BURP

[Reeltime]

OK, anyone understand what this project is all about?

You appear to be able to sell your credits for rendering?

[Megacruncher]

Big Ugly Rendering Project

"aims to develop a publicly distributed system for rendering 3D animations."

Simple enough. It's not science but it's distributed computing & you earn your credits in exchange for work done as you do with any other project.

They had an April Fool spoof about iTunes buying them with sordid financial ramifications but I wouldn't worry about that.

[scole of TSBT]

FYI...BURP has GPU WUs currently in case you're looking for a different GPU app to run. Doesn't run very hot either.

[Bryan]

It doesn't support GTX 10XX Pascal cards.

[scole of TSBT]

I have WUs running on 3 pascal GPUs for a couple hours now. Do they get computation errors or fail to validate?

EDIT: They're not logging any progress but they are running WUs. GPU usage pegged. Also, these hosts with GTX 1080's are sucessfully running it...
http://burp.renderfarming.net/show_host ... stid=69537
http://burp.renderfarming.net/show_host ... stid=71563

Ok, they run technically but not good. A GTX 1070 took over 4 hours where a GTX 770 (or maybe it was a 970) took 20 minutes.

[Bryan]

I had tried it a month ago and it wouldn't work. On one of the forums they said they had no support for Pascal. I guess they've upgrade the app.

[scole of TSBT]

I wouldn't invest in any more GTX 900 (Maxwell) series GPUs. The Pascals rule on any Nvidia GPU project compiled for a newer version of Cuda. BURP looks like it's giving old Fermi WUs to Pascal GPUs. As soon as they get that fixed, they should work as well or better than the Maxwell GPUs.

[davidbam]

BURP has work (at least for CPU / Linux)

First WU have completed and are in Pending. Downloads a 700-ish Mb file on each instance though.

Can it be bunkered?

[Bryan]

Yes you can bunker all 4 WU it gives you per instance

[davidbam]

I'm running 2 instances simultaneously per machine i.e. 128 threads on a 2990WX. Have yet to see the load average exceed 40 so I am thinking I'll try 192 threads

[Bryan]

I'm running 4 x 16t and I see 84% sometimes. It uses the threads very inefficiently. You can run more WU w/ less threads BUT I can tell you now you can't handle 16 x 4t. My 128G RAM machines choke on that setting. The efficiency goes way up with that setting but it eats RAM big time ... over 2G/thread.

[davidbam]

Hmmm - I am running 3 instances each with a single 64 thread WU + 16 threads of Universe (to empty a buffer).

htop is reporting long-term load averages of about 66-68 & I can't see any appreciable increase in computation time for Universe WU. HIghest RAM usage I've seen on htop is 24Gb (out of 32Gb fitted)

[Bryan]

According to THIS page it requires 9.7GB of RAM / WU.

Figuring 10G/WU it will tell you how many WU you can run and from that you can divide up the number of threads you want to run.

[Megacruncher]

Well I’m just glad to be getting any BURP WU at all!
In just over 13 years of trying I’d amassed a princely 3K of credits. Then, BANG!, I get 13 times that in 24hrs.
If the work supply keeps up for a few days then it’ll be scoring for FB. Which, as things stand, would bag TSBT another 25 points! Also the prospect of reaching a million for it seems at very least possible.

BTW there’s work for Windows CPU as well.

[davidbam]

would bag TSBT another 25 points

yup

I am wondering if this project has come alive for an upcoming FB Sprint. Maybe it doesn't work that way?

[Bryan]

It probably won't be a Sprint project ... the work is too spotty. Although it wouldn't be the 1st time a sprint was called on a project that had little or no work

[Megacruncher]

It would be, either, a feat of unprecedented coordination & cooperation, or the freakiest fluke ever, if FB called a sprint on BURP during one of it's rare spells of up-time. My money would be on fluke. But like Bryan says it's not likely to be selected.

Even if this bonanza lasts another 2 weeks, which I doubt, I personally wouldn't bother bunkering it for the next sprint.

[davidbam]

Even if this bonanza lasts another 2 weeks, which I doubt, I personally wouldn't bother bunkering it for the next sprint.

Bonanza seems to be over for now.

Bunkering is rendered (pun intended) impossible by short deadlines and only 4WU issued per-instance. No, my sprint speculation will be elsewhere

[Megacruncher]

Yup. The party is over for now.
But we've got 25 FB points out of it and my tally has increased, 30+ fold, by over 100K.
A week ago I calculated it would take me 4300 years to get to 1 million for BURP. Now that has shortened to just another 112 years.

[davidbam]

LOL - hang in there, friend

[Bryan]

The party is over but I still have over 5k WU sitting in pending. They are slowly coming down ... in the last 12 hours it went from 8800 to 5600.

[Alez]

A week ago I calculated it would take me 4300 years to get to 1 million for BURP. Now that has shortened to just another 112 years.

We should all have goals in life .....

[Bryan]

And now the server has crashed ... why did ya break it Mega?