VM Systems for chrunching ?

_heinz
_heinz
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Topic 191545

Hi folks,
have anybody experience with crunching on Virtual machines?
Virtual PC
VMware
Xen3.0

DanNeely
DanNeely
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VM Systems for chrunching ?

You take a major overhead penalty with a VM, native code will almost certainly be far faster.

_heinz
_heinz
Joined: 4 Jan 06
Posts: 79
Credit: 130476
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RE: Hi folks, have anybody

Quote:
Hi folks,
have anybody experience with crunching on Virtual machines?
Virtual PC
VMware
Xen3.0


just found some interesting links about platform strategy
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2768&p=2
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2768&p=3
there you can see what´s comming in the next future

TauCeti
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RE: You take a major

Message 42054 in response to message 42052

Quote:
You take a major overhead penalty with a VM, native code will almost certainly be far faster.

In my experience with VMWare (Win Client on Win Host) the performance penalty for CPU-intensive work is very low. An example: The performance loss is below 5% for prime95/gimps.

You may suffer larger penaltys for different projects (especially with a lot of disc i/o) but in my experience the CPU/memory-bandwidth bound applications run at least with 90% efficiency in a VMWare VM.

Steve Cressman
Steve Cressman
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I've been trying to install

I've been trying to install VMWare on my system but not having any luck. When i start the installer it tells me that instmsia is missing so i d/l a copy of instmsia. When trying to install instmsia it says it already exist. Anybody have any suggestions how to get around this problem?
:)

98SE XP2500+ @ 2.1 GHz Boinc v5.8.8

MB Atlanos
MB Atlanos
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RE: I've been trying to

Message 42056 in response to message 42055

Quote:
I've been trying to install VMWare on my system but not having any luck. When i start the installer it tells me that instmsia is missing so i d/l a copy of instmsia. When trying to install instmsia it says it already exist. Anybody have any suggestions how to get around this problem?
:)


VMware does not work under Win98, minimal supported Windows for the VMwarePlayer is Win2000SP3.
The available MS-Installer (.msi) for Win98 is also outdatet.

Steve Cressman
Steve Cressman
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 104
Credit: 139654
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RE: RE: I've been trying

Message 42057 in response to message 42056

Quote:
Quote:
I've been trying to install VMWare on my system but not having any luck. When i start the installer it tells me that instmsia is missing so i d/l a copy of instmsia. When trying to install instmsia it says it already exist. Anybody have any suggestions how to get around this problem?
:)

VMware does not work under Win98, minimal supported Windows for the VMwarePlayer is Win2000SP3.
The available MS-Installer (.msi) for Win98 is also outdatet.


Thanks for the info.
Damn, i was afraid of that. But when i d/l vmware installer it said this was for all versions of windows. Would be nice if that info was on their site so that i would not have wasted time on it.
Do you know of one that will work on 98se?
The whole point of doing the install was so that i could try out some linux distros while waiting to afford a new hdd to put linux on in dual boot mode. Guess i'll have to try out some of the live cd distros instead.
:)

98SE XP2500+ @ 2.1 GHz Boinc v5.8.8

Dave Burbank
Dave Burbank
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RE: Guess i'll have to try

Message 42058 in response to message 42057

Quote:
Guess i'll have to try out some of the live cd distros instead.
:)

I've a host running Ubuntu Linux using no more than a live CD and a USB key.
I wanted to test the difference in crunch time between the Linux and Windows apps but didn't have a free partition so I tried this method. The beauty of this is that my hdd is not used (notice 0MB swap space, 0.23MB disk space), so Windows has no clue what's going on. I think I'm having an affair with Linux!

I don't think there is much performance loss running E@H this way as everything essential is loaded into RAM, and the science app is not very memory intensive.
As well the hdd (USB key) isn't being read or written to all that often so the performance loss there is negligible.

Oh yeah, so far my crunch times have gone from ~65000s (windows) to ~45000s (linux), that is a 5.5h/Wu improvement, not bad for a live cd and usb key!

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. - Richard Feynman

_heinz
_heinz
Joined: 4 Jan 06
Posts: 79
Credit: 130476
RAC: 0

RE: RE: Guess i'll have

Message 42059 in response to message 42058

Quote:
Quote:
Guess i'll have to try out some of the live cd distros instead.
:)

I've a host running Ubuntu Linux using no more than a live CD and a USB key.
I wanted to test the difference in crunch time between the Linux and Windows apps but didn't have a free partition so I tried this method. The beauty of this is that my hdd is not used (notice 0MB swap space, 0.23MB disk space), so Windows has no clue what's going on. I think I'm having an affair with Linux!

I don't think there is much performance loss running E@H this way as everything essential is loaded into RAM, and the science app is not very memory intensive.
As well the hdd (USB key) isn't being read or written to all that often so the performance loss there is negligible.

Oh yeah, so far my crunch times have gone from ~65000s (windows) to ~45000s (linux), that is a 5.5h/Wu improvement, not bad for a live cd and usb key!


Hi Dave, nice to try UBUNTU!!!
you can also boot from the USB-stick, if you store the image on it and the BIOS is able to do it!
any other possibility is to use SD-Cards as Diskdrives as I wrote in the thread "poweroptimized crunching boxes"
:-) britta

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