At the end of March 2020 I've joined BOINC project (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, https://boinc.berkeley.edu/). The primary reason was my personal interest and also the internal feeling of helping scientists fight COVID-19 using my PC.
I'm currently providing computational power for two projects: CPU for http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ and GPU for http://www.gpugrid.net/. As for June 2020 both projects are running and computing tasks that are tightly connected to addressing COVID-19.
I've spent a few days by fine-tuning my setup in order to provide my PC power to scientists BUT at the same moment not to interrupt my normal working/gaming flow.
I don't own anything crazy nor any "NASA PC" but still have a decent new rig: 8-core, 16 threads AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3,6 GHz (4,4 turbo), 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM and, most importantly, of course, ladies and gentlemen, beautiful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB!! which is - quite accidentally to be honest - the THIRD best GPU for connecting into the computational grids.
Source: https://www.primegrid.com/gpu_list.php, 7th June 2020: top rankings of fastest GPU models, cross-platform comparison:
- (1.000) TITAN V
- (0.711) GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- (0.603) GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
... and since TITAN V costs almost as an older small car in the Czech Republic and 2080 Ti is still more than double the price of my 2070s I am sure I made the BEST possible choice here.
Anyway, enough of showing off and let's get to the point of this blog post. Am I able to play some games and crunch tasks for Rosetta project at the same time? YES. Absolutely!
I was a little bit worried about COD Modern Warfare and using 50 % of Ryzen 7 3700X for Rosetta project at the very same moment(s) but it works like a charm. In practice, I am seriously using 8 threads for BOINC calculations while gaming on ultra settings here and FPS stays always above 90 and in average sits around 110 FPS value. Crazy. It is obvious that RTX 2070s does the heavy lifting here but... still... I did not know whether I will have to suspend Rosetta tasks every time I am about to play the most recent games or not. The power and throughput of CPU does not stop to impress me.
Temperature of CPU sits around comfortable 60-65 Celsius degrees. In order to avoid a lot of noise caused by CPU fan maxed out and my PC trying to fly away from my desk I switched off Gaming Turbo Boost option in BIOS and also disabled Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). After this, CPU sits on core 3,6 GHz and fan RPM stays more or less constant AND quite silent. Which is very important factor for me as I have my PC on the table and right next to me. Before switching of those two settings, CPU was overriding it's core clock frequency from 3,6 GHz to anything between 3,6 and 4,4 according to the needs and immediately increased fan RPM and noise level significantly.
When I don't need my GPU anymore I enable GPUgrid project tasks in BOINC client and let the 2070s do the work. Maaaan, 9 TFLOPs of power in this graphic card speaks it's own language and I just gather the credits and badges on GPUgrid :D Some potential vaccines and protein structures are being calculated on my PC right now. Hopefully we will find something useful with other 4.5 million contributors around the world.
My statistics in The Czech National Team: https://statistiky.czechnationalteam.cz/index.php?akce=user&id_user=27259,
(7th June 2020)
399th place in GPUgrid (Czech Team)
2415th place in Rosetta (Czech Team)
World rank: 358,599th out of 4,417,167 (91.8817 percentile)
Only 8,2 % of contributors around the world provided more resources than me so far - and I've just started :) I will try to update the progress here periodically.
If you are interested about helping scientists fighting (not only) COVID-19, check out: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ and https://www.gpugrid.net/. "You don't have to be scientist to do science." :)
