Best way to run a large scale project

[ngetschel]

I'm a student in university and have been talking to some people there about the possibility of using the various computer labs/library computers for running GIMPS on a large scale, I guess in a similar manner to Curtis Cooper. Just wondering what the best way to do that might be.

[GP2]

Originally Posted by ngetschel

I'm a student in university and have been talking to some people there about the possibility of using the various computer labs/library computers for running GIMPS on a large scale, I guess in a similar manner to Curtis Cooper. Just wondering what the best way to do that might be.

How much does electricity cost your university?

It costs a lot of money to run things on the scale Curtis Cooper does. Presumably the University of Central Missouri allows it because they get some prestige and publicity whenever he makes a discovery.

[Uncwilly]

First thing (after developing a plan and presentation) is to get permission in writing from someone with the authority to authorize such activity. [Google: Aaron Blosser aaron prime
us west - it is a cautionary tale]

Since large organizations often use disk images to produce clones, that is the way for new machines. They also use machine management software to manage updates and remote installs. These both require Sys Admin level co-operation. So your best bet is to produce a presentation why your organization should get involved in GIMPS (Chalsall does it on the corporate side to monitor machine health and stability.) I would suggest that you share it here for critique, then present it to the powers that be.

Be sure to take the cost into account in the presentation.

Welcome to the forum.

[kriesel]

Cpu only? Straightforward with standard imaging and maybe a bit of setup scripting. Document well so that you're well covered legally, and so that someone other than you can carry it on or undo it some day. (Like for after you've left.)

Gpu(s) also or only?In addition to the above look into separate client management software, depending on what software you want to run and what gpu type(s) will be available. Read about them at http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpos...92&postcount=3

[diep]

Originally Posted by ngetschel

I'm a student in university and have been talking to some people there about the possibility of using the various computer labs/library computers for running GIMPS on a large scale, I guess in a similar manner to Curtis Cooper. Just wondering what the best way to do that might be.

yeah you have to be careful. I ran a chessprogram on a supercomputer (legally yes - wrote lots of paper work to get permission) back in 2003. That was a huge supercomputer back then, especially for European standards.

Starting up the thing at 500 out of 512 CPU's took 3 hours initially. Of course i would've lost games that way. After experimenting, which lost me crucial time and of course points in the world champs computerchess - i got it down to 1 hour starting time. Yet that still was too long in between rounds.

After couple of days someone visited us there explaining how i could start it up faster. The way to do that was to keep day and night things running on the supercomputer. So overnight it had to keep running nonstop.

The partition would be activated then and keep activated and start times would go down. I tried that - and it WORKED!

Suddenly start time of Diep was "just" 10 minutes. Within a few days after that i had the thing scale very well for the supercomputer (with 2 hours of sleep at night at most) and all spare time it kept running of course to keep partition activated.

So that tip was a very good tip.

Whereas it had been appointed i would also at night run on that partition with the chessprogram....

However... ...after the world champs had finished the university Maastricht got a very huge bill for me using up all this system time...

They billed 90k+ CPU node hours whereas i had a limit of 80k cpu node hours.

Glad i didn't see what was on that bill...

Activated Nodes, a node being a computer in this definition, they eat a lot of power and juice.