SPCR Folds Team Blog

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:46 am

FYI nothing exciting, but interesting.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/784- ... -gpus.html

KansaKilla · Post by **KansaKilla** » Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:06 pm

a folding graph would have been sweet.

kind of a good news, bad news time right now.

good news, i got the dual gpu's up and running. two low powered 9800gt's and a q8200. went to bed, things were folding along nicely. temps of 72 and 67 degrees celsius.

bad news, woke up six hours later and the temps were 85 and 98. i was afraid i might burn down the apartment. i left the side of the case off and temps are in the low 70's now. still folding away, though. i'll have to get a couple of s1's for the gpu's.

bad news, i am going to lose the apartment. that means two fewer boxes for me over the next couple of months.

good news, i just bought an i860 and an msi mobo that does sli. now to get some ram, a dummy plug, windows 7 64bit, etc.

bad news, that will take a while to set up. so expect to see up and down numbers over the next three to four months.

y'all take care.

--kk

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:35 pm

Well, that sounds pretty mixed, hope you get things all straight sometime soon. As far as the gpu temps go, I regularly have cards get up to about 90C, it doesn't seem to bother them, although 98 seems a little high. You might be able to get away with a smaller fan somewhere inside the case that can provide some more directed airflow, but that depends a lot on the case. As far as the i860 goes, if you're clever you might be able to get it running bigadv jobs, but it's kind of doubtful you'll get enough throughput with gpus going too. The stock 860 is right at the edge of doing bigadvs, any other regular loads and it'll probably fail. But it's pretty good at A3 runs too.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Apr 14, 2010 2:07 pm

For some reason NVidia thinks its perfectly reasonable to run their chips at about the same temps as the sun's core. I'd prefer running them cooler, say the temperature of lava.

kittle · Post by **kittle** » Wed Apr 14, 2010 2:45 pm

odd results there Kansas...

GL in finding a stable place to live & fold.

My folding has been down over the past few weeks as ive only been running GPU folding, and hosting a game server that runs 24/7 on my PC - so im reserving the cpu cycles for that.. thus no SMP folding.

however that will change in a month or 2 when I get my i7 980x upgrade. that should give me a huge ppd jump.

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Wed Apr 14, 2010 2:57 pm

Yeah, you're going to love the i7 980x, mine is running great. Here in the valley, Fry's and Central Computers seem to get them in sporadically, keep an eye out for ads if you just want to run out and pick one up.

As far as the temperatures go, I do some work in semiconductors, and most times they try to simulate chips up to 125C and make sure they still work. Some companies will drop that to 100C for consumer electronics, but 125C is pretty common, I'm sure Nvidia is simulating up to that. So 90C shouldn't really be a big problem, but 100C is really starting to push it.

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 10:03 am

Here's an update on the 470/480 situation:

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2010/04 ... dware.html

So they're on it, it sounds like the next version will support the new cards and deliver higher performance on them, so we could see something more than an incremental jump. That would be very interesting. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 12:09 pm

Numbnuts!

My SMP has stopped for over a day trying to download a WU. It can't get one.

PaleMelanesian · Post by **PaleMelanesian** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 12:17 pm

My 2 regular instances have been taking turns "failing to connect" as well.

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 12:54 pm

Yeah, I've noticed that on one of my machines, I thought it was because I just installed windows 7 on it. Have to check the foldingforum, see if there are any answers there. For me, I've been experimenting with turning off some of my gpu clients to save on power, I guess I'll turn some of them back on. It's good to have multiples ways to fold available.

Edit: Ah yes, here's the foldingforum thread:
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 5&start=30

Looks like we're not alone. Hopefully it will be sorted out soon, higher-ups have been informed.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 5:31 pm

I lost the link but it appears that the first Intel chipset built on 32nm technology won't be along until Q1 2011.

And with them the question is - ummm, what socket will that be?

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 4:46 pm

Here's an update from fahaddict on the smp wu situation:

http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-20 ... re-wus.php

Looks like they are just running low. Huh. Hey, make with the science, brainiacs!

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 5:50 pm

We're waiting here, too...

KansaKilla · Post by **KansaKilla** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 7:20 pm

aristide1 wrote:For some reason NVidia thinks its perfectly reasonable to run their chips at about the same temps as the sun's core. I'd prefer running them cooler, say the temperature of lava.

I just spewed diet coke out my nose at that one!

I still have 4 boxes running right now:
- Q6600 with a 3850
- Q9550 with 2 low-power 9800GT's
- e2180 with a 9800GT
- 9600GT

Sitting on the floor in the apartment (it's a rat's nest right now):
- i7 860 with 2 GTX 260's
- crazy amount of extra processors, ram, mobo's etc., with no permanent home at the moment

Hopefully I can get swap stuff out and get to maximizing the folding from my 2 offices and the house, so that when I turn the apartment over on Memorial Day I won't be suffering too much in the PPD category. The biggest issue is time right now. I don't have a lot of it to get this stuff up and running before I'm forced to Priceline hotels once a week rather than tinker with the boxes back at the apartment.

If the -bigadv thing doesn't work out with the i7 860, then I'm not sure what I'll do. Probably just keep crunching out A3 wu's and try to smile.

I was thinking the other day that this folding stuff is turning into an arms race. I've got to get off that vicious circle at some point and just be content with what I'm able to contribute, rather than look at what points I might be missing.

