Considering buying another box strictly for Rosetta@Home, the machine I'm looking at which is on sale at the moment has an I7-4785T (so 4 cores&hyperthreading = 8 simultaneous jobs possible) ... but it has only 4GB of RAM.

Wondering if anyone running 8 cores of R@H with just 4GB of memory has encountered any issues running full throttle? I know Rosetta@Home is one of the more memory-hungry apps around. Quick reply appreciated as the sale price is time limited.

Considering buying another box strictly for Rosetta@Home, the machine I'm looking at which is on sale at the moment has an I7-4785T (so 4 cores&hyperthreading = 8 simultaneous jobs possible) ... but it has only 4GB of RAM.

1 gb is used by OS (and other services, like antivirus)
So, you have 3gb
Consider that a rosetta wu is, at least, 400 mb of ram.....

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I think the answer is it will be fine most of the time.

Some of the time it might have to limit the number of tasks running, but that won't affect productivity too much because the hyperthreaded cores don't double throughput - they add about 30%.

So, if it runs flat out it might do 3.5k credits per day, and if it's memory limited then that might drop to 3k per day (complete guess) which is still very good.

Running linux might squeeze some headroom out of the RAM, and reducing the amount allocated to graphics should help too.

D

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You could take some of the savings from that sale price and upgrade the RAM. You should be able to buy 8GB of good quality memory for US$60 or less.

You could take some of the savings from that sale price and upgrade the RAM. You should be able to buy 8GB of good quality memory for US$60 or less.

Might look into that. Just as long as it doesn't void the warranty. I've built a bunch of machines myself, but this one being an OEM machine (which comes with a 3 year warranty that seems pretty solid) I am a little more cautious to pop it open.

By the way, these little boxes pack a dense and power efficient punch - perfect for those of us who have wives like mine who doesn't want my 'hobbies' taking up a bunch of space, creating any fan-humming noise, or running the power bill up too much.. I can practically hide these crunchers out of site and not hear about them. :) Also they come with the '~T' flavor of i7s which draw no more than 35W at full tilt so nice and efficient!

This will be my second machine of this type (the last one had more memory though hence this thread) and I'm planning on stacking a growing collection of them into a little Rosetta crunching cluster in the back room! XD)

Very nice. I've been wanting to make my crunching efforts more energy efficient as well. Right now I have the Desktop i7+GPU and I have an Android Smartphone running BOINC. I'd like to find a happy medium in there somewhere which will do a lot of work but will not use a lot of power.

Good luck with your collection!

Very nice. I've been wanting to make my crunching efforts more energy efficient as well. Right now I have the Desktop i7+GPU and I have an Android Smartphone running BOINC. I'd like to find a happy medium in there somewhere which will do a lot of work but will not use a lot of power.

Good luck with your collection!

Just an FYI - I've got everything setup, I stripped out any unneeded bloatware, desktop backgrounds, unneeded services, etc. to optimize the OS memory footprint, and it can handle 8 tasks with 4GB of memory as long as I put the 'use at most x% of memory' setting to 80% or more - which is totally fine as this box wont be used for anything other than BOINC :-)

And of course, because everyone loves pictures, here is the new box on top of the old one (the old one came with an external optical drive that attaches to the top of it, haven't bothered removing it yet but I could if I wanted to make this even denser space-wise..)



...The wife thinks I'm nuts for being into this, but she's allowing it so far :P

I have agreed to pay more towards the power bill out of my own pocket - though electricity is cheap here in Montreal, Canada and 99% from renewable sources
(like 95% of that is hydro-electric, renewable yes but not really aquatic-life friendly, still better than coal though)

Efficiency for the win! I'll post more pics as this farm grows :)

Nice Timo! Just would suggest that even at such low wattage, it might be best to orient them vertically like books with airspace between them so they don't pass heat from each to the next above.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Very nice. I've been wanting to make my crunching efforts more energy efficient as well. Right now I have the Desktop i7+GPU and I have an Android Smartphone running BOINC. I'd like to find a happy medium in there somewhere which will do a lot of work but will not use a lot of power.

Good luck with your collection!

Just an FYI - I've got everything setup, I stripped out any unneeded bloatware, desktop backgrounds, unneeded services, etc. to optimize the OS memory footprint, and it can handle 8 tasks with 4GB of memory as long as I put the 'use at most x% of memory' setting to 80% or more - which is totally fine as this box wont be used for anything other than BOINC :-)

And of course, because everyone loves pictures, here is the new box on top of the old one (the old one came with an external optical drive that attaches to the top of it, haven't bothered removing it yet but I could if I wanted to make this even denser space-wise..)



...The wife thinks I'm nuts for being into this, but she's allowing it so far :P

I have agreed to pay more towards the power bill out of my own pocket - though electricity is cheap here in Montreal, Canada and 99% from renewable sources
(like 95% of that is hydro-electric, renewable yes but not really aquatic-life friendly, still better than coal though)

Efficiency for the win! I'll post more pics as this farm grows :)

You could add a strong GPU and run GPUGRID as well. GPUs are exponentially stronger per watt than CPUs (for optimized applications that is). Rosie and GPUGRID are trying to achieve similar things thru different methods.
You can also add WCG (Mapping Cancer Markers) into the mix to reduce the total RAM usage since WCG uses way less RAM per WU than Rosie.

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