Hey folks,

We're starting up a folding team for SPCR as a way to bring more visibility to our cause for silent computing and, of course, to allow us to help out with cancer research.

Here's some preliminary info:
Website for background & installation info, stats and download: http://folding.stanford.edu
Our team number (click for stats page): 31574

More stats: (added May 7)
http://www.statgfx.com/statgfx/getlink. ... ce=folding and
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ ... amID=31574 (thx miker & thx for the update SW (jun 9)



If you have any installation questions, let me know!

Great idea--I've been looking for a good F@H team to join for a while now!

Whoo hoo! 1st unit submitted to FAH. That took us straight from nil -> #4259 in the rankings.

Break out the champaigne.

Rusty has joined the Forces of Silence. Perhaps I'll have to fire up ye ol' renderfarm for a couple of days to get us off to a good start.

Unfortunately, my folding has to compete with my gaming. But it's a good thing that my gaming rig is quiet enough to sleep in the same room with...

Fantastic idea. It never occured to me before, but when I read the headline, I thought, "About freaking time!" Consider me joined. [H] didn't need me anyway.

Geez only 3 of us have posted completed WU's

Come on guys.

Hello:

I've been running SETI@Home for almost 4 years (May 22, 1999) and Genome@Home for almost 2 years (May 19, 2001). Not at the same time, mind you, but adding a 3rd distributed computing client would dilute my efforts even further. Maybe after I build a new (quiet) computer. I just priced an Athlon XP "Barton" 2800+ with Alpha PAL8045T, 512MB, 80GB Seagate SATA, D8000, Fortron w/ 120mm, etc. at about $1300... The DVD/CD-RW (Samsung) and the V.92 modem (3Com) both are supported in Linux and Windows and I'm comprimising on a Matrox G550 -- I really like dual head monitors, and it too is well supported in Linux and Win2K.

Now if I could only afford those two Samsung 191t's. ($815 each at New Egg). These are *very* nice and the frame is the narrowest that I have ever seen, so having two of them side by side has only a small separation between the screens. Sorry to have veered of topic.

Won't a program like this raise the idle temp of your computer? Seems contrary to the silent computer idea.

Silent or not, we build computers to *use* them, right? Any computer can be silent if it's turned off all the time, and an idle computer is about as useful as one left off. Except for to take messages for me while I'm away, I suppose.

It's nice to have my system still be productive when I'm not actively running games on it. And if a quiet (if not silent) computer isn't quiet enough under full load, it probably isn't quiet enough, period. YMMV.

FYI, F@M does raise my "idle" temps (due to 100% CPU usage), but it's still a few degrees cooler than when I'm running a 3D game. I can't hear any noise difference with F@M on/off, but the only temperature-sensitive fan in my case is in my Nexus (the Panaflos are locked at 5V).

Admittedly, F@H raises temps on my machine up to 5C over idle. Prolly even more if I used cpuidle. Even with this temp increase, it's really not that hard nowadays to build a fast uni-proc or even a SMP machine that is virtually silent. I mean like <=20dB @ 1m silent.

Come on everybody! Let's make it a team effort! I'm sure so many of you leave your computers on 24/7 and have o-so much untapped computing power! It's cool to be able to boast to friends and family that your computer is on all the time, busy w/ cancer research AND silent?

I game on my iBook now, so I have my webserver to do folding! It's on and working now.

It crashes whenever I try to open display mode though...so I'm not sure if it's actually doing anything

EDIT: My temps went up 9C over idle...it's working all right!

What is the X/600 thing? The FAQ doesn't say what it is...

Ok, it's mostly working now. I calculated that I should be done with my first work unit in 19 hours...

Yes, my computer is a dog. And no it isn't silent (yet). Thanks for rubbing it in my face.

*sob* *sob* *sniff*

I anticipate my first work unit done...oh...about May.

It's not a huge deal--I'm a pretty slow folder too. Even with my computer on 24/7, it took me 2-3 days to log my first WU in for the team. I blame Europa Universalis 2 and Freelancer.

Slow and steady wins the r-- well, no, actually it doesn't. But at least CPU cycles won't go through waste via idling. And that's a good thing, right?

