I have to say running costs factor into my decisions about folding.

The latest XP CUDA drivers allowed me to start another SMP session. I also have an x2 with integrated video that only runs SMP. I'm shutting down that latter setup so overall I am doing the same amount. The last GPU I added, I had a lot of reservations about. It upped my electrical usage by almost 90 watt hours. That's not huge it's just on top of everything else.

There will be no new GPUs here until the 40nm series is out. If I have to wait a year well then that's what I will do. At that time will those GPUs be additions or replacements to what I have now? That remains to be seen.

My Core 2 Duo is 65nm. I would replace it with a 45nm right now where it not for the fact that my version of Vista is OEM, and will only work with this currented registered combo or board and CPU. Yes I could have it reactivated blah blah blah, but I won't go through all that.

To an extent, they are. I usually purchase based on need (I fold on our family computer, also my audio workstation), so general usage is my first priority. Next comes noise (mitigated somewhat by my H2o cooling hobby). After that it's cost/ efficiency.

For instance, I know my current upgrade will have to last a good 3-4 years, so when I made my purchasing decisions I decided to get a q9550 and a GTX280 as well as a 8800GTS 512 rather than something either more efficient (9600GTO) or more powerful (i7, GTX985) because I need both longevity and reasonable short-term cost. I also know what we'll be using it for (audio recording/ editing, composition, gaming) for the next 3-4 years, so it had to be reasonably powerful.

The 8800GTS 512 was driven by two things:

1. Folding-- I want to be able to do a lot of constant calculation regardless of what the machine is being used for
2. PhysX

The Q9550 was driven by 3 things:

1. i7 is too much of an up-front monetary commitment
2. we need a quad
3. relative efficiency compared to 65nm processors

In short, my answer is a resounding "yes, but..."

Feels kinda pointless to leave it running when you guys get more than 10 times the wu's with just one gaming card to my cpu only wu's...while I use twice the wattage and get so few points.

That and my dual core is to important to mess around with unstable beta smp clients.

if it was safe/simple to run a multi core and/or if we got points based on watts used crunching numbers, not just core threads i would probably fold a lot more.

I'm only folding because I have a quad core running as a server... and most of the time it's idle. So I have one VM running with two cores of SMP on it - that way I'm averaging ~50% CPU utilisation, and keeping the heat and power consumption down. After a few months I'm only at 48 work units complete... for me it's about donating idle CPU, not spending money on cards to "compete" on the points ladder.

So yeah - costs are an issue, otherwise I would throw money at a high end graphics card and overclock the Q9550. As it is, I tick along with my IGU and stock 2.83GHz, and I don't chew through the electricity.

xan_user, I can appreciate your position. I think people who have donated many WUs, small ones, should be noted. On the other hand the recent batch of GPUs and their points has led a lot more people to fold. We see teams passing us almost daily now. Is Stanford using human response to get more from them? Yes, but in a good way. If some want to fold for the points then so be it. It's not like they can cash them in, go buy something, or win a Nobel Peace Prize.

A lot of high point folders have left here, I would say xan_user is right those people folded for the points and could not stick around with a team losing ground on the ladder. We were team 20 a while back, and we did less then 100K per day. Today we do about 40% better with the same amount of people folding. If better prosperity in Russia means more Russian folders, why should that bother me? Tons more from what I see. And in other really poor Easter Europe countries as well. That's all good.

My second PC came about simply because I had so many leftover parts from upgrades a second PC required only a few more. Curiousity got the best of me, I even bought a motherboard "open box" from the Egg, 2 X16 slots for AMD $50. It worked it was rather funny. I had a computer forensics class that required me to download and test tools. Many tools didn't work under Vista, so pc 2 became my XP box, the guinea pig that folded on the side.

There are other reasons to fold. Lately a friend of my parents has become forgetful and is imaging events. She's out of it sometimes, so slowly what makes her who she is, her personality, is disappearing in little pieces at a time. I've already been through this. My mother did this. Her sister didn't recognize her own kids and she was only 75. Worse yet, she lived almost 10 more years, a grown adult who needed a full time nanny. People say this is degrading to the person, but really, the person is already gone. It's degrading to her kids seeing her like that. It takes an emotional toll, and it costs society a hell of a lot of money. To put it simply from what I've seen of one side of my family I am pretty concerned. I take fish oil and tumeric supplements, I get no points for that. I try to limit my beef to natural grazing stock, grass fed not corn fed like the junk they sell in the stores. Normal beef has omega-3s in it, corn fed beef does not. Now you could say that I have an alternate reason I am folding for myself, a selfish reason. You would be correct and it doesn't bother me. Who wants to die that awful way? And don't overlook, the results here won't help just me, so it's not 100% selfish.

SMP has been in beta for quite a while so it's a mature beta, odd as that sounds. It doesn't interfere with the stability of my pc at all, it's the work units themselves that are sometimes iffy. Actually even regular FAH occasionally has a flood of bad work units. Its not the pc, that's just how it goes. The pc I haven't been running, it's far away from where I am, but it folded SMP for months at a time without issue. Power loss was far more common, and it was not common at all. On my AMD box I found the watts used between loaded and idle to be pretty small, so if its on it might as well fold.

What else can I add? If you normally use - real work - your pc like 3-4 hours a day a cheaper video card like a 9600GSO will let you complete a WU every day. 1-2 hours you can complete a WU every other day. Each WU would be 350 - 500 points. Almost zero additional cost. There are some 2D delays, but newer drivers have mitigated those annoyances.

Has all this helped any?

A

Thanks Aris,

What can i say, alzheimer's is scarry shit.

