Interesting Races and Folders-on-the-Move

dasman · Post by **dasman** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 11:40 am

Congrats dasman! #100 on the charts! Page 1.

539 points yesterday!

Thank you, thank you... I'd like to thank the academy of silent computing, without which this honor would not be possible

Way to go everyone else -- keep the knights in our sights!

Dave

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 11:58 am

Ain't it humbling wgragg, to be putting up 6K PPW and be OVERTAKEN?

For myself, I will be happy when you get the heck past me so I don't have to keep looking at your lights in my rear-view mirror.

The is WAY OT, but I have a story. I leave it to the reader to decide which parts of this story are true and which are "poetic license." I was driving along a freshly paved multi-lane highway just outside of Lisbon Portugal in a U.S. spec BMW 325 coupe. It was a gorgeous sunny afternoon, traffic was light, and my fellow Portuguese drivers were as alert and courteous as ever in yielding the left lane. Even though I was cruising at 110, I noticed another 3-series overtaking. I gradually increased speed to match his, but ran up against the rev limiter and was obliged to pull aside and let the 330d go by.

wgragg is going to be that 330d. ARM Systems is going to be the Ferrari I met on the A5 one night!

David

wgragg · Post by **wgragg** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 12:42 pm

haysdb wrote:Ain't it humbling wgragg, to be putting up 6K PPW and be OVERTAKEN? For myself, I will be happy when you get the heck past me so I don't have to keep looking at your lights in my rear-view mirror.

Gee David, I tried breaking your farm once. I mean, what else can I do?

I honestly have dreamed I could be in charge of a company that had a whole multitude of computers and I could tell my IT manager that every machine WILL run F@H and all the points go to SPCR......yeah right!

I really envy ARM for that one!

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 1:25 pm

Nice one Dasman, Way to Go.

Even if you did bump me down and slightly further away from the 100 spot that is teasingly...er WAS teasingly close

........

I Salute You.

Long may your rise continue and be blessed with all you so richly deserve.

.... (And SPCR get your points

)

Pete

Power to one and all (...Except.... Them

)

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 2:09 am

papasmurf is up 25 places, to #206

vestrus is up 9 places to #198

NullObject is up 15 places to #159

Never are the gains more heady than when you are close to the bottom.

wragg continues his inexorable climb to the top ranks, now at #25

Column busting uber folder ARM Systems slipped past five stallwart white folders today to reach #55.

These two yokels are going to make cracking the top 10 rather more difficult!

TheScarf · Post by **TheScarf** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 2:21 am

I, for one, am getting very worried by dasman's quick climb up the rankings.....not many days left 'til you pass me, you little folding terror, you!!

NullObject · Post by **NullObject** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 9:19 am

haysdb wrote:NullObject is up 15 places to #159

Never are the gains more heady than when you are close to the bottom.

I thought I was going to get dizzy from my ascent...until I looked up and was reminded that I've only taken a few steps. Its kind of like passing hundreds of runners at the beginning of a race only to discover that there are still thousands ahead of you...and most of them will stay ahead of you.

Was hoping to make my way into yellow territory today but I got home last night and discovered that my most productive folder, a 2.8c, couldn't get a connection. Troubleshooting while drunk turned out to be problematic

. Hopefully I'll have it back to folding tonight.

I hope to make it to page 1 before the end of the month.

roym@arm · Post by **roym@arm** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 7:01 pm

haysdb wrote:Of course there is little point in even mentioning ARM Systems, undoubtedly our "worst kept secret," but you know, it is pretty cool to see RED in amongst all that white and gray. The next green is 21 places down and 10 places up. At 7K PPW, a number which will only increase, they won't be down at #58 for long. They will be Top 50 in two days, Top 30 in two weeks, Top 20 within a month.

It goes without saying that this is very good for the TEAM. Go Stevo, and all the good people at ARM.

I'm sure I speak for STEVO in saying this is a lot of fun

but it has been awefully frustrating in the last 4 days

. We got hit with a lull that lasted more than 24 hours when we could'nt get any jobs doled down to our folders. Then, when we finally got them, they were sTINKERS.....now our production looks like half of what we could be capable of....

Oh well...we all just have to keep on folding...

Roy

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Wed Feb 11, 2004 7:46 pm

You're just being "tested" Roy. It seems that everyone suffers some kind of "glitch" when they start folding, it's just that you guys ramped up so fast that the glitch effected a lot more machines than it would for most people.

