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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Tool for estimating CPU cost efficiency |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I have built an Excel tool for estimating the cost efficiency of different systems some time ago, e.g. calculating what gives me the most output per $ spent (hardware + electricity). No rocket science, but it proved very helpful for me to decide what cruncher to build. As this might be interesting to others, too, I often thought about sharing this, but it was so crappy no one but me would understand how to use it. So I redid this today, made it more user-friendly, added some comments what to put in where and hope it can now be of use for others, too.
You can download it here: http://sheridon.de/wcg/wcg_costefficiency.ods (best opened with LibreOffice, with Excel the design does not work perfectly, but functionality does) Feedback and questions are highly appreciated!  |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7663 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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+1
----------------------------------------Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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Dayle Diamond
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 31, 2013 Post Count: 452 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Opened it. Still needs work.
It assumes Motherboard, RAM and GPU are free with Intel. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Dayle Diamond:
I just entered the price of a complete used system I would approx pay at the CPU column for some systems. It does not matter which part of the overall price is put in where, only the sum of the costs counts. The systems already entered are only examples anyway. You should add your own numbers for the systems you like to compare. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Tagged the thread to take a look later when time allows. I like the idea. Thanks for sharing.
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mmonnin
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Jul 20, 2016 Post Count: 148 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Nearly equal between 1700 and Xeon if actual GPU, cooler and PSU costs are considered. Add in the increased badge/WUProp hour production and I'd go with the Xeon.
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7663 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Just a thought here. The Xeons are server grade chips made to run 24/7 so they may be more reliable in that kind of environment. The set up with either of the Xeons does use a substantial amount of electricity and have a significant up front cost. That being said, they will produce quite efficiently. Based on my experience with running Linux off of a USB drive, I think that is a cheap and viable alternative. I have experience with using that on 24 thread systems, but do not know how systems with more threads might perform using a USB drive. I would think that at some point you may run into an I/O bottleneck depending on the project you are running.
----------------------------------------Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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mmonnin
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Jul 20, 2016 Post Count: 148 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Just a thought here. The Xeons are server grade chips made to run 24/7 so they may be more reliable in that kind of environment. The set up with either of the Xeons does use a substantial amount of electricity and have a significant up front cost. That being said, they will produce quite efficiently. Based on my experience with running Linux off of a USB drive, I think that is a cheap and viable alternative. I have experience with using that on 24 thread systems, but do not know how systems with more threads might perform using a USB drive. I would think that at some point you may run into an I/O bottleneck depending on the project you are running. Cheers For the exact same reason of server vs desktop CPU I would say to not use a USB stick. Esp for something that is always accessing the disk (read and write) like BOINC. Over-provisioning is not there and guaranteed lower quality NAND is put into USB sticks. The more and more cores in a system the more and more read/writes are taxing the low quality NAND in USB sticks. To reach a certain production level, higher threaded machines do save on the overhead of running BOINC. 1 disk, 1 GPU, 1 case, 1 PSU, maybe less memory depending on cost or if ya want so many gb per thread. That uses power as well. |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7663 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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For the exact same reason of server vs desktop CPU I would say to not use a USB stick. I have this system running on a USB stick. It is a 24 thread system running 24/7. So you can see it has almost been a year just on the USB stick. For $5.00 US, I think it is a pretty good deal on both dependability and electrical usage. mint 02/15/2018 01:20:11 23:099:15:34:37 38,410,954 109,054 Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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