SPCR Folds Team Blog

A forum just for SPCR's folding team... by request.

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Thu Nov 17, 2011 9:45 pm

Hey, I have a question. So, jhimanka, what are you running to get that 300k ppd a day? Some big ass Xeon server or two? That is a pretty impressive pile of points! Dude, 6 months away from passing me! :D

jhimanka
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by jhimanka » Sun Nov 20, 2011 3:34 am

Yeah, I just got two new servers to break in. I'm now running 3-4 IBM x3550M3 with various cpu types. 8 and 12-core. They use hyperthreading so to the OS (linux) they appear 16 and 24-core. I use -smp to make the client use only as many threads as there are physical cores. It would be a bit quicker to use the hyperthreaded cores as well but I like to keep some horsepower for other tasks. Might have to do -smp 16 with the bigadv changes though. I'm not sure how long I will keep all these servers folding so I probably won't pass you in six months...

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:35 pm

Thanks for the info, good to know. It'll help me with future purchasing decisions. :)

PaleMelanesian
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by PaleMelanesian » Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:58 am

Woo! I just passed 1,000,000 points.

NeilBlanchard
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by NeilBlanchard » Thu Dec 08, 2011 9:29 am

Eeeggsellent! [/Mr. Burns voice]

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:07 pm

Hey, great job, PaleMelanesian!! :D

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Mon Dec 12, 2011 7:18 pm

BTW, the stats servers at stanford have been down for a couple days, so it looks like your data isn't going through. But from what I can tell in the forums, it's just the stats servers that are having the problem, the work servers still seem to be up. It's been weird for me this whole weekend, on friday I lost the ability to upload files, then on Saturday my internet was out completely. Apparently comcast turned it off because the line was too noisy. They came on sunday and got it back up, but because I lost upload ability first, all my systems dropped 4 or 5 finished wus off and started up on new ones. I really hope the data we sent gets tabulated, I upgraded one of my machines last week to an i7 3930k, and it's doing really well. With all 12 cores running in windows, it's doing around 46k ppd on simple smp jobs. But that also freed up the i7 980x board so I could put that into a linux box. Under linux, it keeps picking up 6903 bigadv jobs, and running at something like 74k ppd according to hfm.net. Hope that lasts for a while. :D

NeilBlanchard
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by NeilBlanchard » Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:02 am

Right, and when I cannot get a F@H work unit, my iMac starts running SETI@Home, using BOINC. :)

frenchie
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by frenchie » Tue Dec 13, 2011 6:36 pm

Seems to be back up again... No points for the whole down period though.... :(

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Tue Dec 13, 2011 11:56 pm

Yeah, there's a post from Dr. Pande: http://folding.typepad.com/news/2011/12 ... e-now.html

So there should be a big bump coming up for the points that came in over that period. Watch and wait, I guess. :?

EDIT: And the points came through! Boom!

NeilBlanchard
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Dec 30, 2011 5:14 am

A recent issue for me has been when I manually shut down F@H and then restart it, it most often aborts that work unit (because the machine is "unstable") and then starts a new work unit. It usually does 2-3% more work on the unit and then aborts...

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Tue Jan 03, 2012 11:37 pm

Yeah, that happens to me too, sometimes. Haven't really noticed it more than usual, I've been screwing with some computers, so it's natural to get failures when you do that. For general instability, I usually just crank down the overclock a notch and see if that helps. Usually does. If you're not overclocking, may want to run a memory test, I've had some trouble with that lately.

warriorpoet
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by warriorpoet » Sat Jan 07, 2012 8:45 pm

Looking for a new wireless router; this one keeps going out when it gets multiple connections + ethernet (phones, lappys, kindles, PS3, whateva).

Any suggestions? I promise a healthy PPD increase if I get one that works... ;)

frenchie
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by frenchie » Sun Jan 08, 2012 3:26 pm

I've got this : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0044Y ... 00_details
I've had it for a few month now and it works great. FYI I got it on sale for $35...

Myth!
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by Myth! » Wed Jan 25, 2012 8:04 pm

I just started folding again (old 8800gtx didnt let anything else happen while folding).

I have i7 2700k @ 3.8Ghz, and a ATI hd6950 bios'ed to 1536 stream processors.

My question is what should I run for maximum points?

At present running smp2 with -smp and big size, not sure yet how this early return bonus works but http://linuxforge.net/bonuscalc2.php calculator is telling me ~15k ppd

Running win7-64, 8gb ram (1600mhz though could speed it up, it's rated 2133 but it didnt boot when i initially tried it)

cheers, Mytheroo

aristide1
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by aristide1 » Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:07 pm

NVidia GTX 680 - 1536 Shaders. 28nm technology.

