Three more on Monday!

val_greene
TRZ
TacoBellDog

This is great. 12 new folders in the past week!

David

wumpus is already kicking some A. 456 points already in just 2 days plus a couple of hours.


I'm seeing lots of 71 point WU's (work units) from the new people. With a few exceptions, you will complete your work units faster AND get more points if you add the following "flags" when starting up FAH:

-advmethods -forcesse

(-forcesse is only of benefit to AMD processors, so if you have an Intel cpu, you can omit it without penalty)

The easiest way to do this is find the "shortcut" that starts the client (if there isn't one, create one), right-click on it, select Properties from the pop-up menu, and in the "Target" box, add these flags after the program name. Here is an example:
With these flags, you are far more likely to get the more desireable "Gromacs" work units, which are able to take advantage of the SSE instructions found on modern Intel and AMD processors. The older "Tinker" core does not utilize these SSE instructions and is therefore slower.

David

wumpus, where are you going to stop? 142 -> 296 -> 479 points in your first three days. Heck, you have already reached "Teal" at EOC, with "blue" just around the corner, and at that rate, "green" shortly after that. Not bad for #198 on the list eh?

David

If the Tinkers hadn't hit, I do believe mas92264 would be "red" in one more day. For the 5 days preceding yesterday, he was averaging 1240 PPD.

David

Yeah, I've been trying out a couple of Intel/800 fsb matx boards without a lot of success. 700 to 800 pts per week is about all I can wring out of them. Right now, it looks like I'd need another 150 ppd to stay consistently red - to say nothing about only posting 900 points yesterday due to the Tinker factor. Got a new Intel/800 fsb board coming in today.

M

M, I am running an MSI 865GM2 which I am pretty happy with. The one real bummer about this board is the vcore adjustment simply doesn't work. In fact, they removed the option in the latest BIOS. Because of that I am only able to get an extra 10% out of a P4 2.8C. Still, it has been perfectly stable at that speed, and it's mostly giving me 800+ PPW.

I got about the same out of an Asus board, but only under Windows, since the FSB could not be adjusted in the BIOS. These damn micro-ATX boards are making me pull my hair out. The Athlon boards I use, the Biostar M7NCG 400, which had been a darling overclocker, no longer offer an adjustable vcore! It's absolutely MADDENING - Missing features, features being removed, and features which don't WORK.

David

e-milie
Hortalonus

Welcome aboard the good ship SPCR.

David

Wumpus failed to increase his points production by 150 for a fourth day in a row, but did turn "blue" and did match his 300 point output for day 2, so I still think we may have a new "green" folder on our hands. How 'bout it Wumpus? Green?

David

Thanks haysdb! I've been lurking around the forums for a while and used much of the info I found to build my new "very quiet" Mobile 2600+ box. Then I decided to see what this folding thing is all about and I'm glad I did. Besides... I lived for a couple years in Vancouver and around B.C. (boy do I miss it!) so I couldn't think of a team I'd rather fold for.

Well, I was pressing everything into service trying to prevent the damn dirty Mac users from passing us.

After checking out the stats pages I now realized that they-- unfortunately-- have a huge user advantage over us, so there's no point in a big production push. I'm back to just my 24/7 dual athlon 2500+ folding for you guys. But that's permanent

Plus, man, did it ever get sweltering hot in my work room with 4+ machines folding! Jeez. I won't miss that part..

Hortalonus, I love it when I am able to coax the first post out of someone. I LIVE for this stuff! Truly though, welcome to the fold.

What motherboard are you using for your Mobile Athlon? There have been some posts, and someone emailed me the other day, with problems getting their Mobile Athlons running at the proper frequency.

wumpus, we welcome your dual Athlon with open arms! I believe a number of people will be forced to back off a bit as the temperatures climb. The Macsters have definitely done a superior job of recruiting and have sprinted ahead of us. I gather you will be "game" at such time as we are able to challenge them again?

David

Ok, I did a search and this was the closest information I could find to answer my question. My question today is.. Does the Celeron absolutely blow at floating point math? I had the interesting observation that right now, all 3 of my folding machines have strains of the exact same protien. Yes, I realize that doesn't mean it's still a perfect benchmark, but I've been watching all 3 systems for the past couple days and they seem to get very similar PPD for all gromacs anyway, and right now they all have p563_BBA5_ext. Here's what I have:

Pentium III 1Ghz, 133Mhz memory
Athlon 2400+ running at 995Mhz, memory at 266Mhz due to mobo incompatibility with the mobile chips
Celeron 2.6 o/c'd to 2730Mhz, 420Mhz memory

So basically two either stock, or underclocked, and one 4% overclocked. I already confirmed the Celeron is stable by running mprime (prime95 for linux) for 8 hours in torture test mode. No errors, which is what you'd expect for such a modest o/c. The memory is DDR400 by the way. Anyway, here's my current PPD listing for each server

P3-1Ghz: 29ppd
Athlon-1Ghz: 42ppd
Celeron-2.7Ghz: 56ppd

Now I'm not too surprised that the Athlon has about a 45% performance advantage over my old P3 considering how much more advanced the Barton core is, plus the memory is running twice as fast. I already determined through earlier testing that memory speed seems to play a pretty significant role in speed for both mprime and folding.

