Well, your Xeon only runs at 1.8 GHz and has no turbo boost, so it's running at half the speed of some of the faster processors out there. On the plus side it can utilize quad channel memory bandwidth if populated with 4 dimms. On the negative side of that though is it officially only supports up to DDR3 1066.

So, given the relatively low CPU clock speed, it's certainly not a speedy computer. For most tasks it chugs along just fine, it's those big/longer tasks where the difference in speed really shows up.

It is populated with 4 dimms. I could put up to 512 GBytes of RAM in that mother board, and a second processor (if someone would pay for the chips).

A good thing, though is that I no longer run heavy duty compute-limited processes. From a practical standpoint, the machine is idle most of the time, since I mainly do a bit of web browsing and e-mail. And the rest of the time goes to BOINC processes. And if CPDN would send me Linux work units, it would get about 1/2 of all the processor time. I used to have it running three processors at about 99% for CPDN.

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Right now it runs like this:

Tasks: 281 total, 7 running, 274 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 99.7%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy,100.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy,100.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 6.2%us, 3.5%sy, 90.3%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 7980704k total, 6300940k used, 1679764k free, 750996k buffers
Swap: 4095996k total, 61744k used, 4034252k free, 3615552k cached

PID PPID USER PR NI S VIRT RES SHR %MEM %CPU TIME+ P COMMAND
3018 11573 boinc 39 19 R 56080 52m 2832 0.7 99.3 130:10.47 1 ../../projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/setiathome_8.00_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
4611 11573 boinc 39 19 R 59744 56m 2808 0.7 99.0 16:13.69 0 ../../projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/setiathome_8.00_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
4657 11573 boinc 39 19 R 59744 56m 2808 0.7 99.0 10:39.83 2 ../../projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/setiathome_8.00_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
3588 11573 boinc 39 19 R 72032 68m 2816 0.9 91.0 90:08.54 3 ../../projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/setiathome_8.00_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

Those top 4 processors are all running BOINC processes (setiathome at the moment). And that is while it is also running this Firefox web browser (but how fast can I type?). They could be running CPDN. You can see by my signature box what I used to do with CPDN when I was getting enough work units.

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Jean-David Beyer

I probably just wasn't being clear. Your PC obviously completes tasks just fine. But as this thread started out about the long sam25 models, my point was that on such long tasks, the slower CPU speed would really show up. I certainly didn't mean that I think you should stop running cpdn. Far from it as that PC is very stable.

And not all CPUs at 1.8 GHz are equal. Your system with plenty of cache, not running hyperthreading, and quad channel memory is going to be quite a bit faster running 4 tasks at the same time than a 1.8 GHz i3 with less cache that is running with hyperthreading enabled.

I probably just wasn't being clear. Your PC obviously completes tasks just fine. But as this thread started out about the long sam25 models, my point was that on such long tasks, the slower CPU speed would really show up. I certainly didn't mean that I think you should stop running cpdn. Far from it as that PC is very stable.

Way back when, I was running a machine with two 32-bit Xeon 3.06 GHz chips that were hyperthreaded. And each chip had a cache (I cannot remember what size). Hyperthreading made it do more work, but nowhere near twice as much.

Back then the models ran in three sections. IIRC, the first section was 25 years long about 30 years ago. The second was 25 years long, around the present time. And the last was about 25 years long and somewhat in the future. I may be a little bit off in those numbers, but you get the idea. They would take over a month each to complete, but I usually had three running all the time with SetiAtHome running on what was left of the fourth "processor."

And not all CPUs at 1.8 GHz are equal. Your system with plenty of cache, not running hyperthreading, and quad channel memory is going to be quite a bit faster running 4 tasks at the same time than a 1.8 GHz i3 with less cache that is running with hyperthreading enabled.

This newer machine has a single 1.8 GHz 64-bit processor (CPDN does not care about that) 4-core processor with a 10240 KB cache on it. It is not that I disabled hyperthreading; as far as I know, that chip just plain does not do that. I do have the required 32-bit libraries that CPDN seems to need.

