Anyone out there Folding@Home?

I have a utility that shows me the temperature of the CPUs. I do not know how to set the BIOS to down-clock them based on temperature.

I run an iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and Mac OS X 10.4.10

 

Just like Fred's House of Pancakes, there should be a separate forum just for PriusChat Folding.

Then we could have stickies for explaining how to setup.
Each user could post his own personal setup / rig.

I think the worldwide publicity for team PriusChat is very good for this site, we're solidly in the Top 500 teams.

I agree we need lots of people doing this.

 

The Stats of Kakao are fun to look at.

Just this we should crunch for at least 224,000 points. We're overtaking so many teams, I think we'll be in the top 250 before the end of September.

I'll be top 10 this week, after which is a slow grind to catch up to the top 3.
ClearView22 is actually going to be #1 soon.

On Monday I beat my previous record, 11,571, thanks to those additional P4's I brought online.

Time to recruit some more machines...
Or build a monster !!! Check This Out

 

Our PriusChat team has broken into the top 400 teams at Folding at Home! Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

 

Great! Now onward for # 350...

 

I came across this 'recruiting' video in the Folding@Home Community forum:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jv9UdMNkN74

It's for the Folding Frogs team rather than our own PriusChat team, but it's very informative. Can anyone put together something like this as a recruiting tool for our team?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jeannie @ Sep 6 2007, 06:22 AM) [snapback]507890[/snapback]</div>

That's an excellent and very professional-looking video. I'll be very impressed if anyone here can match it. But I also know that we have some very talented folks on PC. And one more folding promo on YouTube wouldn't hurt.

 

I find it sad there aren't more people folding.

It's so easy to setup and use, and you see zero impact with your computer. I've even played some games at the same time and notice ZERO difference.

We simply need more publicity on the board...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Sep 6 2007, 01:22 PM) [snapback]507979[/snapback]</div>

Was this with using the SMP client on dual-core machines? If so, you could try switching to the regular GUI client - then you'd only be using one of the cores for Folding, so that will slow down the disk accesses. You'd still be contributing; you just wouldn't be accessing the larger work units that SMP can crunch.

The Windows GUI client is very simple to set up - you download it and then execute the downloaded file. It will ask you for a user name and team number, then start up. You'll see it as an icon in your system tray. If you left-click on the icon, it brings up a window showing your progress, estimated finish date, etc. If you right-click on it, you can choose the 'configure' option (in case you need to change your user name or team number).

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Sep 6 2007, 03:16 PM) [snapback]508065[/snapback]</div>

I'm running the basic Windows Gui on my laptop with XP, and running two Windows Clients on my older desktop with XP with no problems (unless I lose my Internet connection just before a Work Unit finishes - sometimes it recovers ok and is able to send the finished work unit, but once in a while it just gives up on sending the work unit and starts a new one when the Internet connection is restored.)

My guess would be that the problem is something in Vista reacting badly with the screensaver. In the two months I've owned a Vista machine, the screensaver has randomly stopped working about half a dozen times and I wind up in a 'Windows cannot start correctly and will attempt to fix itself' about half a dozen times when I reboot (some of them before I started folding on the Vista machine). And that's not counting the other half dozen times it won't reboot properly after a Vista update, requiring another 'repair'. My mantra is 'someday Vista will be stable'!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Sep 4 2007, 08:29 PM) [snapback]507015[/snapback]</div>

Haven't thought this through besides "I want one too" but how many PPD would one fetch on something like this? I'm too lazy to do math tonight. (Also just read that materials have since dropped to 1200-1300 dollars since they first built it....)

 

For folding something simpler will do the trick, as there is no huge datapipe between the nodes when folding.

The only savings are from booting all four nodes off a single hard disk.

Linux is nice in being able to boot a kernel over a network (bootstrap). We used to have PC's with no hard disks in the early 90's.
Same technology, so can save $$$ on just 1 floppy, 1 hard disk, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse.

For SMP, there's a limit to how many can run in one virtual server.
Also, when virtualizing on a cluster with nodes, you get redundancy - not extra speed. In a virtual server you only get 4 cpu's.