Power Consumption (Full load - idle) reports of 230 - 260 watts. Lower usage than a GTX 570.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... itstart=13

Specs
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvid ... 680-review

Card doesn't fold yet.


Just an FYI - I need to get back to looking for a job.
[raspberry]
[/raspberry]

m1st
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by m1st » Fri Mar 23, 2012 5:07 pm

aristide1 wrote:NVidia GTX 680 - 1536 Shaders. 28nm technology.

Power Consumption (Full load - idle) reports of 230 - 260 watts. Lower usage than a GTX 570.
I'm worried about how the GTX 680 will do when folding:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvid ... -review/17

Many of the efficiency changes they've implemented in Kepler have come at the expense of non-gaming GPU compute. I'm sure the rumored "big" Kepler (GK100?) will be a much better performer, but in some tests like the SmallLuxGPU bench, the GTX 680 only has 70% the performance of the GTX 580. There are some compute areas (more associated with gaming) that the 680 does well in, but...

I'm sure a lot of this can be attributed to driver-side optimizations, but the fact that most scheduling has been taken out of the hardware control logic (and is now done by the compiler) and the fact that double-precision FP is now 1/24 the speed of single-precision FP is worrying. The GTX 580 was 1/8 FP32.

It may come down to the work being assigned.

aristide1
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by aristide1 » Sat Mar 24, 2012 12:36 pm

Yeah if you look at the benchmark chart about 1/4 of the way down you see that the 680 shows anywhere from no improvement on some games to a max of maybe 30% better on others. And this is with 1536 shaders versus 512? Pity.


http://www.maximumpc.com/article/featur ... ked_-depth

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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by NeilBlanchard » Sat Jul 21, 2012 9:44 am

We built a new gaming computer for my son, and the new F@H client for Win7 64bit is CPU and GPU integrated into one, which is really cool! It's an i5 3550 Ivy Bridge and a ATi Radeon 7770 and it just pumped out ~9552 PPD even when he is gaming on it for a large portion of the day. Wow is all I have to say!

frenchie
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by frenchie » Mon Jul 30, 2012 1:01 pm

Hey, a new machine for Neil :)

Back to folding for me after a short pause :)

dereksbelanger
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by dereksbelanger » Mon Sep 24, 2012 12:47 pm

Congradulations on the new rig, Neil.

Welcome back, Frenchie.

One place to go and I'll finally be in the SPCR top 10. Too bad the next predicted overtake is in four months! :p

frenchie
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by frenchie » Mon Sep 24, 2012 1:26 pm

Top 10 :) nice !!!

aristide1
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by aristide1 » Sun Oct 07, 2012 4:48 pm

OK, so from a folding viewpoint whats the most effcient video card out there right now?

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Sun Oct 07, 2012 8:58 pm

Hard to say what the best video card is these days. The nvidia 600 series cards use less power, but the folding engine isn't optimized for them yet. That's in beta, may be coming out soon. In the meantime, the sweet spot for pure ppd/power is probably the gtx 560, maybe the Ti version.

aristide1
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by aristide1 » Tue Oct 16, 2012 3:13 pm

cordis wrote:Hard to say what the best video card is these days. The nvidia 600 series cards use less power, but the folding engine isn't optimized for them yet. That's in beta, may be coming out soon. In the meantime, the sweet spot for pure ppd/power is probably the gtx 560, maybe the Ti version.
I'm looking for an overall fast & efficient card at this point. My GTX260 has 2-6 pin power connectors on top. The 650ti has only 1 and should be faster. NVidia doesn't seem to give folding much priority on it's development track, too bad.

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Fri Oct 19, 2012 6:36 pm

Yeah, the gtx 600s are really power efficient in general. I'm tempted to pick up a gtx 670 and wait for the optimized core, but eh, I have a couple of 560s now, no real need to upgrade. But if you do get something, let us know how it goes.

aristide1
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by aristide1 » Thu Nov 22, 2012 6:22 pm

Cordis, sent you a PM.

Aris

cordis
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by cordis » Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:38 am

Right back at you, Aris.

And in other news, I recently hit another milestone... :D

frenchie
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by frenchie » Wed Nov 28, 2012 3:07 pm

You did indeed : viewtopic.php?f=16&t=58085&start=60
Congrats !

PaleMelanesian
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Re: SPCR Folds Team Blog

Post by PaleMelanesian » Thu Apr 18, 2013 8:30 am

It's been quiet around here, but I just passed 2,000,000. :D

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