 2017 4:20:30 AM] |
||
|
|
Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7697 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
I am basically a Linux noob also, but I used Pendrive to write the Linux installation on a USB drive. I used Linux Mint on a 16 gb drive. I have had no trouble running strictly on the USB drive. I could have put the ISO on a CD and just installed to the USB for storage, but not all the machines had a CD or DVD drive. This is not quite the stripped down version hchc uses, but it still works pretty flawlessly, at least for me. Don't use a a cheapie USB, get a name brand one with which you have had good luck. I use Sandisk, after have some bargain bin ones only lasted a month. I have close to a year on one on my 24 thread machine. Good luck.
----------------------------------------Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
||
|
|
KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
well, a few answers Klik: 1)We have a 1400 sq ft basement...but it was finished a few years ago...so I keep these in 10x12 ft. rooms that are on the outside wall (and hence colder) and do not have duct work. Basement ceiling is 8 feet. Typical temp on any given winter day is 63F. Typical summer is 69F. We never utilize the heat or A/C because it's just so perfect (at least for me!). Even with the 10 laptops going in the 10x12 room, the room temp doesn't budge. 2)Each room in the basement is on its own circuit...the 2 rooms I am using are 20amps each...so 20amps x 110volts=2200watts. Typically you plan for 80% power utilization so .8 x 2200=1760watts I can run on a single 20amp circuit. Each laptop is 50 watts so that would be 35.2 laptops max, but I would run far less...probably 20 laptops at most...probably 5-10 per wall outlet...all laptops plugged into a decent power strip/surge suppressor (not UPS). The laptop power adapters are quite long...about 8 feet I think. 3)I actually just started leaving the 10 laptops on their sides, opened...far better than stacking them 4-5 per stack. Each laptop is about 4 pounds max. 4)The laptop batteries are quite good...I can run BOINC 100% for 1.5 hours...or have BOINC stop crunching when on battery and the battery will last 4.5+ hours. Our power can sometimes go out for 3 hours 1-2 days a year so I just let BOINC run 24x7 even on battery. Seems like you got it all figured out. A words for the engineer. Cheers mate.  |
||
|
|
|