SPCR Folds Team Blog

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sun Jul 27, 2008 4:29 pm

Not just hot weather, but problems with thunderstorms. I went home to find my not-local folder off, and all the clocks blinking.

That folder, by the way, is in the hottest room in the house. No heat problems though. No case, just the mobo sitting my desk with the CPU fan and an 80mm NMB blowing on the northbridge.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Jul 29, 2008 7:02 pm

Yeesh, on the team user list I may pass 2 people in the near furture, and after that I will have to earn another 300,000 points before I pass the one after that.

CoolGav · Post by **CoolGav** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 6:34 am

aristide1 wrote:Yeesh, on the team user list I may pass 2 people in the near furture, and after that I will have to earn another 300,000 points before I pass the one after that.

I'll be passing you by the end of next year! (should the same points difference continue...)

For now I'm #32 for the #32 team!

kittle · Post by **kittle** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:26 pm

My folding has stalled out due to hot weather.
but my main rig is back up and I got the GPU client running last nite. That should make a little difference.

I'll be happy when i can get to page #1

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:55 pm

CoolGav wrote:
aristide1 wrote:Yeesh, on the team user list I may pass 2 people in the near furture, and after that I will have to earn another 300,000 points before I pass the one after that.
I'll be passing you by the end of next year! (should the same points difference continue...) For now I'm #32 for the #32 team!

This is not an ego trip for me. I would prefer you pass me after I buy a quad or two, and I would pat you on the back when you do so.

Frankly I can't believe I've gotten this far.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 6:05 pm

kittle wrote:...I'll be happy when i can get to page #1

You're #114, you're moving right along. We'll stay up late and wait for you. And we'll leave the light on too.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:01 pm

Ugh, of all the reasons to lose points having a WU hang on shut down irks me the most.

Then I can't start because it expired, so I download, but it's all different. And I found and downloaded the SMP version for Windows, which now requires the -SMP switch, but installation is painless. I downloaded it and I started it. That's it.

Which means my Ubuntu box is going to have the same situation, time for a new version.

kittle · Post by **kittle** » Tue Aug 05, 2008 2:21 pm

aristide1 wrote:
kittle wrote:...I'll be happy when i can get to page #1
You're #114, you're moving right along. We'll stay up late and wait for you. And we'll leave the light on too.

Heh thanks

Im still trying to get the GPU client and the "new" smp client to play well together. I have to use the older version of their beta because the new one doesnt support 64-bit windows.

Once the weather cools down, i can fire up my older server - that will help as well.

spookmineer · Post by **spookmineer** » Tue Aug 05, 2008 3:28 pm

kittle wrote:Im still trying to get the GPU client and the "new" smp client to play well together. I have to use the older version of their beta because the new one doesnt support 64-bit windows.

As I read when the new GPU client was just released, it is not recommended to run the GPU client together with an smp client, as the GPU client will use a considerable amount of CPU power (here it's at about 52%).

Hopefully (and hinted at by Stanford) a newer GPU client won't use as much CPU power.

Anyway, if you get both of them working, great

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 4:58 pm

So is anyone GPU2-ing here?

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:23 pm

aristide1 wrote:So is anyone GPU2-ing here?

the new client? I'm using it, in conjunction with the V6 single core client.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:49 pm

How many PPD is it worth on your PC Ryboto?

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 6:04 am

aristide1 wrote:How many PPD is it worth on your PC Ryboto?

it depends, last week, my combined PPD was breaching 1600 points(GPU2+V6), with the V6 accounting for around 150ppd. This week it's a lot lower, around ~500ppd lower, not sure what the deal is.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:33 pm

What GPU are you using?

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:34 pm

aristide1 wrote:What GPU are you using?

it's an HD3870 at stock speeds.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 4:33 pm

Do you still do CPU folding as well?

Do PCI-E 2.0 cards work in 1.0 slots? I guess I should check Wiki.

Added - With minor video card exceptions (what other kind is there with PCI-E X16?) 1.0 and 2.0 are upwards and downwards compatible.

We'll see as I order a video card. Due to unfortunate circumstances I need to buy my first copy of XP (OEM) so a hardware purchase is required, and this one is as good as any.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 6:23 pm

OW!

I've gone through my fair share of WU's that stall at very end recently. I lose time but it's not a huge problem. I'd be more upset if I was away 3 or 4 days and it my pc would be hung all that time but this.....

The last WU hung. I let it go 1 hour, it didn't budge so I closed it and opened it again. Then I got a popup window from FAH!, a first for me, saying that there was a severe error, no code or info, and that it was closing down. About as informative as a Microsoft message. I did this 4 times and then I tried deleting all the files and folders in the work folder. The so called completed WU files, their size was zero. Huh? FAH was shut down, but no matter, I could not delete most files having to do with the latest WU. I ended up reinstalling in a new folder, version 6.22.

