In case anyone has wondered...I am still alive.

FAH has been running as a service on my machine 100% reliably with zero action on my part for about the last 2 years. I would never know it was running if I didn't see it in the process list. It has not interfered with the daily operation of my computer in the least.

What a wonderful piece of programming the Stanford folks have created.

The "farm" hasn't been running since my now ex-wife kicked me out of the house a little under two years ago. I still have it, I just haven't felt it was right to burn electricity I'm not paying for, and it generated a fair amount of noise. It was quiet for what it was (I tweaked every fan with resistors to slow them as much as possible without anything getting too hot), but it's hard to make an open box containing 7 systems totally quiet. It's all "old junk" now - a few Barton 2000+ were the fastest processors I had, with the rest Palomino 1800+ and the like. If anyone wants a complete system of Shuttle/Linux server and 7 "blades", let me know. Shipping it will be a bit of an issue because the MDF "barn" is rather large and heavy, but where there's a will there's a way.

I'll have to browse the forum and catch up on what's been happening. I see that we are hanging in at #20 with 142 users, so it looks like the team is hanging in there, sure and steady.

I see that I am now a member of the 500K point club, and still hanging in at #13 overall, and there's my old friend ARM Systems right ahead of me, and mostly familiar names at the top of the list. flapjack is new to me.

Fold on brothers and sisters.

Welcome back to SPCR!

Welcome back David!

Sounds like you've had a bit of a rough spot - best of luck putting it all back together

I see that there are now five cores. The release of a new core was always "big news". Two years ago we were all tweaking the command line with -advmethods and such to try to get as many gromacs as possible. What's new in that area of late? Which command line switches are the current rage?

It would appear that FAH has kept itself updated. Has anything happened that would require any manual updates?

Glad to see you back. A bit of a surprise to hear from you with baseballs still in the air.

It has been kind of quiet around this board, a lot of lurking going on though.

The tags now are not really as beneficial. I think there is some beta type things you can sign up for but that is about it.

Those old socket A and XP processors are hard to come by now. Out of production. You might be doing yourself and others a favor by parting it out. Check ebay to see what they are going for. I am looking for an M7MCG 400 Biostar if you go that route. I can't do the farm thing because of the HIGH price of electricity and the heat in summertime.

Condolences or congratulations on the divorce.

"Bring out your dead!"

"Here's one."

"That'll be ninepence."

"I'm not dead!"

>Two years ago we were all tweaking the command line with -advmethods
>and such to try to get as many gromacs as possible.

Hi, David. You still want -advmethods and -forceasm. In addition, you want to set the option for large workunits (by running with -config or -configonly and answering the questions.) You need both the large workunits setting and the -advmethods to have any chance of getting the bonus points workunits. (You can wire in advmethods via the configuration dialog now, but I still give it on the command line because I'm old fashioned.)

I don't remember ever using -forceasm. Is that necessarty for a P4 processor? All I have set on the service is -advmethods.

This is seriously embarrassing to admit, but I'm going to have to think a little bit HOW to run FAH! It's been running so long as a service that I don't know how to run it any more.

I will be back shortly. I gotta give this a try.

There was just the one question about large work units. Is that correct? How much does this increase the memory demands of the app? I recently upgraded to 1GB so I should be OK in any case.

Dunno if this helps or not, but at the moment my both FahCore_78 processes use 107 mb of memory. I think I've seen much bigger numbers, too.

GOOD GOD!!!!!


Is this an 'old school' role call????


Hello/Welcome back everyone



For

I know where there's some very nicely done stickies on that...

> I don't remember ever using -forceasm. Is that necessary for a P4 processor?

In theory it is never necessary. What it does is force the use of the fast assembler routines even if the program has crashed and restarted.

Damn, sorry to hear about the marriage not working out. That really blows! So ok, moving on, I'm just curious since you mentioned the farm, were you planning to sell it then? That would be an interesting ebay auction. What do you think it's worth? Maybe $1500 or so now? What was the power consumption once all loaded up anyway, around 500 watts or so?

I don't think an eBay auction would bring anywhere near $1500, but yeah, I should just list it all as a complete turn-key system and then figure out how to ship it. I'd probably have to build a crate for the MDF "barn" since it's probably too big and heavy for a cardboard box. It's glued together so there's no way to break it down.

I did know how much energy it drew at one time, as I plugged the power strip into a Kill-A-Watt meter, but I cannot recall now from memory how much it was. 500W is probably not a bad guesstimate.

Well if you go the ebay route, feel free to post up the auction link. I'd be curious to see what it fetches on the open market.

I will definitely post a link here, or at least let y'all know it's been listed. I don't know if linking to eBay is against forum policy. As a moderator, I might have to delete my own message.

Chances are I won't get around to it for awhile. I'm pretty lazy these days.

MAH!

I too am still alive......

I hope.

What form factor were those old mobo's? I may be interested in a few for a small rack mount farm for myself.

-TRC

Micro ATX. All Athlon boards.

I fabricated aluminum plates that each board is attached to, just like a motherboard is mounted in a case. It made handling the boards easier, reduced the risk of static shock, and provided a surface to slide into slots cut in my MDF "rack". I am rather proud of this "innovation" and would be pleased if these could live on in another farm.

haysdb, is there a photo of this setup kicking around anywhere?

Ray

There was, but I don't know how long posts are kept before being purged. Hold on...







I had forgotten what a work of art the box was. I really did some fine work.

David Hays!

Great to hear from you. Sorry to hear about your troubles, but I hope things turn out for the best in the end. Things have been quiet here since you left.

Let's hope that folding farm goes to good use!

Still kickin'. Greetings everyone.

It's been another 15 months, so I guess it's time to check in. It's good to see so many of the "old timers" still pecking away, and also good to see so many new names.

FAH is still running on two quiet tower PC's I built a few years ago from information I learned here. The PC's are still running strong, never a problem except for the occasional malware. They remain as quiet as ever.

David...

Damn nice to 'see' you again 'Ol' Chap.



Pete

What's a P4?

Only 1?

OK seriously now, when P4's first came out I was folding with 2 PIIIs and my rank overall reached about 7000. No way to get near that today with a pair of PIIIs.

My global rank stalled around 5300 with 2 dualies, so I had to add another.

Hello.

I like to check in once a year or so.

Actually I plan on making a re-appearance as I am building a new machine. The 2.4GHz Northwood is being replaced with a Core i7 920 and an NVidia 9600GT graphics card.

I see that I have slipped to 44th place, which is no surprise given my 6 year old hardware. The new hardware should make me competitive again.

I haven't touched the FAH installation on my machine in *YEARS*. Literally. It's installed as a service, so it always restarts when I have to reboot, and it has never given me any reason to stop running it. I will continue to run it on the new machine and I see that a lot has changed since I last stuck my head in here. There is a multi-core version of FAH, and a GPU version that runs on the graphics card. I will be back asking a lot of questions when it comes time to install FAH on the new hardware.

-David

David:

The GPU2 client will change your folding life. I am not joking.

Am I correct that I will run one instance of the GPU2 client and one instance of the SMP client? And that I should turn Hyperthreading off on the quad-core i7?

I'll be running a version of Windows: Windows 7 64-bit is what I'm going to try first. I'll dual boot with XP 32-bit if and when I have to. I'm going to try my best to avoid buying a copy of Vista, as a matter of principle.