Folding rigs.

Cuddlesworth · 29-04-2008 10:38am

zilog_jones wrote: »

Oh yeah, didn't notice your name before You new to this, or did you change teams?

I have been meaning to do something for a while, but was under a tight corporate network.. Now I have started I can't stop eyeing up all the machines around me not in use.

BadCharlie · 06-08-2008 11:11am

Im up and running again. Have one machine folding away 24/7 at the moment "when gaming folding is off". Not sure how long i will keep this going.

Its rig two from sig, it burns 161watt while folding if i could get my video card to help in folding it would use 205watts.

So far i average a little under 100points a day just using this machine.

zilog_jones · 06-08-2008 8:23pm

BadCharlie wrote: »

"when gaming folding is off"

You don't need to do this TBH. It's not like you're short on memory with 2GB or anything.

BabyEater · 06-08-2008 9:57pm

Just thought i would share what i am folding with, under the username Cronan.

A P4 3GHz dont know anything else about this yoke.

An AMD 4200x2@2.7GHz with a 780G integrated graphics. One CPU core using processor the other CPU core helping out me 780G integrated graphics.

An AMD Opteron 144 @2.7 with an ATI HD4850. The CPU is helping the 4850 in this rig.

zilog_jones · 06-08-2008 10:20pm

The GPU client does not need a whole CPU core to itself - from what I've seen it uses half or less once it's started. So you should be able to still run a CPU client on each core too - they may be a bit slower at doing work but should still reach the deadlines no probs on such modern CPUs.

BabyEater · 06-08-2008 10:35pm

Using 100% here on my Opteron 144 as this GPU2 client on my HD4850 seems to use a lot of CPU power.

I will check out the 780G inetgrated graphics client as that is a slow GPU so might not need the whole CPU

BadCharlie · 06-08-2008 11:13pm

After doing lots of reading ect.. and wondering why i could not get my x1950xt video card working. Its cause the GPU2 client does no longer support my series of video cards

. It would have done more work then my CPU.

BadCharlie · 20-08-2008 9:35am

BabyEater wrote: »

Using 100% here on my Opteron 144 as this GPU2 client on my HD4850 seems to use a lot of CPU power.

I will check out the 780G inetgrated graphics client as that is a slow GPU so might not need the whole CPU

Under windows XP a GPU2 client will use 100% on a cpu from what i have read. Also does the same to my folding machine. Need to change to windows Vista for it to use around 20% of its CPU power.

Im getting close to 4800PPD by just using one GPU2 client.

BabyEater · 20-08-2008 9:42pm

Just have 1 gig of RAM so vista is out. My HD4850 only gets 1500PPD hope it will improve when they optimise the cores for it.

Shiny · 29-10-2008 4:32pm

Just started folding for the boards.ie team there today.

Have 1 laptop and 1 pc running at the moment. I could
probably get more if I knew how to run it on the computers
in college. I cant install anything here and copying the install folder
to a usb key allows it to run but I can't connect to revieve work units.

riptide · 29-10-2008 4:33pm

Great.

One thing about college PC's./... You have to ask the owners/admin for permission.

Shiny · 29-10-2008 4:37pm

Permission only really matters if you have it installed and running all the
time. I was just hoping to run it while i was in the labs programming.

Its not as if DEVc++ needs cpu power.

zilog_jones · 29-10-2008 8:23pm

You probably need to go through a proxy server to get internet access within college

Shiny · 30-10-2008 9:58am

I entered in the proxy information that was working in my browser in
college and it still couldn't get the data from Stanford.

Will try again today.
Has anyone heard of folding data being carried around on a USB key?

zilog_jones · 30-10-2008 7:55pm

I found using the IP address of the proxy server instead of the name seemed to work when I was folding in UL (don't know why the name didn't work). It only uses HTTP to download and upload IIRC, so technically shouldn't be a problem.

