Join the SatelliteGuys Folding@Home Team!

[Foxbat]

If you want to try something different, there are two new Folding clients to try. There is a new Android client that utilizes the GPU(s) on your phone to Fold while recharging your phone. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonymobile.androidapp.gridcomputing

The larger audience is served by a client that runs in a tab in your Chrome browser. If you can run Chrome, you can Fold. https://folding.stanford.edu/home/f...ing-google-portable-native-client-technology/

 

[EatMyVolts]

Oh how I hate getting core 15 after core 15 after core 15 Sorta makes me question getting the fancy graphics card.

 

[KE4EST]

Yep stuck on a string of them right now, I would have made a personal record today, but they decided I needed core 15's...Grrrrr

 

[Foxbat]

I'm not home right now to check on my Ubuntu nVIDIA GPUs, maybe this is a Windows and/or ATI thing? I seem to be chugging along at ~250K PPD.

 

[Foxbat]

If you want to try something different, there are two new Folding clients to try.
...
The larger audience is served by a client that runs in a tab in your Chrome browser. If you can run Chrome, you can Fold. https://folding.stanford.edu/home/f...ing-google-portable-native-client-technology/

Putting my money where my mouth is (what the heck is that supposed to mean, anyway???!?) I launched Chrome pointing at the NaCl page with my MacBook Air with the 1.7 Ghz Core i5.

It doesn't take long to complete a WU and you can enter your SatelliteGuys.US Team info as well, so you get credit! Give it a shot!

 

[KE4EST]

Just fired this up to try it out.

 

[KE4EST]

Your right it don't take long to get through a WU.

 

[Foxbat]

According to Vijay's blog, they are crediting the NaCl WUs at 125 Points. I'm Folding a few on my iMac to see how long it takes and each WU finishes in 7-9 minutes. That works out to approximately 22,000 Points per Day, not too shabby. However, I think most people will still do better if they install the normal FAH Client on their machine.

This would be good for me to use on the machines I don't want the full-blown package, like my notebook. My MacBook Air's CPU fans do spin up while the NaCl page is up!

 

[KE4EST]

Yep that is exactly what I came up with. I ran a couple and did some calculations and came up with 125 per WU. It is faster, my CPU is getting 12-13K a day on the normal FAH Client.
Thinking about running it a day or two and see what happens. Also gonna do temperature comparisons and CPU usage.

 

[Foxbat]

I tried it out on the Mac Mini that my son uses for classwork and while it seemed to be working pretty fast, the extra heat generated made its way around the corner to where the thermostat is located. Our thermostat is set up to save energy during the sleep and away times so when the air conditioner kicked in at 2am I figured I better change from 100% to 60% Folding on the Mini.

However, it froze up at some time during the night, so I don't know how effective it would be in the long run. I don't know if there are any logs to show how much work it did before it stopped Folding.

I see I'm an update way from being in the top 2,000 individual Folders. I'd have to search through this thread to see the first time that happened.

 

[Foxbat]

Just an FYI if you're checking in on your stats and seeing Nada: Stanford reports FAH Server Issues. Probably won't be fixed until Monday, but we should still be getting WUs even though we can't see the results.

 

[KE4EST]

Yes, so far WU's are still coming in and being uploaded ok.

 

[Scorpion.sting]

Glad to see the team is doing well. We should be climbing up the chart to the top 100 teams (again) if we continue at our current pace.

 

[KE4EST]

I would climb faster if they would ever get done with these Core 0x15's.

 

[Foxbat]

It looks like Stanford has got the server back online. Nothing like a massive jolt in the 24 hr Points reported to make you look good...

 

[Foxbat]

Since I was stuck at work this weekend waiting to restore a 1.8 TB backup from the network (even at 1 Gbps it is going to take 4-5 hours at best!) I played around with that one dual hex-core Xeon server and Ubuntu from a USB 3.0 thumb drive. The results were not what I expected. Even though the FAH Client saw the 24 cores, the estimated PPD was pathetic, about 3,000. It's almost like have too many cores got bogged down in the overhead of interprocess communications between the threads.

Frankly, it was doing better running the Chrome NaCl client, even though it only utilized half the available CPU cores. Turns out there's a BIOS setting for the server that lets software use the NUMA configuration to determine which CPU is best fir to run in. If I switched it to report a "flat" NUMA landscape of 24 available cores, I'm sure the performance would have jumped. Not too worried about it since the servers should be heading to the software developers soon.

The disappointing result with the Ubuntu install makes me wonder about the "optimum" core count for a Folding rig. I was looking at MacOfAllTrades.com and their used Mac Pro prices. They have my Mac Pro 1,1 (late 2006) with dual 2.66 GHz Xeon 5120 CPUs for $249. It's tempting from the standpoint that I already have one so I know how it will perform (around 5-6,000 PPD for the CPU) and even though it can't fully support a modern PCIe 3.0 card with its v1.1 bus, I still manage ~170,000 PPD from my GTX 960 card.

But I'm slightly greedy, so I see for $649 I can get a newer Mac Pro (Early 2008) with dual Quad core Xeon E5472 running at 3.0 GHz. $50 more gets you the same year but 3.2 GHz Xeon E5482 "Harpertown" CPUs instead. But, now I wonder what could I get from HP or Dell for the same or less?

NewEgg and Amazon have refurbished and off-lease workstations available for $350-$699 that offer lots more, performance-wise, than the Mac Pros. I found one HP Z600 workstation with dual hex-core Xeons, but nothing on the inside is standard. Then I start thinking about building a specialized Folding Rig, but the costs jump up again.

So I sit here and bide my time and wait for a deal to appear while my two Linux boxes Fold like crazy. Oh, and if you made it all the way to the end here, my two Maxwell cards are Folding using the FahCore_17. I saw a post on the Folding Forum that FahCore_18 was going to be rolling out to the unwashed masses for Linux GPUs that should help those with the newest nVIDIA Maxwell-family chips see better performance.

 

[KE4EST]

Congratulations to Foxbat for reaching 50,000,000 Points!!

 

[jrp]

50 mil?! Impressive.

 

[Foxbat]

Thank you, thank you! And I got my 25-year watch from work yesterday, too! Quite the week for milestones!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I don't know my my stats are going up and down so much. The machines are folding 24/7. The most powerful machine is also my work machine. I use it to do my work, but when I go home at night I shut everything down and only F@H is running. Yet when I look at my stats it does not look this way.