F@H has the point system to encourage more folding. But for those of us that dont want to buy a certain gpu to crunch with, it ends up being discouraging instead. and some of us just turn it off.

as for the smp install the beta warnings are stronger than i feel comfortable with. and the install process looks more than a little cumbersome.
Right now all i can use is half my cpu power, if Fah had a simple multi core installer, they would get a lot more WU done.

xan,

Can I get you to run 2 singles?

Most likely...
I do like to do some crunching for seti too

One is a core 2 duo, one is p4 2.4 with HT,the 3d is a celron 1.7... no foldable gpu cards.

Only the core 2 duo can do this right? or can HT do it aswell? (oviously no on the celly)

do i just set up a different folding folder and run it from there?

From a purely technical view SMP wants to see 2 cores minimum. That means early P4s with VT could run SMP, but since they have only 1 physical core it really didn't mean that much point-wise.

To run to singles - I would first create a shortcut in your current directory. Open it and check the properties of the shortcut. You may see a "Target line" and a "start in" line. If there are 2 separate directories you need to duplicated both directories, otherwise you need to duplicate just the one. The second 1 or 2 directories get their own shortcut. The properties on the 2nd shortcut should show you both the target and the "start in" directories to be the second ones.

If 2 instances of FAH point to the same work directory they will both attempt to work on the same WU, which will cause a failure.

Don't fold since energy prices are on they way up here. And to be honest this "folding" thing is getting way out of hand. Ppl are building computers with sole purpose of folding and why ?
Do we know for sure 100% that by folding we will find cure for cancer or whatever ? No, they "think" it might but that is just not enough for me.
Folding has been around for quite a while now and where are those results ? Anything, anybody ?
No thanks, untill Mr Pande starts donating money for my electric bill I think I'll be folding my clothes instead.

With a global economic slump do you think folding will drive up energy costs? If yes please explain.


Well that has all been explained on the FAH website. Why are you asking the people here? That's where we get our information.


If you know for a fact which type of research will succeed then please tell us, we are waiting. You don't know? Nobody knows. If everyone in the world would think like you then all research for everything would stop, so that we could save our pennies. Does that sound sensible and logical to you? If yes then please explain how and why.


Again, the answers are on the web site, why ask us? If you know who has succeeded in research then you tell us, we do not know. All groups I have seen I can ask this same question and get the same answer you posted. And again, if everybody would think like you all research for everything all over the world would stop. Wouldn't that be wonderful?


See the interesting thing about people who think the way you think they will be the first people in line demanding the new cure even though they contribute nothing. Can you explain why this is true?

I would like to thank you for you contribution here to this thread, but true to form, you contribute nothing and ask for something.

Perhaps if a cure is found this way it should only be for folders. How does that sound to you?

You are wrong. You only have to activate if you change motherboard.You can change CPU twice a day if you feel for it

Just curios, who told you that you cannot change CPU ?

Don't recall.

Please don't feed the trolls.

Since when is stating an opinion=trolling ?
OP asked if we take running costs factor into consideration when folding I just replied giving my own reasons why I did stop folding.

When it comes to Folding web site, well lets just say that it's layout sucks hence I really can't find any useful info there on how FAR have we come, and most importantly: Did ALL this energy spent around the world actually give something usefull ?

I can't find anything useful from any research site. What are the options?

Perhaps haysdb can contribute so more info?

Ok this is not clicking, i've tried to finger this out but I just end up locking up the clients, at first. now i think it sorted but one client is giving me an 503 erro and not getting downloads?

I usually dont have trouble with this sort of stuff...
but F@H is not the most user friendly with non gui clients...

Got any link to running dual clients that might explain it a little differently?

Or is it a temp server side issue?

EDIT: now working!

How do i run them w/o showing in the taskbar?

How did you get it working?

Not real difficult to find, guys:

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

Have we found the cure for cancer? Of course not. Might we? It's possible, and to me, a possible cure for any of these diseases is worth the $11/ mo. it's costing me to fold.

I have been away from folding for a few months - I moved from Amsterdam to North West Italy. There is no ADSL in our village so I have a long dial-up upload - around 2 hours - after each WU (the result file is around 26Mbytes). In addition, since I upgraded to the 2.6.27 kernel, fah bombs out and has to be killed off at the end of any WU it can cope with; you have to run through an intricate sequence of qfix, delete, qfix again before you can send the WU. As a result, instead of getting 1.25 WUs (@1920 per WU) per day out of my system, I am lucky to get one WU. Take tonight, for instance, the current WU will finish at 3am. I shall be asleep by then; if I wake up at 6, and it takes me 1 hour to get the results ready to send, and two to send them, I shall be lucky to complete another WU by midnight Sunday.

I confess I do not understand why the Pande group are unable or unwilling to fix this problem - they seem to have been living with it for months if not years. But it does make participating more of a labour of love than it should have to be.

Mike

let the old wu finish and reinstalled into new separate folders for each core.

Stil trying to see what the best balance of Wu size will be for best ppd.

Since my system is on 24/7 and I have an always on net connection, I see little reason not to run the F@H client unless it begins to interfere with what I'm doing. Otherwise, it can run in the background as a service and I don't even notice it anymore.

xan_user: Remember that F@H is designed so that every little bit helps so why not run it? In regard to the SMP client, HT does not work on it anylonger so you'd be stuck running the single version though you can run multiple versions. As to the old Celeron you have, I've succeeded in completing work units on an old 700 MHz Celeron (P3 generation) though it was pretty slow. So keep in mind as I said, the project is designed so that every little bit helps

Ive stopped leaving my dual core running 24/7 just too much $ running 3 PC's. I run one big core while its on, two cores (one small one big) uses too much ram, and I notice the system lag.
The p4 HT has a F@H core and a SETI core. probably runs ~24/5 day a week. (client server/nas)
Celery 1.7 runs single F@H 24/7. (Filemaker server)

total~2000-3000 pp week.