Now in theory, I was thinking the Celeron should still have about a 2:1 advantage over the Athlon, but in reality it posts up scores that are only 33% faster. This is sad! Unfortunately, both servers are linux so I don't have any other type of benchmarking software I can load up to compare the two. Still, 56ppd is just shy of 400ppw, which is roughly half what it sounds like a non-Celeron P4 should be capable of at the same clockspeed. So what's the deal? Should I bite the bullet and just get a normal P4? Is the Celeron really that bad at math?

IIRC the Celeron has essentially a P4 core, but with only a fraction of the cache that a P4 has. This core is heavily dependent on it's cache, and consequently the performance of the Celeron suffers. There was an article at AnandTech called "The Battle of the 'rons" or something like that, that explained it very well. The Celeron got demolished by the AMD Durons.

OTOH, a fast P4 Northwood is an impressive folder. At this moment, a P4C@3.1 is showing a combined 1064 PPW for 3 clients on LogStats, and that has been pretty consistant over the past few days. This is with 3 instances of FAH, all running DGromacs. With regular Gromacs, it's typically in the 800's.

David

David,

My mobo is a DFI Ultra Infinity and I love it! It's rock solid and a breeze to OC... you can control everything. Also, the Mobile 2600+ is a great little chip. I ran it just over 2GHz on 1.45 volts for a while. Now I've bumped it up to 2.5GHz and my temps have yet to hit 40C under load.

- Hort

2.5GHz. Sweet!

David

quksilver
Cameron_Ashizawa
AndrewC

Welcome to SPCR's Folding@Home team!

Note: All three of our latest members got "sTinkered" with 71 point Tinkers for their first WU's. Congrats for "toughing it out" with these first work units. These are the slowest WU's you will ever be forced to do. Do add the -advmethods flag to the shortcut which starts FAH on your machine and, if you have an Athlon processor, add -forcesse also.

David

David, it's nice to be on the team with you...

Fold on...

I am expecting big things from you. 500 PPD, MINIMUM!

David

All in due time...

shens, aka isp, has posted his first points for SPCR, an 18 pointer. Hip hip Hooray! As the lowest ranked active folder (#345), there is nowhere to go but up.

quksilver put up 277 points yesterday and jumped 38 places, becoming a fetching shade of teal in the process.

David

seamus

mlehner

Drewdog2323

NAngney

Me sees my welcome 20 days too late
Better late than never. Thanks David, you're a great foldleader.

btw, I've been trying to upload a 241 point tinker WU without success. While waiting, my PC crunched through a 200 frame tinker and uploaded it with success. What's wrong?

Each work unit must be returned to the same server that issued it. When you finish a work unit, but the server from which you received it is not currently available (down or possibly just really busy), that work unit will we "queued" for later upload and you will be reassigned to a different server to get another WU. The client will try every 6 hours to upload queued work.

At the moment I have three clients with queued work. Server .119 (171.64.122.119) is listed as being "DOWN" on the server status page.

David


Edit: I beat Neil to the Enter key by one minute.

Hello:



It's the server -- they sometimes have slowdowns and/or glitches, so with some more patience, they'll all upload eventually.

Hmm, darn that .119 then

This is fun. While trying to silence THOR, I got enough spare parts to piece together another PC, except for the RAM. Grrr, RAM prices are really up. Anybody have a spare gig lying around? It's all for a good cause

FAH does not place great demands on memory, so you could get by with 256 easy, and not make any sacrifices in performance. I don't know how accurate the "Peak Mem Usage" column in is Task Manager, but mine says FAH4Console.exe and FahCore_78.exe together use just 35MB. Heck, you could most likely get by with 128.

David

Andy

Sardaan

SThomas

DraGoNsLaYeR21

PorBleemo


I have not had the pleasure of welcoming a batch of new Folders for a full week, so I am "rolling out the welcome mat"

Do avail yourselves of the information in the Folding@Home Beginners Guide but I won't pretend there is even a fraction of the information in there that you might want to know, so feel free to ask about anything at all. You will find this a very friendly place.

David

Wecome new folders...

Faidros
Ducky
DavidMitchell
DM

My guess is that DM and DavidMitchell are one and the same. DM, can you verify that?

David

toonz
kloppe
Sync

Welcome to SPCR's Folding@Home team!

David

Sync is starting off with a bang - 186 points his first day and 276 already today as of 3 PM.

Edit: Sync shot up 49 spots in the rankings today, to #247.

David