If your cluster has 16 cpu's, you can run 4 virtuals of 4 cpu's.

So what's the point if each node already has 2 or 4 cpu's? Might as well keep them separate.
Also virtualizing steals CPU cycles.

So if you have four single cpu PC's and cluster/network them, you can have a 4 cpu virtual - with a net output LESS than if you crunch independently, in parallel, on each computer.

However for hosting a web application, one machine dies, your website still lives, it's just 3 cpu's instead of 4.

So the real innovation is having 1 master Ubuntu machine and multiple slave nodes that boot off the network and start crunching.
Only 1 network card (on board) required, so it costs even less than the Microwulf.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Sep 6 2007, 03:16 PM) [snapback]508065[/snapback]</div>

Geez, I was about to post on how you must have old machines. Weird.
The folding ONLY uses idle cpu cycles and some memory, nearly Zero hard disk I/O.
On my laptop, GUI version, it's using 108k and 50% (one out of the two CPU's).

Tonight I secretly installed the GUI on my son's dual-core AMD 3800+ w/2gigs ram, and he plays WOW in very high resolutions. No complaints !
One extra CPU for the team!

Cool, I made the Top 10 tonight !!! Total points in 1 day of 11,571 is going to be hard to beat even by me, looks like my daily average will be around 9k per day, just over 1k higher than ClearView22.

ClearView22 is using less than half the CPU's I'm using with nearly the same results. So he has good gear.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mark Derail @ Sep 6 2007, 11:49 PM) [snapback]508345[/snapback]</div>

I'm running folding on 2 XP machines (older models), 1 with the Gui and 1 with the client, and running SMP on my new VISTA AMD 64x2 5000 machine.

Both my XP machines have LED's blinking fairly often indicating some disk activity, and the VISTA machine has an LED blinking VERY rapidly indicating some disk activity. But the performance monitor (or resource utility? I forget which it is, and I'm on one of the XP machines now) shows that I'm actually not using anywhere near as much disk resource as I thought, considering the rapid blinking of the LED. So I can understand that Evan decided not to pursue 'folding' on his 2 VISTA machines for fear he was over-using the disk.

(BTW, I'm using a 2GB 'fast' SD card as a 'ready boost' drive, which probably isn't really helping much since I've already got 3 megabytes of memory!)

None of my machines seem to get particularly 'hot' based on my low-tech hand touching the skins of the computers and feeling the air flow from the fans (although my laptop got very warm without even doing folding until I put it into a docking station, where the bottom of the laptop is now elevated, rather than sitting directly on the desk surface). I don't know of any temperature sensing devices on any of these three computers, but I know from reading some of the Folding@Home community forums that some people who are a lot more 'techy' than I am have added extra cooling fans and sensors to their computers, especially when running the beta version with an ATI graphics card. I don't play computer games; my VISTA machine would need a better power supply and probably cooling 'stuff' if I were to get a graphics card just to have a DVI input for my monitor, and I don't have the knowledge or skills required to start tearing my computer apart and replace/add 'stuff' to it. So I guess I'm just fortunate that I don't seem to have any 'overheating' issues (and I'm not going to try to learn anything about 'overclocking' at this point in my life!)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jeannie @ Sep 8 2007, 10:39 PM) [snapback]509405[/snapback]</div>

I run a little utility on my iMac that tells me the temperature of each of the two cores. They get pretty hot when I'm folding. I'd imagine there'd be a similar utility for a PC.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Sep 9 2007, 01:57 AM) [snapback]509413[/snapback]</div>

I assume it depends on whether there are temperature sensors on the motherboard, and I'll admit total ignorance! Mark mentioned looking at the BIOS, and I've never looked at the BIOS on this machine, because I don't know what I'm doing.

Are you running a quad core or a dual core MAC, Daniel? I know the MACs are now run with Intel chips, and I read somewhere that the Intel processors for WINDOWS run hotter than the equivalent AMD processors, but I don't know if that applies with MACs (comparing apples with lemons?)