What's the prognosis for those 20 machines that got Tinkers? Are they picking up Gromacs as they finish them? How many are still working on those they got last weekend?

David

Stevo@ARM · Post by **Stevo@ARM** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 12:32 am

haysdb wrote: What's the prognosis for those 20 machines that got Tinkers? Are they picking up Gromacs as they finish them? How many are still working on those they got last weekend?

David

I may have missed a few, but here is a quick snapshot of our current Folding Muscle for team SPCR:

A Quad XEON 4x1.80 HT 2MB Cache, 2 single 1.80HT XEONs, a Dual 2.80HT XEON, a Centrino 1.60 Pentium M, a Dual AthlonMP 1500+, an Athlon 2600+, A P4 2.26, two Athlon 1700+, a Dual P3 650, A Dual P3 450, and a BUNCH of other 500 - 1GHz level P3's and 1 or 2 odd Celeron 450-500's ... (and I am sure I am forgetting a few here and there)

Most of them have completed their first round of sTinkers from last Friday night. And, this should be news for celebration, but actually almost every client picked up another sTinker on it's next WU assignment. Out of about 40+ active folding clients (37+ with SSE or 3DNOW) that I can remember at this moment, 30 of them are crunching on sTinkers right now.

Do we have enough horsepower in these systems to get Gro's? Maybe you can explain to me what Vijay means when he talks about a performance rating of '0' or '.8' or '.9' ? I am not sure how this number is derived either. I would have figured I would get more Gro's with the above systems though.

Maybe I installed the clients wrong?

For the CLI clients I am using: -local -service -forceasm -forceSSE -advmethods

For the GUI clients: -forceasm -forceSSE -advmethods

One thing I did do was setup the multiple thread CLI clients the way I wanted them with separate sub-directories for each thread, (you know for CPU's 1 - 8 on the Quad XEON HT and 1 -4 on the Dual XEON HT's) and then copied these directories (minus the work folders) to each of the various machines. I then put shortcuts into the startup folders and let them rip. I'm not running them as a service just yet cause I want to keep an eye on them while we get familiar with how this all works.

So, any of you more experienced folders have any idea how I can get these systems to be more productive for the team? Cause I'm stumped at the moment...

Stevo
-------------------------
Help! This Tinker-sand is sucking me under, somebody throw me a rope

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 12:48 am

Stevo,

Look in the log for a line like this:

[22:41:28] Unit 5 finished with 99 percent of time to deadline remaining.
[22:41:28] Updated performance fraction: 0.979764

OK, thats TWO lines, just bare with me.

If you don't see a line like that, I can think of a few reasons:

It may not display without the command line switch -verbosity 9
It may (probably does) only display following completion of a Gromacs

That's just a couple and not a few, but I did have a third one in mind, which I forgot before I got to bullet number 3.

The first of the two lines above provides the clue as to what the Performance Fraction means - it's calculated based on the percentage of the deadline remaining at the completion of the work unit. It's based not just on raw cpu performance, but on how many hours that cpu runs, and what percentage of the cpu is available to F@H.

There is no question that the bulk of your machines should be well above the .8 mark, so it's a mystery why you are getting all those Tinkers. Your command line arguments look fine, although I would add the aformentioned -verbosity 9, just to make sure that everything that can be logged IS logged.

-service is only necessary when a client is run as a service. If you run the CLI client from a shortcut, it's not necessary, although it's possible it does no harm either.

I don't think it's possible to install the clients wrong. The client is just one .exe, and it will create whatever other files it needs.

To clarify, on the quad xeon system, you have 8 F@H directories, and the config file in each one has a unique machine id, right? Directories 1-8 and machine id's 1-8?

You definitely added back -advmethods?

I'm scratchin' my head, but nothing else is coming to the surface.

David

Stevo@ARM · Post by **Stevo@ARM** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 1:12 am

Should we move this to another thread David?

I don't want to bring down the mood of this one, which is usually full of very good news and encouragement for team members on the move from fellow team members (and a little good natured taunting back and forth

), with this sort of trouble-shooting.

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 1:42 am

haysdb wrote:To clarify, on the quad xeon system, you have 8 F@H directories, and the config file in each one has a unique machine id, right? Directories 1-8 and machine id's 1-8?

Just wanted to put some extra emphasis on this.

If you don't have the machine ids right your results won't get counted.

