Join the SatelliteGuys Folding@Home Team!

[JamesJ]

let me ask this, do you guys leave your Ps3's on all the time? I usually leave it on standby when not directly in front of it, but do you leave yours on when you go to bed and such? just wondering if that is good/bad for it opinnions as I would really love to do more folding.

 

[RandallA]

4688 as of 04/04/07 8:20AM PDT

We're moving up there!

 

[Foxbat]

4688 as of 04/04/07 8:20AM PDT

We're moving up there!

I should complete another WU around 3:00pm EDT, and another 1,400 points towards the team. (Gotta love that SMP beta... My Mac Pro takes about 21 hours to crank 'em out, 10,000,000 steps in each WU.)

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Interesting idea, but not at this time we are still having our strange server load problem. So I wouldnt do it until after that is fixed.

Yeah, the last thing we want to do is diminish server performance.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Tweaking Folding Performance

I was surprised this morning to see that even though my machine was on overnight and folding the whole time, it only got 1550 frames completed at 40 sec per frame. The machine is a 2.6Ghz P4. My home A64 3400 got more than that done in a fraction of the same time.

Is there a way to tweak it to do more, or does just just prove that with a A64 vs a P4 (single core), AMD kicked butt...

How much does RAM impact it? A64 has 3GB, P4 has 1GB.

 

[RandallA]

The P4s are a piece of crap. I have 4 P4s at work (2.0, 2.8, 3.0, 3.4) folding and look at my scores. I've scored some points because of my AMD X2 4600+ at home.

If anyone knows of a way to speed up these P4s, please let us know.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

The P4s are a piece of crap. I have 4 P4s at work (2.0, 2.6, 2.8, 3.0) folding and look at my scores. I've scored some points because of my AMD X2 4600+ at home.

If anyone knows of a way to speed up these P4s, please let us know.

Wow. Pretty surprising. Or maybe not...

 

[Cegarrett]

I should complete another WU around 3:00pm EDT, and another 1,400 points towards the team. (Gotta love that SMP beta... My Mac Pro takes about 21 hours to crank 'em out, 10,000,000 steps in each WU.)

MY 1st SMP Should Finish Up this afternoon It's running much faster since I stopped the GUI That I also had running on that machine.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

The P4 at work also has a dual boot with Fedora.

Would I get better performance at night if it was in Fedora instead of XP?

 

[Foxbat]

Got 4 kilobucks burning a hole in your wallet and want to fold proteins like there's no tomorrow? Here's one way to dispose of that disposable income. Fully loaded (16 GB RAM, 3 TB disk, ATI x1900 graphics) is just under $15K. Whoof.

Of course, for $15K, you could buy 21 PS3s and make a folding farm.

Edit: Of course, I forgot to point out the $15K price tag included two 30" Apple LCDs. Take those off and the price is closer to $10K... *cough*

 

[Foxbat]

Hey, cool! I see GoalieBob99 has joined in from Iraq! I wonder how he keeps his system cool while it folds?

Okay, the update from 5-Apr-2007 @ 11:00 UTC shows us up to 4,296th place!

5000th place: Team pcmapesFolded - 42,368 pts, 184 WU
4296th place: Team SatelliteGuys.US - 55,848 pts, 189 WU
4000th place: Team BaileyTransport - 62,327 pts, 369 WU
3000th place: Team Belarus - 99,768 pts, 1,176 WU
2000th place: Team Antique Fan Collectors Association - 181,245 pts, 3,831 WU
1000th place: Team Hamond's High School Folding@Home Team - 452,745 pts, 2,018 WU
_500th place: Team kruck - 1,134,271 pts, 8,604 WU​

Edit: I notice that the link to our team shows a different ranking (4368th) from the overall stats I downloaded from 4:00am PDT. I wonder if we're in a pack of current folders and we're all jockeying for position? That may slow down our progress unless we get some more beta testers on the team...

 

[Cegarrett]

I got just over 1100 Points for my 1st SMP Folding unit which finished last night. What's the most anyone here's received for one WU?

 

[Foxbat]

I got just over 1100 Points for my 1st SMP Folding unit which finished last night. What's the most anyone here's received for one WU?

I usually get 1440 points per WU for running the SMP unit on four cores. How many cores do you have?

 

[Cegarrett]

I usually get 1440 points per WU for running the SMP unit on four cores. How many cores do you have?

Just 2

 

[RandallA]

Foxbat,

How stable is the SMP version? I have a dual core at home but I'm afraid to install the SMP version. At work, I'm stuck with these single processors P4s that are not doing any high scoring.

 

[Foxbat]

Foxbat,

How stable is the SMP version? I have a dual core at home but I'm afraid to install the SMP version. At work, I'm stuck with these single processors P4s that are not doing any high scoring.

It seems to be working quite well. I have rebooted a few times (not related to f@h) since I started folding last Friday and the clients have always restarted. I have seen some crashes and resultant dumps in my console logs, but the clients have restarted without any input on my part. The GUI doesn't work (some sort of video blanking problem, it seems) but that's okay with me. Cegarrett might be able to share his experience with the SMP beta.

I also don't seem to get 100% CPU utilization (about 74-78% for all four cores) which made me think about trying to run another instance of the client. The only downside I've seen is the data transfer between WU assignments. It saturates my DSL connection for 3-4 minutes while it transfers the results up to Stanford. But that's not too bad as it only happens once a day or so.

The Mac just completed another unit, so SatelliteGuys.US should take another jump.

 

[Cegarrett]

My wife's Computer Sent results up this morning so I jumped up a little too.

I have a p4 3.0 and I thought it was a single core but task manager shows two independent CPUs so I'm running the SMP the SMP runs 4 seperate processes of the core program so my machine stays pegged out at 100% good thing I sprung for the full array of cooling fans in my full tower.
Because this was my first WU with the SMP I had installed and uninstalled the GUI and the Console version multiple times and intern rebooted ~8 times since the begning of the WU. I did have what I preceived as Core(program) lock-ups (CPU was running at below 20%) twice so i rebooted and restarted the program other than that and the automatic update the rebooted my computer monday night everything has worked good.

I also turned off my Screensaver and set powersaving to turn off my monitor after 10 minutes to keep from having any other "unneeded processing" taking away from the Folding. (I used the electric sheep screen saver).

Foxbat,
depending on how much you use your PC I'd probable start another instance of the SMP to use that ~96%(26%-22% per core) of cpu that you're not using now.

 

[gbjbany]

Cegarrett - Task manager shows 2 processors because of Hyperthreading it emulates 2 cores, however you only have a single core on the chip.

 

[Cegarrett]

Cegarrett - Task manager shows 2 processors because of Hyperthreading it emulates 2 cores, however you only have a single core on the chip.

thanks for the info I guess that's why It takes 2 days for each WU

It's working though

 

[Foxbat]

Reading the FAQ for the SMP beta, they say best results are on a 4-core machine for now (I don't think there were too many 8-core boxes out when they were developing the SMP version). They did say if you had a four-CPU with HT to leave the HT disabled as this would cause the extra processors to increase processing time.

Does anybody have an ATI x1900 graphics card? I'd be curious how that runs. According to the client status, the GPU provides over 60 GFLOPS (!) per card, easily beating out all other clients.

I may take a huge hit in the points. When I signed up, I saw that there were other "foxbats", so I used an "@" with SatelliteGuys to identify myself. That has caused an issue with the UnitInfo widget and the author suggested I lose the "@SatelliteGuys" from my donor name. I did that, but I lost 4 or 5 hours (~300-500 points) since the SMP client does not checkpoint.