Einstein@home on new PC - what do I need to do first?
13 Mar 2021 18:38:32 UTC
Topic 225045
(moderation:
Hi All,
I'm re-building my gaming/crunching PC next week, and need to know what steps I need to take to get Einstein@home successfully running on the new machine. I have a couple of specific questions about the process, and then I welcome all info and suggestions.
1) I would like to run all of the work units currently downloaded to my old machine, without downloading new work units. How do I do this?
2) My GPU will remain the same (AMD RX580 GTX), but I'm upgrading from an Intel i7-4770 to an AMD Ryzen 7 3770X. How do I register the new computer with Einstein@home? Is there a manual way to do so, or does it happen automatically when I reinstall BOINC and the project?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Disregard question #1 - I
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Disregard question #1 - I found the "No new work" button in BOINC.
Just set NNT in the Manager
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Just set NNT in the Manager and finish all your work and report it.
Then upgrade your PC. If you are just replacing the motherboard and cpu, you don't need to do anything with BOINC. You are not changing anything in your OS or storage.
When you start the PC back up, BOINC will adjust automatically to your new hardware. Just unset NNT and get new work.
You actually don't need to even set NNT though. You are not disturbing BOINC or your Einstein tasks. The application and tasks are still the same in the project folder. The change in mobo or cpu will not affect anything with the project as long as you are staying with the same OS, your host ID will not change. It will just report the change in the cpu.
BOINC should run through its automated benchmark when it sees the new cpu type. Which should bump up your FLOPS rating with the Ryzen compared to your old Intel cpu. That will change your estimated times to completion after you have returned work with the new cpu.
I've had problems in the past
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I've had problems in the past with boinc trying to start and erroring out my entire queue of GPU tasks while installing new graphics drivers. I'd recommend stopping boinc while that's being done.
But he isn't changing
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But he isn't changing graphics cards. Just the cpu and motherboard. Graphics drivers stay the same.
Unless windows throws a
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Unless windows throws a snitfit, in which case all bets are off. Initially running on default drivers for everything on the new mobo and all bets are off. I've migrated a windows install from Vista-7-10, and AMD-3800 to I7-920 to i7-4790k. Mess of driver problems every time; I'd expect to do first boot with default generic 1024x768 vga drivers (or whatever the failsafe resolution is today) and need to reinstall the existing GPU drivers after sorting the mobo/etc out. (And assuming you don't have the bad luck to run into random 'fun' problems on the way; most of those were probably OS change related though not the concurrent CPU swaps.)
I changed mobo and cpus
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I changed mobo and cpus multiple times running Windows 7 and never had any issues.
Never bothered with Windows 10 and instead moved to Ubuntu.
Again, changed mobos and cpus multiple times and never did anything to BOINC or my projects. Just stopped BOINC and did the upgrade.
I always do a clean install
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I always do a clean install of Windows when I replace the motherboard, so that there are no driver issues.
My new system is as follows:
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
ASUS TUF Gaming Motherboard X570 w/ PCIe 4.0
64GB DDR4-3200 RAM
AMD Radeon RX580 GTX Black Edition w/ 8GB video RAM
1TB NVMe SSD on PCIe 4.0 Bus
1TB SSD storage drive
I have done a clean install of the OS and of BOINC. I have my preferences set to HOME, just like before, but I can't get BOINC to stop downloading CPU tasks. I only want to run GPU tasks. I have set the appropriate settings to tell BOINC that I do not want to use the CPU, but without success.
Keith Myers wrote: I changed
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I saw an article once on the way to move to a new cpu and mobo on Win10 is to delete every driver relating to the old mobo before removing it, that means sound and EVERYTHING, and then when you start up the new machine Win10 will think it lost all the drivers and will auto download install them for the new mobo and after a couple of reboots you should be good to go. I have NOT tried it but may in the future.
John Tibbetts wrote: ... I
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Are you sure the new computer is using the 'home' location? Have you actually clicked on the 'details' link for that new ID and checked that it's listed as 'home'?
If that is correct, go to your account -> preferences -> project page on the website and confirm (via the drop-down link near the top) that you are looking at the preferences for 'home'. Scroll down the page to the 'Applications' sub-section and make sure the O2 Multi-Directional CPU app is NOT ticked. For good measure, make sure that just below these tick boxes, the questions about "Run CPU versions ..." and "Allow non-preferred apps" are both set to NO. Make sure you "Save" any changes you make.
If you make any changes, use the 'update' function in BOINC Manager to force the client to contact the project and be updated with those changes.
You must be overlooking something. It's perfectly possible to control which searches you allow to supply tasks.
Cheers,
Gary.
Gary Roberts wrote: Are you
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That's what I forgot to do. It's working perfectly now, fetching only GPU WUs.
Thanks!