Add my idle duelies to the effort as well. My pc is so blissfully quiet now because of this site, this is a great way to say thanks!

I should have something done in a day or two.

Fredster...

Well I'm glad to see some life out there.
Fold on!

I would fold, but it seems that my system hopelessly maims the popup labels in explorer as a result. This is very annoying, and is consistent with different versions. Does anybody else have this problem too and/or knows the fix?

Thanks for joining. I'd be really interested to see your setup. Care to put some pix in the general gallery?

70% done with my first WU...should be done by the time I get home...

I wish the work units were a little smaller. I know that puts more load on the servers receiving the results, but an all-night run only got me to 100 of 600 iterations in a WU.

At least you can resume a WU in progress.

I have my DigiDoc 5 set with low thresholds so I'll catch a problem before it gets out of hand, so I don't like to leave the thing running when I'm not home. Maybe when I get a fire-retardant baffle-- my current one is made of foam core.

That brings up something that's been bothering me-- no fire ratings for some of the sound absorbent materials. Acousti's own site mentions fire ratings, but some of their resellers don't. I have no idea about the urethane mattress open-cell foam I'm using (which works despite the low density due to copious use) and the cork can't be safe.

I noticed that Folding warms the CPU, but not the north bridge compared with Prime95. I'm guessing this is because of heavier memory usage by Prime95. In any case, it's nice to test long term heat-handling with low-volt fans with something that's actually useful.

As my system becomes better at handling heat, it gets harder to test. WIth an SLK-900 on my Athlon, it takes forever for an idle->maxed temperature rise to stabilize. About 20 minutes now with my 92mm L1A @ 1000 RPM.

-M

Sure, I think I can scrounge a camera somewhere. Possibly next week. I've got almost the same setup as you - same case and mb anyway, although I'm running 1000 MPs (darn budgets!) and SCSI drives. I was very happy to find your article in particular.

Fredster...

Put in my first WU! 6 people total on the SCPR team have put up a WU...twice what it was a day or two a go. Not bad!
45/400 for my next WU...

All right, count me in. Let's see what I can get out of my machines until they burn down

Hello:

I'm curious; is Folding@Home a non-profit organisation?

And, I'm sure I can find it in a Google search -- but can someone post a URL or 3 about Folding@Home? [edit] D'oh! I missed it! And, I've decided to give it a whirl -- I guess I'm a sucker for distributed computing. My Athlon 700 "Classic" is crunching away here in Linux as I type.

TIA

Neil: Powergyoza's first post in this thread has a link to the Stanford web page. As far as I understand it, F@H is not for profit. They're researching protein folding. But there's some more info on the Stanford site.

Hello:

Now that I'm running the Folding@Home Linux console, I have some questions: How many "frames" are in a (typical?) work unit? [edit] The one I'm working on now has 400 frames.

How long does your computer take to complete a (typical?) work unit, and what is your hardware? [edit] This first unit that is crunching now will take this machine approximately 60 hours to complete! [/edit] Is this a cache intensive client or does it run as well on small caches as it does on 512KB or bigger?

Is the Linux console faster than the Windows? Is there a difference between the three Windows clients in terms of speed? I'm running the Linux console on my Athlon 700 "Classic", and in roughly 14 hours it has comleted 92 frames. And is there a program that monitors the F@H client and logs the times and stats?

One last question: if you shut the client down, does it restart at the beginning of that frame, or does it pick things up precisely where it left off?

Can you explain what you mean by that?

I can only answer some of those questions, Neil. Someone else will have to tackel the rest.

The work units are of different sizes. Some seem twice as big as others. I've seen both 100 and 200 frames in WUs.

I have an AMD 800, and it takes me 24-48 hours to complete WUs, if I leave it on all night.

No clue about the rest of your questions. There's a bit of information at the Folding for the [H]orde page which you can find on [H}ard|OCP somewhere.

Hello WussBoy:



Which client version are you running and what OS are you using? I guess my 400 frame work unit is pretty darn BIG!

If you are taking roughly 24 hours/100 frames, and the Linux client on my Athlon 700 seems to be taking ~15.5 hours/100 frames -- it seems the Linux client is faster; not too shabby to be ~25% faster on a 12.5% slower machine!