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

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rpc180
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Post by rpc180 » Wed May 07, 2003 3:19 pm

Farms, Shrubbery, Folding? Could this sound any LESS scientific? :wink: Don't forget, the estimated overtake is if all variables remain constant. If they get more members, run their machines 24/7, etc ... it all changes :shock:

Zhentar
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Post by Zhentar » Wed May 07, 2003 7:23 pm

My comp is back up after no less than 4 days of downtime trying to get the new hard drive set up :) YaY 3 procs again.

Poor laptop....

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Post by Wrah » Thu May 08, 2003 2:23 am

One or 2 updates later and The Knights are now going to overtake us already in August..

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[size=24][b]We need more people folding!!!![/b][/size]

Post by dukla2000 » Thu May 08, 2003 3:29 am

Zhentar wrote:My comp is back up after no less than 4 days of downtime trying to get the new hard drive set up
:roll: I strongly urge you take another day to check things out properly before firing up the Folding. (Will also give me a chance to get some clear water between us! :wink: )
Wrah wrote:The Knights are now going to overtake us already in August..
Yeah - last week we were going over 3000 points/day, now we are dropping back towards 2500 :cry:

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 5:50 am

Question, I am on the east coast, NY and NJ, and we have a lot of brief power outages. You know like for less than a second, just enough to have to reset the clock on the VCR and the microwave. How do you deal with that, or don't you deal with it at all?

Also are you connected to the internet the whole time you're folding? Or just at the beginning and at the end of a work unit?

Yes I will go over there and look.

rpc180
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Post by rpc180 » Thu May 08, 2003 5:55 am

You get brownouts? I'm on LI, we're pretty stable unless its thunderstorming out. I guess those are pretty frequent in the summer months ... onto your other question. I'm connected 24/7, its serious Matrix at my house, but folding only requires net access to download a WU and upload the results (15-30secs / WU).

aristide1
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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 6:04 am

More brownouts in summer than winter. In the summer the occaisional voltage sag as well, when all the lights dim for a second or 2.

Central Hudson and PSE&G, yuck!

Thanks.

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Post by dgouldin » Thu May 08, 2003 6:58 am

Sounds to me like you need to connect all your electronic devices up to a UPS. Most of them can supply power for at least 30 minutes, so a couple of seconds would be a piece of cake.

http://www.apcc.com/

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Ya' gotta' have a "UPS"

Post by NeilBlanchard » Thu May 08, 2003 6:59 am

Hello:

If you run a computer for even just part of the day and you do anything that you don't want to lose, I highly recommend using a uninterruptable power supply (aka UPS)! It also can protect your equipment like modems and anything else that can be blown by a power surge or brown/blackout, as well as your data, and even the inexpensive ones often have a USB connection to safely shut down your machine if you are away during a power outage. I only paid $45 for a 500va (300watt) model from APC at BJ's Wholesale Club. Win2K and WinXP have built in power management that allow you to go into hibernation at a certain battery level. So, you can work through any momentary blips or blackouts up to about 10-15 minutes long, depending on the draw of your system (LCD monitors help a lot here).

aristide1
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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 8:03 am

Quote from the folding website instructions:
Note: Windows 2000/NT/XP users should use a separate screensaver-only version of Folding@home (see below) if they require screensaver functionality. If you do not require the screensaver functionality, just install the client and start folding!
OK, but The only Window's 2000 option is the screensaver. See?
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html I should pic the first one, right? It says all versions, but the 2000 symbol is not there.

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Post by Rusty075 » Thu May 08, 2003 8:36 am

No, I'd pick the 3rd one. The " "No-nonsense" text-only console"

Doesn't have the pretty pictures of the graphical client, but it's faster, and it tells you useful information about what its doing. Makes trouble-shooting alot easier.

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 8:52 am

No, I'd pick the 3rd one. The " "No-nonsense" text-only console"
That's the only one that doesn't mention W2K at all, either with the symbol or saying it's for "all versions".

I'm bring careful cause I'm gifted, if only 1 doesn't work I am sure to find it.

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Post by Rusty075 » Thu May 08, 2003 9:26 am

Option#3: "Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP "No-nonsense" text-only console" Looks like it mentions W2K to me :wink:

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 9:43 am

Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP "No-nonsense" text-only console
Oh for Pete's sake, the "/2000/x" part is behind the Windows symbol. Once I did a copy and paste I picked it up.

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Post by herosformula » Thu May 08, 2003 11:37 am

Before they changed the format, I was watching the Knights. They had a couple of days that were posting 5400 points / day.

Zhentar
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Post by Zhentar » Thu May 08, 2003 1:46 pm

you can still see other pages, its like a forum at the bottom right :)

Turns out my laptops been trying to send a WU since yesterday morning! I lost the WU, but at least it works now. Man, I'm losing places fast....

And dukla- the difficulty was figuring out how to clone things I wanted to and having difficulty with the packaged maxtor utility.

I've got a perfectly working clone of my old windows now :)

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 4:35 pm

OK so I downloaded the CLI version and it went out and got the exe and apparently it went out and got a work unit as well. I didn't change any settings. So now I just d-click the exe and go?

Besides that I just finished some major hardware changes, which includes a new processor, SLK-800 with a slow fan, and no intake fan. I've run Prime95 for about 3 hours, cpu temps stayed glued at 47C. I want to run it longer first before I try a work unit.

Can I stop in the middle of a work unit?

Getting more memory this w/e as well, so Monday's a good time to start folding.