Stevo@ARM · Post by **Stevo@ARM** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 2:07 am

Wrah wrote:
haysdb wrote:To clarify, on the quad xeon system, you have 8 F@H directories, and the config file in each one has a unique machine id, right? Directories 1-8 and machine id's 1-8?
Just wanted to put some extra emphasis on this. If you don't have the machine ids right your results won't get counted.

Check

I set up each client with a machine ID from 1 to 8 for each version of the client in the cfg file in their own separate sub-directories. But I'm glad you guys are going over the details, in case I missed something.

Stevo

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Thu Feb 12, 2004 2:11 am

Stevo@ARM wrote:Should we move this to another thread David?

That's a thoughtful suggestion. I got cornfused about which thread I was in.

David

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Fri Feb 13, 2004 1:15 pm

ARM Systems is 50!

wgragg · Post by **wgragg** » Fri Feb 13, 2004 1:19 pm

haysdb wrote:ARM Systems is 50!

Happy Birthday!

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Fri Feb 13, 2004 2:55 pm

Stevo@ARM · Post by **Stevo@ARM** » Sat Feb 14, 2004 12:50 am

wgragg wrote:
haysdb wrote:ARM Systems is 50!
Happy Birthday!

Wrah wrote:

aaawe shucks

you guys are swell

Thanks for your team spirit and support, I must say we are havin' fun, makin' friends, and enjoying racing against the other teams, I never knew an online community could be so fun.

Stevo
------------------
Folding a hankie right now *sniff*

ColdFlame · Post by **ColdFlame** » Sat Feb 14, 2004 1:46 am

Even though you all ignore my personal race with Semm, he now seems to be reasonably ahead of me to call this battle over (gj Semm

). I still have another 2000+ up my sleeve (need a case to get it running, another $25). Then we'll see

So far I'm going to return the gauntlet to Buddabing

I'm evil!!!

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Sat Feb 14, 2004 2:20 am

Actually ColdFlame, I just took a look at your race with Semm a couple of days ago, but he had creeped far enough ahead that it didn't make the front page.

David

ColdFlame · Post by **ColdFlame** » Sat Feb 14, 2004 2:57 pm

I've overclocked my Duron from 2.0 to 2.1 and my Celeron from 2.7 to 2.8. Seems silly but this is the best I can do at the moment. Both run stable. Celeron is my domain controller, mail server and file server however

I'll set that 2000+ machine soon that might help me close on Semm

TheScarf · Post by **TheScarf** » Sun Feb 15, 2004 1:11 am

I must admit, beyonder is one stubborn folder!! No sooner do I get within passing distance, a 60 pointer seems to be added to that score!! Just o/c'ed one of the bartons in an effort to put this 'little' tussle behind me.....You out there beyonder???

dave (folding as the_crate)

CoolGav · Post by **CoolGav** » Sun Feb 15, 2004 6:25 am

Well, I seem to be cathching up ColdFlame slowly, even although Semm is getting away from both of us. Once I get to 16k5 points I reckon the gap in actual positions is going to close right up.

I have resurected my XP2400+ whos hard drive was being uncooperative and has been replaced (my third SP1614N - that's a lot of space!). Today I have also managed to sucessfully swap out my Duron 800 for a 1.6. Only problem is that it's on my old KT133 board (I NEED its ISA slot

), which means its only at 1.2GHz for now... Still, those few more points can only help

ColdFlame · Post by **ColdFlame** » Sun Feb 15, 2004 1:42 pm

Yea I guess you might catch me CoolGav but I'll get that 2000+ working in a few weeks and then we'll see

Gav! Gav!

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:22 am

Our most enthousiastic folder, David himself, has finally reached the much desired status of red.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:47 am

wgragg · Post by **wgragg** » Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:51 am

Now David, how will I ever catch up to you if you do that?

Seriously, congratulations!

Wendell

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Feb 16, 2004 8:26 am

wgragg wrote:Now David, how will I ever catch up to you if you do that?

Oh, I don't think that's going to be a problem. I'll have to find a thousand points a week from somewhere to hold you off indefinitely, and even that assumes you don't increase your production even more. My only hope is to slow you down enough that I can reach the top 10 before you and ARM Systems boot me out.

I must admit though, it is a goal of mine to stay ahead of you

David

mas92264 · Post by **mas92264** » Mon Feb 16, 2004 10:16 am

Hays, not even a top 1,000 worldwide folder (like me!) has struggled to stay red (like me!) and struggled to make it to the top 10, where I am firmly entrenched (for now!)

Great performance, Hays. Come on up.

M