Attack of the Tinkers! Hopefully, not a trend...

dasman · Post by **dasman** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 3:12 pm

Haven't seen one of these babies since my 1st or 2nd week folding -- now I've just picked up (3) 70ptr's (takes these systems from 500+ppw down to 190ppw)

Hopefully this isn't the start of a new trend?

Dave

PS Woohoo! Only 60hrs to go

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 4:41 pm

Only one of my 14 clients has picked up one of these, but it will take 76 hours in total and is worth a whopping 177 PPW, which is less than a third of what I get with Gromacs. In other words, I sure HOPE this is not the beginning of another plague.

David

roym@arm · Post by **roym@arm** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 4:59 pm

haysdb wrote:Only one of my 14 clients has picked up one of these, but it will take 76 hours in total and is worth a whopping 177 PPW, which is less than a third of what I get with Gromacs. In other words, I sure HOPE this is not the beginning of another plague.

David

We also noticed sTINKERS since Thursday night. We have quiet a few of them...

RoyM

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 5:08 pm

Quiet a few of them?

David

roym@arm · Post by **roym@arm** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 5:29 pm

haysdb wrote:Quiet a few of them?

David

Yeah! I did not check all the units but on Friday morning I counted at least 7 sTINKERS.

Roy

wumpus · Post by **wumpus** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 5:50 pm

I got all Tinkers this weekend, when starting the folding console client on 5 different machines to help us stay head of team OS-X.*

That was WITHOUT -advmethods which supposedly makes you way more likely to get gromacs, I guess.

* This clearly did not work

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 5:59 pm

wumpus wrote:I got all Tinkers this weekend, when starting the folding console client on 5 different machines to help us stay head of team OS-X.*

That was WITHOUT -advmethods which supposedly makes you way more likely to get gromacs, I guess.

* This clearly did not work

Yes, dispite protestations to the contrary, by some moderators at folding-community.org, -admethods is the closest thing to an "I want Gromacs" flag as exists. No other flag has any influence over what type of work units are assigned. Correction, there is the FAH/GAH preference in setup, but except for very special circumstances, that should always be set to FAH. It does not mean you wil get ONLY Gromacs, but in my experience you will get only the very rare Tinker when using this flag.

David

dasman · Post by **dasman** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 6:10 pm

Maybe the Tinkers is because they're running out of gromac work to assign? That would jive with the one server being out of work and only makes sense -- most CPU's do SSE these days and I'm sure most people become rapidly aware of the -advmethods. They probably don't have all that many non-SSE, non-advmethods people out there to give these things too...

Dave

wumpus · Post by **wumpus** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 8:12 pm

My lone P4 3.2 folder finally finished his tinker, and now with -advmethods set, I got a "double gromacs".

alcimedes · Post by **alcimedes** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 8:18 pm

stay ahead of who?

race to you the knights!

zuperdee · Post by **zuperdee** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 8:26 pm

Heh. I've been getting NOTHING but Gromacs lately!! Maybe they're giving ME all the Gromacs, leaving none for the rest of you... I'm not complaining--it gives me a chance to increase my rank in the team.

unregistered · Post by **unregistered** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 8:48 pm

I just finished up a tinker this afternoon. 1 out of 2 boxes. My slow box out produced my faster this weekend. My borg seems to do nothing but tinkers, reports in every 2 weeks. I'm going to have to upgrade that 1.1 gig athlon to speed him up.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 10:36 pm

Vijay Panda wrote:More Gro projects are on the way, soon.

http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?t=7516

David

unregistered · Post by **unregistered** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 11:56 pm

wumpus wrote:

My lone P4 3.2 folder finally finished his tinker, and now with -advmethods set, I got a "double gromacs".

You should be seeing double the point output now

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 12:03 am

unregistered wrote:wumpus wrote:

My lone P4 3.2 folder finally finished his tinker, and now with -advmethods set, I got a "double gromacs".
You should be seeing double the point output now

These DGromacs are not that wonderful in terms of the points. They aren't "bad" exactly, they just aren't great. Part of the problem seems to be that they aren't able to fully utilize the cpu. Bring up the Windows Task Manager and click on the Performance tab and you will see what I mean. The Pande Group is working on this.

David

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 9:44 am

I now have four sTinkers

. I try not to cry about this, because I do the work Stanford gives me, but I'm sure as hell not happy about getting them either, because I'm a "points whore," what can I say?

David

pdf27 · Post by **pdf27** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 10:04 am

Well, I just got my first Gromacs, so I'm not complaining...

unregistered · Post by **unregistered** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 12:10 pm

pdf27 wrote:

Well, I just got my first Gromacs, so I'm not complaining...

So did you figure out the tags -advmethods -forcesse

If you have you will now start making about double the score (ppw).