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And then there's the network speed needed to send back the data. ADSL doesn't cut it these days. :)

Mine is pretty fast; here are some tests to show variability of time and destination

Date Download Upload Test Server Export All Results
2/12/2019 9:42:27 AM 82.23 Mbps 65.30 Mbps New York City, NY
11/29/2018 3:51:58 PM 83.08 Mbps 86.85 Mbps Washington, DC
8/30/2018 7:37:59 AM 82.58 Mbps 88.45 Mbps New York City, NY
6/25/2018 3:32:57 PM 84.02 Mbps 64.41 Mbps Atlanta, GA
6/25/2018 3:25:40 PM 84.02 Mbps 52.36 Mbps Atlanta, GA
6/25/2018 1:20:03 PM 83.32 Mbps 20.43 Mbps Los Angeles, CA
6/25/2018 1:10:41 PM 83.95 Mbps 65.87 Mbps New York City, NY

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And then there's the network speed needed to send back the data. ADSL doesn't cut it these days. :)



Mine is pretty fast; here are some tests to show variability of time and destination

That is more than ten times as fast as mine. Until some of the more recent large uploads, I was just enabling internet access for half an hour at night unless there was an upload I wanted to monitor/check size of. I have had to up that to a few hours if I have several of them backed up.

That is more than ten times as fast as mine. Until some of the more recent large uploads, I was just enabling internet access for half an hour at night unless there was an upload I wanted to monitor/check size of. I have had to up that to a few hours if I have several of them backed up.

I just leave the network up all the time. The network is not all that busy. I run Verizon FiOS, so I basically have a private line all the way to their access point in the next town.

Here is how it gets from here to there. Boring entries at the end omitted.
192.168.0.1 is the (internal) IP address of my router.

$ traceroute www.cpdn.org
traceroute to www.cpdn.org (129.67.193.7), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 0.432 ms 0.572 ms 0.703 ms
2 * * *
3 B3309.NWRKNJ-LCR-22.verizon-gni.net (100.41.223.8) 9.918 ms 9.989 ms B3309.NWRKNJ-LCR-21.verizon-gni.net (100.41.223.6) 14.948 ms
4 * * *
5 0.ae1.BR1.EWR6.ALTER.NET (140.222.237.223) 12.276 ms 12.332 ms 0.ae2.BR1.EWR6.ALTER.NET (140.222.237.225) 14.738 ms
6 152.193.0.142 (152.193.0.142) 12.387 ms 5.206 ms 11.591 ms
7 et-0-0-47.cr10-lon1.ip4.gtt.net (89.149.139.5) 89.216 ms 89.284 ms 89.334 ms
8 ip4.gtt.net (46.33.78.78) 84.110 ms 84.197 ms 86.630 ms
9 ae24.londtt-sbr1.ja.net (146.97.35.193) 101.719 ms 101.616 ms 96.421 ms
10 ae28.londtw-sbr2.ja.net (146.97.33.62) 80.029 ms 79.853 ms 79.902 ms
11 ae30.londpg-sbr2.ja.net (146.97.33.5) 97.512 ms 97.394 ms 99.985 ms
12 ae19.readdy-rbr1.ja.net (146.97.37.194) 99.847 ms 97.598 ms 97.330 ms
13 ae2.oxfoii-rbr1.ja.net (193.63.108.94) 82.312 ms 84.919 ms 82.442 ms
14 ae3.oxforq-rbr1.ja.net (193.63.108.98) 82.288 ms 82.270 ms 82.314 ms
15 oxford-university.ja.net (193.63.109.90) 84.855 ms 84.855 ms 84.925 ms

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Finally the two sam25 I had finished successfully for circa 100 days. One was on its 3rd attempt. Yeah ;)

Jean-David Beyer said

Is mine a slow computer?

This has just been re-evaluated, judging by the description of the new Linux models. Here.

I guess that the project could now described as being in phase 3 of modelling.

First was the simple slab models, used by in-house researchers.
Then came the move to outside researchers, with more complex models, when we became "professional".
Now we're about to start using cutting edge models, similar to those in the current state-of-the-art model used at the Met Office.

My brief glances at the new Intel processors, with a view to building another computer looks like being justifiable.
(But where to put it? Decisions, decisions.)
(Or maybe, Them.)

My brief glances at the new Intel processors, with a view to building another computer looks like being justifiable.

I too am looking at building something a tad faster than I have though unlikely to be able to afford the latest and fastest. Mine will be however a new MB in the same box when I get a spherically shaped tuit.

That is more than ten times as fast as mine.

Note that my speeds are specified Megabits (not MegaBytes) per second, so if you misunderstood that, my speeds are only a little faster than yours.

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Sadly, my speeds are as low compared to yours as I said.

Got two sam25 WUs dfrom batches 798/13 months & 797/24 months on my i5-2520M laptop. I really hope they will not take another 100 days to finish, though the 24 months is at 0.9% on 5th hour so roughly 550 h. to go