Folding@Home - The Race For 50 Million!

Folding@Home Forum ^ | 04/22/2008 | Vijay Pande

[texas booster]

In the near future, we will be releasing some new projects which require a very rapid turn-around time. These are peptide fragment simulations which we are interested in simulating for a time-sensitive collaborative project involving protein structure prediction.

These WUs will go directly to the classic clients running with -advmethods. Non-classic clients (eg SMP, GPU, PS3) will not be affected, as all of these calculations will be run via the AMBER core and only the classic client supports the AMBER core.

To reward users for participating in this exciting project, we will be giving a x1.5 bonus in the points awarded. What's the catch? These projects will be less rigorously beta tested, so there will be an increased risk of Early_Unit_End errors. We believe the risk of this is minor (there will likely be a higher rate of early unit ends, especially very early in the WU, but we do not expect client machines to become significantly less stable). However, if you do not wish to participate in this project, just remove the -advmethods setting from your client.

This will not last forever and will likely go back to normal -advmethods usage in a few months. With that said, we do plan other uses for -adv in the future.

Note: the text was updated to clarify that this is classic clients only.

[Drango]

Friday night folding for the Gipper bump!

[Oshkalaboomboom]

I guess I won't know if the switches actually work on the AMBER core until I start my next work unit, I figured this out in the middle of a run.

I am now running a new WU and it is on the AMBER core, whoopee!!

[texas booster]

Thank you for joining the Folding team.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

I am now running a new WU and it is on the AMBER core, whoopee!!

Of course I'm getting the same amount of points I was getting in the Gromacs core so perhaps they haven't started that 1.5x bonus yet. How can I tell if the -advmethods switch is actually getting me a high value WU, or all all Amber core WU's high value?

[texas booster]

Did you ever finish that Amber core?

Most of my runs have been GROMACS lately.

[JosephW]

Happy 4th Texas Booster!

You’re slowly catching up to me, but I’ve just started a little upgrade cycle, so I may begin to pull away again.

You should be hitting 2 Million points by the end of the month. What are you running as systems?

[colinhester]

Here are a few lines from my “log file.” Looks like the switches worked. I’m going to let this cycle finish before installing on my other machines. I hope this speeds up my progrees a bit. It’s hard to believe I’m pushing top 2% of all folders, but barely on the radar in this crowd......Colin

Launch directory: C:\Program Files\Folding@Home
Arguments: -local -verbosity 9 -advmethods

[06:50:30] - Ask before connecting: No
[06:50:30] - User name: colinhester (Team 36120)
[06:50:31] - User ID: 3C9E62717F93B887
[06:50:31] - Machine ID: 1
[06:50:31]
[06:50:31] Loaded queue successfully.
[06:50:31] Initialization complete
[06:50:31] + Benchmarking ...
[06:50:35] The benchmark result is 3472
[06:50:36]
[06:50:36] + Processing work unit
[06:50:36] - Autosending finished units...
[06:50:36] Trying to send all finished work units
[06:50:36] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[06:50:36] - Autosend completed
[06:50:36] Core required: FahCore_7c.exe
[06:50:36] Core found.
[06:50:36] Working on Unit 09 [July 7 06:50:36]
[06:50:36] + Working ...
[06:50:36] - Calling ‘FahCore_7c.exe -dir work/ -suffix 09 -checkpoint 15 -verbose -lifeline 1760 -version 503’

[texas booster]

Mostly single core P4 processors running the console version.

Lots of AMD, two dual core units and one new GPU, the ATI 2450.

Its hard to find time to even upgrade any more.

[colinhester]

Just added a 3.0GHz dual core to the mix. Hope I can finally get some decent numbers.

Like I said in my last post: this is one tough crowd!!

[JosephW]

Not a tough crowd a fun one.

It’s easy to climb up the ranks until you get near the top and then things slow, but it’s fun and lots of support available. TexasBooster is a great help to anyone, and I’ve been know to give a helping hand here and there.

A lot of good work being done and we Freepers prove that charity works, and we show who gives to charity and who doesn’t (here’s a hint - look at DUs numbers).

[colinhester]

Fun crowd? YES! Tough crowd? Heck yeah. Wouldn’t have it any other way. This project is for a very good cause, but it’s also forcing me to learn about the technology, which is real funny since I used to work in semiconductor fabrication. I’m just waiting for the octal cores to roll out....

I appreciate everyone who’s answered my stupid queations along the way. Thanks to all.....Colin

[texas booster]

Are you running SMP on the dual core or two console projects?

I have had good points off just a cheap ATI 2450 card. I am looking forward to upgrading to one of the new ATI cards that should come out in late August. Some of the high end ATI and NVidia GPU cards are pushing 4000 points per day.