If not post back with the type of client you are running (gui, no-nonsense console) and type CPU you have. OPTIMIZE OPTIMIZE

pdf27 · Post by **pdf27** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 2:01 pm

Yeah - someone posted a comprehensible explanation for how to do it this afternoon. I'm running the Linux console version, so instead of typing FAH4Console-Linux.exe, I typed FAH4Console-Linux.exe -advmethods -forceasm to start it. Seems to work perfectly without being too complicated.
From around 200 hours/WU, my timing has dropped to around 17 hours/WU. Unless this is worth less than 6 points/WU, my scoring should improve rather a lot.

Edit: I probably ought to mention I'm running a P3-733 under Mandrake 9.2

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 7:51 pm

pdf27, you gotta create an 'alias' for that so you don't have to remember to type all that in each time.

Better yet, get it running as a 'service' with finstall so you don't ever have to worry about starting it manually.

David

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:53 pm

Looks like nearly everyone is taking a 10% to 30% beating from the "Tinker Storm". TRC-13, ARM, myself, Zyzzyx, Dukla2000, WarpedPlatter, Wrah, and on down the list.

David

mas92264 · Post by **mas92264** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 9:18 pm

Yep. Half of my folders at me casa are hacking their way thru Tinkers.

M

pdf27 · Post by **pdf27** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 1:35 am

haysdb wrote:pdf27, you gotta create an 'alias' for that so you don't have to remember to type all that in each time.

I don't anyway - I leave the box up when I shut down in the evening, and then just hit the up arrow then enter every morning to start it. About a nanosecond's worth of work

haysdb wrote: Better yet, get it running as a 'service' with finstall so you don't ever have to worry about starting it manually.

How do I get that to work under Linux? Several people have tried to explain, but I always got very rapidly lost. If you can explain it in words of no more than one syllable I might have a chance!

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 1:59 am

pdf27 wrote:
haysdb wrote: Better yet, get it running as a 'service' with finstall so you don't ever have to worry about starting it manually.
How do I get that to work under Linux? Several people have tried to explain, but I always got very rapidly lost. If you can explain it in words of no more than one syllable I might have a chance!

finstall is written for Linux, so pretty much all you have to do is download it and run it. It will make the necessary additions to the startup scripts. It has been a few months since I used it, but I remember it being relatively idiot proof.

It has gone through about a hundred revisions, so by now has got to be pretty robust.

Here is the link to the script, with instructions right at the top for how to run it.

finstall - FAH ("Folding At Home") client installation script

The following link goes to a thread at folding-community.org with some chit-chat about it.

finstall - FAH installer for Linux,Free/OpenBSD,MacOSX,Wine

zuperdee · Post by **zuperdee** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 2:41 am

Perhaps the Stanford folks are now giving the fastest folders the Tinkers, and the slower ones Gromacs? That would make perfect sense--after all, Tinkers MUST be done at some point, and if they cannot be done as efficiently as Gromacs, why not give them to the fastest folders?

CharlieChan · Post by **CharlieChan** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 3:02 am

pdf27 wrote: How do I get that to work under Linux? Several people have tried to explain, but I always got very rapidly lost. If you can explain it in words of no more than one syllable I might have a chance!

Log in as whoever you are.
Download http://www.vendomar.ee/%7Eivo/finstall
type chmod +x finstall
type ./finstall
enter no
enter yes
enter yes
enter [your folding name]
enter 31574
[keep on hitting enter till end]
type vi foldingathome/fah_config
press insert
in between the quotes enter -forcesse -advmethods
press escape
press :
press q
press enter
type su
type cd foldingathome
type ./installService
type ./folding start
type exit

I may have missed a step

pdf27 · Post by **pdf27** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 3:55 am

CharlieChan wrote: I may have missed a step

THANKS!!!!!

Minor problems using Vi (I'm an emacs person

), but otherwise it worked perfectly. I've probably lost 10 hours worth of CPU time from what I was previously running, but that's insignificant.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 10:11 am

Excellent! Thanks CharlieChan, who once again comes to the rescue of a poor floundering Linux user

. I am I card-carrying member of this group myself

. I have stolen your step-by-step lock-stock-and-barrel and added it to the "useful links" post I am building. The "installing FAH as a service" section of that has already grown so large as to need it's own thread, but it least it's SOMEWHERE for now. We have all of this knowledge, but no centralized place for the real gems of wisdom.

My Linux skills are so weak that I use gedit rather than vi. It's actually pretty nice for short scripts. I have a "script" that opens all of my FAH configuration files, from dchpd.conf, hosts, exports, startfah, and so on, giving each one a tab across the top of the gedit window. This is handy because I can never remember what's where, so I can just click through the tabs until I find what I'm looking for.

David

dasman · Post by **dasman** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 12:17 pm

Imagine that I used to think DOS was overly complicated -- god forbid I ever have to deal with linux...

Dave

unregistered · Post by **unregistered** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 1:34 pm

I got 2 ot of 2 CPU's working on tinkers. One is a 40 frame tinker(new to me), got one yesterday too. Takes 11 - 12 min per frame. Much less consuming that the 400 frame version.