I lost the WU and another 4-5 hours on top of that. I hate when Stanford released new programs. <Insert raspberry here>

kittle · Post by **kittle** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:11 pm

spookmineer wrote:
kittle wrote:Im still trying to get the GPU client and the "new" smp client to play well together. I have to use the older version of their beta because the new one doesnt support 64-bit windows.
As I read when the new GPU client was just released, it is not recommended to run the GPU client together with an smp client, as the GPU client will use a considerable amount of CPU power (here it's at about 52%).

Hopefully (and hinted at by Stanford) a newer GPU client won't use as much CPU power.

Anyway, if you get both of them working, great

they sortof work together.
I have a 4 core system (2x dual core Opteron). so its just a matter of setting the SMP client to only use 75-80% cpu and let the gpu client have the rest.

im still fumbling for the proper balance of settings. Currently im running GPU only so I can see how many PPD and WU / D it will process.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:25 pm

Perhaps a dual core, no SMP, and 2 video cards would be ideal.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Aug 09, 2008 6:27 pm

As Stanford goes through a bunch of servers problems my Vista folder has been doing one or more of the following:

1. Getting invalid acknowledgements.
2. Attempting to transmit completed WUs and ruining the Net connection.
3. Having WUs time out.

Doesn't seem to matter what server its connected to, its folding and the results are ending up in the garbage can.

Seems summer may be a good time to not fold, or perhaps the first month after a new version. Seems like a huge waste of resources.

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:39 am

well, I think we're boned,
Folding farm for Overclock.net. If we had just one user like that, I don't think we'd be dropping rank this fast.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 7:59 pm

You mean the guy with the 51 NVidia cards? If he's was smart enough to get the 8800GS at 59 watts each that's 3 Kilowatts each hour, or about 350+ dollars a month to fold. And if it's 8800GTS G92 cards it TWICE that.

Holy you-know-what.

Of course if his electric bill goes any higher the police may think he's growing pot at home in the attic or basement.

The good news is that as a team we're averaging almost 1000 PPD, which is a record for us, especially with only 105 active folders, which is like a record low.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 9:04 am

Hiya,

Can someone email me the FahCore_79.exe file for Windows, please? For some reason, I have not been able to download it for months...

Or, has anybody had any luck getting either of the new Windows SMP clients to work? I can install them, and they start to run, and then almost immediately they have a fatal error. This is on two different machines with WinXP Pro (32bit and 64bit).

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 8:01 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hiya,

Can someone email me the FahCore_79.exe file for Windows, please? For some reason, I have not been able to download it for months...

Or, has anybody had any luck getting either of the new Windows SMP clients to work? I can install them, and they start to run, and then almost immediately they have a fatal error. This is on two different machines with WinXP Pro (32bit and 64bit).

I had a similar issue, the only way i fixed it was by installing the SMP client to a new directory, and reconfiguring it.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 12:29 am

Can anyone explain to me why I've got four FahCore processes running on a dual-core machine? As far as I can tell, the install.bat file only ran two test cases of mpiexec... but FAH seems to want to run four...

EDIT - Actually... here's another quirk for you. I've installed the SMP client as it should be, and I'm trying to get things working with srvany so the client runs as a service in the background. However, it's not picking up on my AppDirectory parameter in the registry key for the service.

AppDirectory = REG_SZ "C:\Program Files (x86)\Folding@Home SMP"

If I start the service while allowing it to interact with the desktop (i.e. show the command window) it tells me that the launch directory is C:\WINDOWS\System32....

floffe · Post by **floffe** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 3:57 am

Nick Geraedts wrote:Can anyone explain to me why I've got four FahCore processes running on a dual-core machine? As far as I can tell, the install.bat file only ran two test cases of mpiexec... but FAH seems to want to run four...

That seems normal to, me at least my classic client runs four processes (only one of which actually take CPU time) without SMP (this is on Linux).

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 4:24 am

floffe wrote:That seems normal to, me at least my classic client runs four processes (only one of which actually take CPU time) without SMP (this is on Linux).

I'm currently showing four FahCore_a1.exe processes, each trying to hog as much CPU power as possible... from what I can tell, it really shouldn't be doing this, unless Stanford has figured out a good reason for putting more threads than cores on a particular machine.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 12:49 pm

Nick Geraedts - SMP is designed for 4 cores but runs fine on 2 cores. no worries here.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 12:55 pm

Ok, good to know. Any thoughts on the service installation?

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 2:02 pm

You should be find, just follow the directions precisely and it should run.

HEY! SMP no longer runs under Win 2000 Pro?