On 29/11/2021 18:45, John wrote:
>
> Hi,
> as the subject says, I'm really, really tempted by the new,
> super-duper M1 Max Pro Hypergood Excessively Powerful Chippy type
> Macbook Pro but I have a question I can't find an answer to on Apple's
> site so I thought I'd ask you guys.
>
> I run, as a hobby, in the name of my wife, distributed computing
> projects on my old, spinning rust MBP. These are GIMPS [the Great
> Internet Mersenne Prime Search at https:///
www.mersenne.org ] and
> BOINCy stuff like SETI@HOME [
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ ] and
> their protein-folding, MilkyWay, Einstein and other stuff.
>
> These run in the background, get the hell out of the way when I'm
> doing intensive work and generally "just work".
>
> But ... they do shitloads of CPU and GPU operations. They also
> write to disc, a lot. They keep the boxes I've run them on quite warm
> much of the time so they are definitely processor intensive, RAM
> intensive and sort of I/O writey.
>
> My question, to which I am too inexperienced in Mac-Magics to be
> able to find the answer is: would these totally fuck up a new box that
> only has SSD storage? Would distributed computing tasks kill an SSD
> drive fastly?
>
> Or are new SSD's immune to wear?
No, not immune to wear: they have a maximum number of "lifetime" reads
and writes after which they won't necessarily be reliable any more.
The exact figure is not simple to calculate because it depends on usage.
However, looking at the GIMPS page it says it needs about 30MB to store
work in progress (in case of a power failure) and does so every half
hour. This is peanuts in the scheme of things: Samsung are promising[1]
that their latest SSDs will last 10 years at a daily write rate a
thousand times higher than GIMPS'.
[1] Promising but not guaranteeing. ;-)
> If they *would* does anyone know whether I could run the softwares,
> with all of their writes and reads off of an external spinning rust
> hard-drive? I can find a couple of small ones of those if I need to
> but I'm not sure whether MBP's will run softwares from them from
> start-up and continuously.
You can do this as well - subject to the DC software allowing you to
select where it should store its files. You can install the DC
application on the external drive as well if you want, but there is
little point in doing so as it will only be read from disk once each
time you start the app.
> This is a deal-breaker. If DC does wipe out SSD's like I wipe out
> Pot Noodles and bacon sarnies, I'm never going to buy one.
>
> So ...
>
> Opinions? Facts? Help making up my mind, please?
The various DC projects rely 100% on goodwill from participants. If
there was any danger that their software would 'wipe out' an SSD then
they would clearly warn people, or change their software so it couldn't,
or do something, because the negative publicity would mean the end of
their project and they couldn't chance that.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Merry Christmas and I hope everyone has a nicer, mask-free,
> flu-free, SARS-free New Year.
>
> Take care, everyone and try to avoid all those nasty mutants.
>
> J.
--
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey, England