[colinhester]

For what ever reason I could not get SMP to load, so I’m running two console versions. I doubt I’ll add a video card to this machine; it’s for the kids. But yeah, you’re right about some users pulling down some serious ppd. I’ve been lurking over at the overclosckers forum, and some of those people are computing from a different world......C

[texas booster]

I have had challenges getting SMP folding to work on a Windows system. Finally just gave up and went back to console folding. Reliable, quick, lots of good science, just not as many points.

Prices are dropping like crazy on the new video cards. It adds a lot of punch to a normal system, especially on games. Look around for ATI38xx series cards in a month for under $100.

Wish I had the time to play like I used to. The Extremeoverclockers forum is a great place to learn.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/f45.html

[colinhester]

Texas Booster, Here’s a question: How much, if any, does a video card help when running a console version?...C

[texas booster]

The console version is heavily dependent on the processor, and not very much dependent on the video card.

Console F@H is optimized to take advantage of the very fast interconnects inside a CPU, and the GPU F@H is heavily dependent on the very fast interconnects inside a GPU.

The newest Penryns are blazingly fast for F@H because the chips are fairly efficient at crunching the F@H code, but the real speed comes from the 6 - 12 MBs of level 1 and 2 cache that is found inside the chip die.

It does help that the NVidia GPU has 1.4 Billion transistors inside the GPU. Think of GPUs as very specialized CPUs with tons of interconnects and specialty registers (about 800 on the latest ATI GPU).

Here is a comment from Dr Pande regarding the SMP F@H, to illustrate the speed issues with SMP.

"There was a good question in the forum that I thought others would be curious to hear:

From Vijay's blog entries it would seem that the SMP client has some fundamental advantages over running multiple singlecore client, but I can't really think of how that might be. Do you know of some architectural overview of how the MPI stuff is being used in this context?

We could just run multiple independent clients, but this would be throwing away a lot of power. What makes an SMP machine special is that it is more than just the sum of the individual parts (CPU cores), since those cores can talk to each other very fast. In FAH, machines talk to each other when they return WUs to a central server, say once a day. On SMP this happens once a millisecond or so (or faster). That 86,000,000x speed up in communication can be very useful, even if there isn't 100% utilization in the cores themselves.

The easy route would have been to run multiple single-CPU FAH-cores (this is what other projects do), but that would be a big loss for the science, as this throws away a very, very powerful resource (fast interconnects between CPUs). Indeed, it is this sort of fast interconnect which makes a supercomputer "super", since the CPUs in supercomputers (eg BlueGene) are pretty slow, but the communication between cores is very, very fast.

We've done a lot to develop algorithms for FAH-style internet connections between CPUs, but there are some calculations which require fast interconnects, and that's where the FAH/SMP client is particularly important. By allowing us to do calculations that we couldn't do otherwise, the science is pushed forward significantly (and we thus reward SMP donors with a points bonus due to this extra science done and the extra hassle involved in running the SMP client).

I guess it remains to be seen if we can pull off MPI on FAH to the point where it works effortlessly, but so far Lin and OSX look pretty good, so we're close. The A2 core should hopefully seal the deal. Now, the main task is getting Windows/SMP behaving well ..."

[houeto]

Most of all, if you have upgraded to a new system and didn't reinstall F@H please follow the thread and let us help you get folding again.

I upgraded to a new duel core processor and re-installed F@H. I set the CPU usage to 100% but it is only using 50%. Strange. Guess I don't understand how the duel core machines work.

Also, I get core download errors that sometimes last for days before it will take off working! That is killing my production.

This note is to all on the thread. If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated.

[texas booster]

Dual core systems will run a kernel in just one of the cores. Even at 100%, Windows will report your usage at 50% since the other core is not working except for background stuff.

I create two folders, F@H1 and F@H2. Copy the same console version 5.04 into each folder. Run the first console kernel just like normal, but make sure that you chose “yes” for “Change Advanced Options”.

Inside Advanced Options you can adjust as you like, but the very last choice is “Machine ID:”.

F@H1 Folder becomes Machine ID 1, and F@H2 folder becomes Machine ID 2.

In your case, treat the existing folder as F@H1. Create a second folder (F@H2) and copy the console 5.04 into that. Run it as normal, but choose Advanced Options and set this folding kernel as Machine ID 2.

Always set the console to run as a service. This way your dual core will fold even if you don't login.

For more information on the individual switches inside the console look here:

http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

***************

Now, you can get more points from running the beta work units v6, but they require more maintenance. I seldom run betas anymore since I travel so much, and I don't want to lose a week folding if a beta expires or has trouble.

Follow the above steps, just download and run the v6 console. However, do it after August 3, when a new beta is to be released.

See

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther

[houeto]

Thank you sir.

[texas booster]

Let me know houe it goes ...