Aris

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 5:38 pm

OK OK, so I wanted to do it, and I started it. My CPU usage reading on task manager is 100%, 4 frames done, 396 to go. If they're 6 minutes each that's 2400 minutes = 20 hours. Ugh.

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Post by rpc180 » Thu May 08, 2003 5:48 pm

P4 Processor? Seriously, go with the -advmeathods and -forceasm tags for the program... Gromacs cores are specialized for P4 instructions... Tinker cores are faster on AMD chips due to their 6 pipelined instructions vs P4 4. 6 minutes a frame is what I get at 2.2GHz on a P4.

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Post by aristide1 » Thu May 08, 2003 7:15 pm

I got a PIII and I'm stuck on frame 14.....wha?.... wait a minute......for some reason 6 frames just got marked completed all at once. OK so that's 20 frames in 2 hours 30 minutes. No I'm not in your league. Oh well.

My temps just sit there. 41C cpu and 30C board, 36C hard drive, after 2.5 hours of this. Things could be worse.

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Post by rpc180 » Thu May 08, 2003 7:43 pm

actually, the math shows that you're doing a frame in 4.5 minutes :) That sounds fine for a Tinker core on a Pentium III.

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Post by aristide1 » Fri May 09, 2003 7:30 am

actually, the math shows that you're doing a frame in 4.5 minutes
Oh I wish, but it's 2.5 hours * 60 minutes = 150 minutes, divided by 20 frames = 7.5 minutes/frame.

Up to 150 frames now, figure I'll be done this time tomorrow.

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Post by Wrah » Fri May 09, 2003 8:14 am

7.5 minutes looks normal to me. I got a few p3-866 running and they need about 10-12 mins per frame, depending on the project. I also have a p3-450 and that one needs 18 mins.

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Post by aristide1 » Fri May 09, 2003 8:21 am

I'm going from CAS 3 to CAS 2 memory next week, I'll see if it gets any better.

I have 256MB of memory now, and it's not using all of it. Interesting.

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Post by Wrah » Fri May 09, 2003 8:37 am

I would be very interested to hear back from you if the cas2 made any difference.

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Post by rpc180 » Fri May 09, 2003 9:20 am

oops, my bad, I calculated 2.5 hours into 90 minutes (1.5 hours) :oops: and I thought I went to college ...

I recently dropped my ram to 2, kicked about 10-20 seconds per frame ... extrapolated, 10 sec * 100 frames (gromacs) = 1000 / 60 = 16.7 minutes speed up. Or 20 secs -> ~30 minutes speed up. I hope my math is right for that one, otherwise its time to study for the GREs ...

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RAM latency

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri May 09, 2003 9:41 am

Hello:

As I understand it, since today's CPU's run at such high multiples of the FSB, that RAM latency is very important. Running CAS2 instead of CAS2.5 can be like a couple of hundred mHz. And DDR RAM supports only CAS2.5 and CAS2 -- CAS3 and CAS1.5 are not "real" latencies. If you're interested, there is a new RAM review over at Lost Circuits: http://www.lostcircuits.com/memory/ddr400/ that gets into latencies, and also into SPD. The bottom line is, you need to set the latency manually in order to know that you are running at CAS2, since the SPD is often wrong or it is interpreted incorrectly by the motherboard.

My APacer PC2100 CAS2 RAM is still running at CAS2 "Turbo" at 308mHz (DDR) which is a 15% overclock. Not bad for $29 sticks of 256MB RAM! :D It does not make it much higher at minimum latency, and as the Lost Circuits article mentions, it is better to run CAS2 at a lower frequency, than it is to run CAS2.5 at a higher frequency. Unless you just want bragging rights for running a higher number... :shock:

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Post by Wrah » Fri May 09, 2003 12:56 pm

Well, I was just curious as to how much particulary the fahcore benefits from faster ram. It could be that it's leaning mostly on the cpu cache.

Right now all my pc's run on standard cas3 sdr. If fah likes faster ram a lot, I'll be the at the shop the next day buying a nforce2 mobo with dual DDR channels. :mrgreen:
And the thought of building a farm (one step at a time) is still running around in my mind. (as I'm typing this I'm taking my first steps into linux which I'll need for diskless boot). The ECS mAtx board I have in mind for it accepts both SDR and DDR. I got some SDR lying around, can buy cheap slow DDR or more expensive fast DDR. I'm not sure what's the best buy. 30 mins speedup is nice though.

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I'm not sure whether it is cache or latency or bandwidth...

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri May 09, 2003 8:11 pm

Hello:

If F@H likes cache, then a Barton XP 2500+ should beat a Throughbred XP 2600+. Does anybody have these 2 and can compare them? If it's latency dependent, then CAS2 beats CAS2.5 by a big margin -- I might be able to test this. But not for too long... :P

I tend to think that it is not bandwidth dependent, but this would be tougher to test, since PC2700 is also lower latency than PC2100 -- because it runs at a faster clockspeed. Maybe the only way to try out for bandwidth is to run a single channel vs dual channels on an nForce or nForce2 motherboard. Another way would be to use an AGP video card on an nForce board with integrated video. I would do this, except there is a bug when I use an ATi Radeon on my nForce mobo: the FSB clock drops to 100mHz no matter what I set it at! :evil:

I will say that on my two nearly identical machines, the one with the least stuff running in the system tray, runs F@H about 2-4% faster! No Zone Alarm Pro, no Electron Microscope, no scanner software, no MailWasher...both do run antivirus, keyboard drivers, and I'm sure several other things. I'm running Win2K, BTW.

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