Join the SatelliteGuys Folding@Home Team!

Something wonderful will be happening today!
I guess this would be a bad time to upgrade to Ubuntu 17 on my two Folding Rigs, huh? ;););)

I guess for old times sake, I could Idle the Dell Precision 7400 and the GPUs on my Mac Pro and let the two Dual Core Xeons take me across the Finish Line as I started Folding back in March of 2007...
 
1000235218.jpeg
Mic drop.
 
Yeah, I saw last night it was coming, but didn't want to stay up till 1am EDT, to post ...then forgot till now.
Congratulations!!!!
 
In celebration, I applied all the Ubuntu updates and patches that I've been waiting until this milestone to apply. My 2006 Mac Pro came back up, but my Dell needs to be debugged as it won't let me log in (accepts my password, then the desktop session manager dies and I'm back at the User credentials screen). So I'll give Voyager6 a chance to catch up as I "limp" along at 450K PPD...

In reality, the Mac Pro was more "critical" to the household as it runs CUPS as well as Folds, and it makes all our networked printers available to all our mobile devices. I'm glad that wasn't the one with issues.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KE4EST
Did I say 450,000 PPD? After running the MacPro in it's current configuration, it is actually more like 325,000 PPD. The basement is a lot quieter, and cooler, too.

I downloaded the lightweight Ubuntu 17.10 Desktop and I'm going to try installing that on the Dell. I'm also thinking of moving the GTX 1070 into the MacPro and make it the all-Pascal box (1070 & 1060). I just wish the Stanford would get the 7.4.17 Beta out, but I guess I'll jump to FAH 7.4.16 on the Dell as well.
 
Update: Well, the 2nd-oldest card I have, a Xotac GTX 970, has frozen fans. These are low profile fans so nothing I have laying around will fit, but I'm sure Amazon has something that will fit. In the meantime, I relocated the GTX 1070 into the MacPro and fired it up, increasing the daily production numbers to somewhere between 750K - 850K PPD.

I have to admit that reaching the milestone of One Billion Points is something I didn't think would happen so soon. I know it's been eleven years since the SatelliteGuys joined the ranks of the worldwide Folding at Home Project, but in that time competing projects and even Cryptocurrency has become a huge draw on the electrical grid of our country and around the world. Cryptocurrency mining is reported to use more electricity world-wide than the country of Poland. Of course, it's too late to switch GPUs over to Cryptocurrency mining as the only way to break-even is if you have renewable ("free") power or have ASIC Mining rigs.

So I guess my nod toward Earth Day is to shut down and retire the Dell T7400 workstation. It will take a month or so to see how much of a difference it makes on the electric bill. Plus, the weather is warming up (dare I say "Spring"?) and the less heat in the basement yields lower cooling costs in the Summer.

Is it worth my while to put the GTX 960 & GTX 970 up in the Classifieds?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Scott Greczkowski
Brian Gohl, or better known as Titanium on the forums here bought my GTX960 to use for his media PC. In which he has tuner cards in his rig, so not just used as a Kodi box or similar.
IIRC I think he said it made a huge improvement on decoding large feeds over FTA satellite.
 
Wow, I'm not sure what happened, but I opened up the FAHControl on my iMac and it wouldn't connect to my MacPro in the basement. I get down there and the MacPro is powered up and the screen is dark as I would expect after the screen blanks, but the mouse was dark and no Num Lock LED on the keyboard. Hmmm... Try forcing the power off, but when the power was applied, no USB power and no Happy Mac sounds.

Long story short, I pulled out the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 cards and the backplate of the 1070 was coated in some sort of oily substance. I put the GTX 1060 in the PCIe slot #0 and this time when I powered up, I got the Happy Mac chong sound and Ubuntu booted up. Yay! But then I had to shut down FAHClient, delete all the slots, and let FAH reconfigure the computer. I am now limping along with the GTX 1060 and 3 of the 4 CPU cores Folding, so I expect this is the end of the road for me, at least until GPU prices come back to Earth.

Edit: looking at my hourly stats, whatever happened seems to have occurred before noon Friday. My Points go to zero after that.
Screen Shot 2018-05-05 at 03.30.09 .png
 
Sorry to hear. Supposedly they are coming back down. We will see.
 
Boy, it looks like removing three-fourths of ones GPUs is detrimental to ones Points Output... ;) Sorry, Team. I've got other things to spend money on at the moment.