SebRad · Post by **SebRad** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:19 pm

Hi, no SMP work going on for me either, for about 2 days now I think.
Fortunately the GPU keeps chewing through units and it's worth about 3/4 of my PPD so could be worse.

Re the "Arms Race" I'm trying to keep a sensible view on it, but I want to keep a spot in the top 10

Seb

frenchie · Post by **frenchie** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 12:24 am

Grrrrr !!!!!!!!
No SMP for a fourth day now... I must have missed the last WU by just a pinch. Darn.
New Mobo on the way for me and I can finalize my other project (another couple of Ks per day hopefully).

KansaKilla · Post by **KansaKilla** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 9:47 am

cordis wrote:As far as the i860 goes, if you're clever you might be able to get it running bigadv jobs, but it's kind of doubtful you'll get enough throughput with gpus going too. The stock 860 is right at the edge of doing bigadvs, any other regular loads and it'll probably fail. But it's pretty good at A3 runs too.

What if I OC the thing? You think that will be okay with the 2 260's? Maybe 3.2-3.4?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 12:06 pm

I'm temporarily running SETI@Home (BOINC) until Folding@Home comes back on line...

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 12:55 pm

Yeah, if you OC the 860 moderately, you should be able to make it. I was able to run 1 gpu on an i7 930, so maybe just getting it up to 3ghz would be good enough to run dual gpus. Be careful with oc'ing it, though, there have been some reports of 1156 socket failures when the power gets too high.

I know what you mean about the arms race, though. That's why I've been more focused on ppd/watt lately. I'm trying to see how low I can get my power while still doing at least 66k ppd a day, but it's been tricky lately. Running bigadv jobs, you find that your stats get a lot more choppy, and adding this smp a3 WU problem, it's become really unpredictable. Watching my stats on the main user list, I've noticed at least one folder who I had previously passed has suddenly jumped up to 150k ppd and passed me. I can only imagine that when they get the 470/480 issues straightened out, we'll start seeing some big jumps there again, and I may even start sliding back. Then again, it's all for a good cause, and I've always liked having a powerful computer or two around, so I don't mind too much. Now if I can only keep my power consumption down...

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 6:22 pm

http://www.behardware.com/articles/785- ... -32nm.html

Here the 980x uses a couple of watts more than a 920, but has 50% more cores. Now that's efficiency. This chart really should have the Intel Q6600 present as the definitive reference point.

With AMD? I'm wondering if Enron played a part in their power consumption.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 5:14 pm

cordis wrote:Here's an update from fahaddict on the smp wu situation:

http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-20 ... re-wus.php

Looks like they are just running low. Huh. Hey, make with the science, brainiacs!

Also -
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=13484

PaleMelanesian · Post by **PaleMelanesian** » Mon Apr 19, 2010 4:57 am

I just passed mike_chin.

for me,

for him.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Apr 20, 2010 1:39 pm

Some GTX 470s are in stock.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 79%3A56828

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Apr 20, 2010 2:28 pm

Typical Intel.

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/18517/66/

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Tue Apr 20, 2010 5:20 pm

Yeah, heard about that, it's a little preliminary but it sounds plausible. Hopefully at least the heatsink holes won't move, a single pin should allow them to keep the cooler mounting the same.

In other news, it looks like there are more smp wus, so turn your machines back on if you shut them down:

http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-20 ... 0-6059.php

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Apr 20, 2010 5:30 pm

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvid ... e-wait-/19

Looking at this chart, it shows the difference between full load consumption on a GTX260 and idle consumption to be about 130 watts. This is what my GTX 260 uses when folding.

Given that the 470 uses 200 watts. This is actually quite good. The number of stream processors more than doubles for a 50% power increase.

Yeah KK you seem to have more spare parts than I do. I gave some to my college recent, the geeks in the computer lab. I expect more parts to be retired as power costs go up and PPW becomes more of a factor. It's already a PITA.

I wonder when Intel with make a 6 core for socket 1156.

dereksbelanger · Post by **dereksbelanger** » Wed Apr 21, 2010 6:55 am

cordis wrote:In other news, it looks like there are more smp wus, so turn your machines back on if you shut them down:

http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-20 ... 0-6059.php

These WUs are only available to clients using -advmethods.

Another interesting thing is that these WUs use core a3 and are being assigned event if a passkey isnt configured.

frenchie · Post by **frenchie** » Wed Apr 21, 2010 9:46 am

This is a bummer... Still no WU for small folders like me...

cordis · Post by **cordis** » Wed Apr 21, 2010 10:42 am

So wait, if they are A3 wus, you should be able to get them with an upgrade to 6.29. I have a couple machines running A3's now, they run great. If they're out of A1 and A2 wus, that just means that the transition to 6.29 should happen now. I think they were officially going to do it in July, so this is a little early. So yeah, when you upgrade, run a -configonly run and set up a passkey and advance methods, and you should be good to go.

dereksbelanger · Post by **dereksbelanger** » Wed Apr 21, 2010 10:58 am

Hey Frenchie - not sure what you mean. There are new WUs for both SMP and UNI clients - so either way you should be covered.

Also, you dont have to run the big jobs option to use -advmethods.

Seems to me that if you set the -advmethods option on your cleints you'll be folding away in no time!

Report on new SMP projects: http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-20 ... 0-6059.php

Report on new UNI projects: http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-21 ... 6501-3.php

SPCR Folds Team Blog

yikes!

yep!

update

yep

update

Re: yikes!

oc'd 860

Re: update

ugh

Re: ugh

smp stuff