I’ve been GPUGrid-ing since 2009. Over the years I’ve invested about €2k in PCs and €1K in GPUs because I believe in this project.

During the past 10 days I’ve become disillusioned. For whatever reason, the scientists limited the number of WUs available. My contribution has dropped, dramatically, from its usual 1M credits per day.

Today, she who must be obeyed informed me that our monthly electric bill will increase by €60 in the coming year. I have little doubt that most of that is running two PCs, 24/7, for GPUGrid.

My conclusion is that:

• GPUGrid don’t really need my contribution
• I can contribute to the household budget by stopping GPUGrid-ing. That’s what I’ve done…

I’ve been GPUGrid-ing since 2009. Over the years I’ve invested about €2k in PCs and €1K in GPUs because I believe in this project.

During the past 10 days I’ve become disillusioned. For whatever reason, the scientists limited the number of WUs available. My contribution has dropped, dramatically, from its usual 1M credits per day.

Today, she who must be obeyed informed me that our monthly electric bill will increase by €60 in the coming year. I have little doubt that most of that is running two PCs, 24/7, for GPUGrid.

My conclusion is that:

• GPUGrid don’t really need my contribution
• I can contribute to the household budget by stopping GPUGrid-ing. That’s what I’ve done…

I’ve been GPUGrid-ing since 2009. Over the years I’ve invested about €2k in PCs and €1K in GPUs because I believe in this project.

During the past 10 days I’ve become disillusioned.

For whatever reason, the scientists limited the number of WUs available.

My contribution has dropped, dramatically, from its usual 1M credits per day.

Today, she who must be obeyed informed me that our monthly electric bill will increase by €60 in the coming year. I have little doubt that most of that is running two PCs, 24/7, for GPUGrid.

My conclusion is that:

• GPUGrid don’t really need my contribution
• I can contribute to the household budget by stopping GPUGrid-ing. That’s what I’ve done…

I’ve been GPUGrid-ing since 2009. Over the years I’ve invested about €2k in PCs and €1K in GPUs because I believe in this project.

I do believe in this project too.

During the past 10 days I’ve become disillusioned.

That's quite strange, as I have the feeling that we are contributing in the most promising research in GPUGrid's history during the past 10 days.
It's going on since December 2014 actually.

For whatever reason, the scientists limited the number of WUs available.

That's wrong perspective, as during the past 10 days there were always at least over 2000 long workunits in progress.
So I really admire the staff's enthusiasm (mostly Gerard's I think), as the current method needs continuous babysitting of the workunits.

My contribution has dropped, dramatically, from its usual 1M credits per day.

My contribution has fluctuated more than usual, so I've raised my cache settings to the running time of one long workunit.
Since then it's almost normal.
Perhaps your spare project kicked in, if you have any.

Today, she who must be obeyed informed me that our monthly electric bill will increase by €60 in the coming year. I have little doubt that most of that is running two PCs, 24/7, for GPUGrid.

That's true. If you're crunching on your CPUs (8 core AMD, and 4 core + HT i7-920), each of these can consume almost as much as a GTX 980.
But there's a little contradiction: if there's a shortage in workunits, it will actually decrease your electricity bill.

My conclusion is that:

• GPUGrid don’t really need my contribution
• I can contribute to the household budget by stopping GPUGrid-ing. That’s what I’ve done…

Your second conclusion is incontrovertible under any circumstances, so I think it was irrelevant in your decision.
I'm sorry to see you go, don't take my comments personal.
I've shared my point of view on the events of the past 10 days because I hope it can help prevent others to become this much disillusioned.

I am sorry for your loss (and the GPUGRID surely is too). Excuses at this point may be worthless, but I think I'll take the opportunity to describe the situation in the lab for the last times.

Lots of software changes have been happening in the last three weeks (essentially all analysis/simulation building programs in Matlab have been recoded almost from scratch to Python) and most of the lab has been dedicated to this endeavour. This left me as the only net contributor to GPUGRID and, as I explained elsewhere (https://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=3570), the strategy I took is to send the exact number of Workunits to keep the whole the network busy and allowing a fast turnover following our adaptive scheme (for which each simulation generates a new one after analysis of the results of previous ones). This is the cause for the slight WU availability drop.