Also: http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Sneakernetting

Shiny · 31-10-2008 8:23pm

Yey. First unit completed. Bit disappointed that after 24hours of running
the WU, it was only 165points.

Surely a Q6600 can do better than this in 24 hours with the normal client?

zilog_jones · 02-11-2008 5:40pm

Unless you're using the SMP client (which may still be buggy, haven't been paying attention recently), you should be running 4 clients simultaneously to make use of the 4 cores.

Shiny · 02-11-2008 8:45pm

I installed the smp client yesterday evening and am about 70% through
the first WU.
All 4 cores are now maxed out completely as opposed to around 25% with
the normal client.

I will report back the points generated from this.

Thanks for the help zilog.

Edit:

1,760 points for 1 WU on the SMP client. Just jumped 45 places.

Shiny · 09-11-2008 12:49pm

zilog_jones wrote: »

Unless you're using the SMP client (which may still be buggy, haven't been paying attention recently), you should be running 4 clients simultaneously to make use of the 4 cores.

Yeah its still buggy.
The first submission above was fine then I got a bad? WU and it completely
borked everything. Spent days trying to fix it. have decided to just run
3 clients at once. hasn't crashed yet but points are much lower.

riptide · 09-11-2008 1:43pm

Remember guys that the new WU's 5748 or whatever they call it, has twice as many atoms as the previous ones. And unfortunately again Pande Group has screwed up the points awarded to it. So if you were geting 6k per day on GPU, you might only get 4k now on these WU's.

the_syco · 25-12-2008 2:49am

Erm, how do I increase the F@H thing to a higher priority, or something?

Have a quad Q9550, and an ATI HD487, so would hope to do something that would increase the usage of the CPU, to maybe at least 80% or is that possible?

Or should I just run 4 of them at the same time? Oh, and how do I get more than one to run at the same time?

the_syco · 26-12-2008 4:44am

OK... got it running 4 times on the console. Will look into getting the ATI GPU running it as well later. Running it on 80%, so I can still do other stuff.

Score is 9381, 63 WU's now, will check tomorrow to see if it has increased.

/edit
The processes are on 51%, 43%, 34%, and 48%, so will hopefully they'll be finished tomorrow, and then I'll check the points.
They're set at 80 (percent?) CPU, and 512MB RAM each.

/edit 2
GTA4 still runs when the above is running. A slight bit jittery, but playable.

/edit 3
Two cores finished. Points now 9977, 66 WU's.

/edit 4
After experiencing problems when all cores @ 80% with F@H, Portal running in the background, formatting a TB HDD, and copying files at teh same time, going to leave it run at 10% each core. Have set it up with the console version, so nothing in the taskbar, and all 4 F@H programs as services detectable in the Task Manager. Machine is often left on, so it'll slowly do stuff.

zilog_jones · 07-01-2009 6:43pm

As I've said before, there's no real need to set FAH to anything less than 100% (unless you have heat issues) - it's set to run at the lowest priority, and Windows thread scheduling seems to do a decent job at not letting it interefere with higher priority processes (i.e. everything else in most cases). I've run benchmarks on games with FAH running at 100% compared to it not running at all and have seen no discernable difference in game performance - FAH performance is greatly decreased of course, usually only significant on one core though. Some games are known to have performance issues with FAH running, but this is only because they're buggy (GTA:SA comes to mind).

However, the FAH GPU client is detrimental to game performance in my experience. Maybe it's different for other cards/drivers but I seem to lose 10-30 fps running that in the background with my 8600GT.

I recently got a 8600GT (256MB GDDR3) - not much of an upgrade from my 7600GT, but it was cheap (€30 off a friend) and it has CUDA so I can finally run the GPU client. I have it overclocked to 690/1518/740 (core/shader/mem) and I'm getting about 1500 PPD from it. Don't run it 24/7 though (turn it off when playing games etc.) so in reality it's a lot less. The GPU client seems quite reliable these days - I haven't had any trouble with it yet.

Folding rigs.

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