Please let me know if this is really an inconvience for the majority of you and I will change this strategy to a more (I think inefficient) but user friendly one.

Tomba, I hope you can take a chance to reconsider your decision. Users are the most important in GPUGRID (besides science) because nothing could have be done without contributors like you. I'd like to remember that contributing is not an obligation and must always be done according to our personal means. I think donation in general (not only in GPUGRID) must be measured not in absolute terms but in relative terms. Therefore, we would be very happy if you could keep on contributing without intereferring in your household budget.

Gerard,

I think most of us are here to contribute to and accelerate the research. Credits are the icing on the cake.

Please do not impact the efficiency of the research, just to keep crunchers happy. We (should) all have back-up projects to satisfy our crunching itches when GPUGrid is saturated.

Thanks
____________

Can't wait to have my own house, move to a state with cheaper electricity and I'm going to go nuts with electronics!
You can only crunch for 12 hours a day if you want (though right now it's getting cold and i'm thinking of adding more GPUs as heaters!)
If there are limited Work Units then I would go with single high-end GPU configurations so you can still game pretty well.
____________

Good luck Tomba!

Gerard, please rethink and change the strategy. If people don't get work when they want it, they go elsewhere or just stop crunching.

In the two months since I stopped crunching for GPUGrid I've kept a close eye on developments. Developments? None. Nothing has changed. I see many "no work" posts.

AND... running two PCs 24/7 has consumed much electricity. I was happy to do that but so often they were on but doing nothing for GPUGrid.

The party's over...

Please don't leave us - we need all contributions. I am also retired and, as you, have spent, and continue spending, significant resources on Internet based research. I limit my contribution to suit my budget and am happy to make whatever input I can to GPUGrid, WCG, malaria, etc., etc.

Every contribution helps and if there are no WUs available, wait until the work is ready for processing.

Just a suggestion.

jcm

I have three cards on this project, a 980Ti and two 750Tis, and it has been a long time, weeks, since I've had any trouble getting work for them. They're crunching 24/7.

Please don't leave us - we need all contributions.

It’s nine months since I dropped out:

• Inability of the project to keep my two 24/7 rigs busy
• Cost of electricity.

I do miss the camaraderie of being here, but the practicalities are evident:

I was paying €179 per month (€2148 per annum) for electricity when running GPUGrid.
The power company has just reduced my monthly take to €82.50 (€990 per annum).

At least she who must be obeyed is happy!

I can see how an electricity bill of €180 would cause someone to stop crunching. Factoring in hardware costs that's a huge amount of money.

There are ways to minimize the cost of crunching though.

1. Buy used hardware. You can get 40%-50% off the initial costs.
2. Use efficient hardware. Get a wattmeter, make sure it's really efficient :)

I'm suspecting that a good portion of Tomba's electricity costs were the AMD FX-8350 and i7 920 CPUs, (also a Pentium 4???). Changing those to 14nm intel chips could have shaved 150W or more off your power consumption.

3. Selling older hardware before they become obsolete... the 770 is/was still worth good money.

4. Crunch only in the winter, so you're using the waste heat. Whatever you spend on crunching is effectively part of your heating bill. Also crunching 3-4 months will make your per annum cost much more bearable.

I have a GTX 750, a GTX 1060 and 3x 12-14 core Xeons crunching and the heat is just enough that I can turn off gas heating and still get a comfortable 22C in the house.

Crunching this way, electricity costs aren't an issue at all. Even the 12 core Xeons cost 120$ from ebay so hw costs can be kept down as well, if you look for good deals.

Please don't leave us - we need all contributions.
+1 :) Stay with us Tomba

I'm suspecting that a good portion of Tomba's electricity costs were the AMD FX-8350 and i7 920 CPUs, (also a Pentium 4???). Changing those to 14nm intel chips could have shaved 150W or more off your power consumption.