Posted on 01/02/2006 9:53:26 AM PST by systematic
New thread for this week.
Congrats to all new members who joined this week!
We've made excellent progress so far and have smoked the DUmmies and Kossacks. Let's keep folding!
Sounds good to me. :o)
As an aside, I've had some issues with FAH getting WUs to their computers, but they all seem to eventually get accepted. For the Win98 computers, I usually make a copy of the folding@home directory [and subdirectories] periodically in case the machine crashes before it's done or while sending the data back. I lost a fair number of hours of processing time before I started doing my own interim backups. W2k and XP haven't crashed yet.
From what I've read, whenever you upload a work unit to Stanford, it is immediately credited to you, on whatever server, that assigned you that workorder. The process is, at the top of the hour, the "stats" server, polls the Work servers, and collects information on workunits. That is compiled into one text file, that usually shows up on the Stanford F@H stats page for your team, about 15-20 minutes past the hour, depending on how many updates were done.
In order to validate the data, and make sure any erroneous information isn't released, Stanford makes these text files available, every 3 hours, which means that for sites like EOC, or FAHstats, the stats are at least 1, sometimes 2 hours old.
Oftentimes, there is slippage, say for example Stanford is still processing an extremely large update at 12:00, the text file is not yet released, but the third party (EOC), checks in, see's if there is an update, there's not, and then continues on.
Jim,
Please publibically state your opinion on FR folders. You have a group of Freepers who have dedicated their spare CPUs to folding proteins. Currently, there is about 250 freepers or so who are doing this, we're crushing DUers and KOSers. We've had a moderator spike our thread from technical.
Please give your opinion on this project. Either is something to support on FR or not. If it's not a supportable project, let us 250ish freepers know so we can abandon this one or not. I and many other think it's a very worthy project to support, but if mods intend to spike it per your directive, we can go away.
We need you to comment on it. Thanks.
Realize too, that the EOC website, is NOT an official Stanford sanctioned site, the statistics that you get there, are merely a service that the board made to it's team members, and then, made public.
Processing time is relative. The Stanford site, merely is presenting the data,in a straight format. The EOC site, takes longer to process, because it's giving you a much more complex look, at the relationships... ie, the overtakes, +/- gains, etc, etc. That all takes processing time, much more than simply listing entries, in a descending order.
No offense, but you're reading too WAAAAAY much into the mods' move. I would've asked the Admin Moderators their reasoning first.
OK, back to the technical "stuff"... I have a question on "power options" for overnight running. At the risk of making it obvious I slept thru my A+ class, when running my 'puter overnight, what power setting should I use, other than shutting down my monitor? Can I turn off the hard drive? Go to standby? (For those who are wondering what I babbling about, in XP you can power down parts of your 'puter to save energy)
I know absolutely nothing about it.
Jim
Hmmm... good question. Obviously, if the computer goes into Standby, or Hibernation, it is not going to process F@Home workunits. That might be a neat experiment to try, to see if Hibernation or Standby will actually work, when F@Home has your CPU pegged. I keep mine disabled, because I have a few other programs, that don't play nice with Hib/Stby, and if I invoke those modes, I get the blue screen.
As for shutting down the hard drive, F@H doesn't use "that much" disk space, but it does swap the .dat files in and out, but again, I think that the process would wake the hard drive up, as necessary.
I don't know how often this "swap" takes place, but it does take a few seconds for a HD to come out of sleep, so multiply how many times it's called up, x (a few seconds), and you will reach a number that is a credible slowdown.
ie.. What is the sound of one hand clapping... ?
Jim,
Ok, I can understand that. here's the short of it. Many Freepers have joined up to help fold protiens. That means while your cpu is idle it folds protiens. This is about solving disease. We've been trying to encourage folks to join and at this point, Free Republic is essentially in the top 100 as far as contributions. It will only get better. My particular issue is that our thread on it was spiked for no reason.
JR doesn't seem to care. In the light of that Klutz_Dohanger's suggestion is excellent. Otherwise, I don't want to find out what happens when JR's forced to care...
He responded to me. I think he's not been aware of our effort. We'll see :)
I agree. Just post normal threads under Culture/Society. Maybe use the announcements highlight when we hit a milestone. Did anyone ask the SB moderator why the post was moved?
I pinged the SB moderator a long while ago...the new thread got pulled.
I wouldn't open my CPU to anyone. Have no idea what this is all about, but doesn't pass the smell test. CPU power is cheap.
Jim- The Folding @ Home project is a well known and well established program. It passes the "smell test" by the company it keeps. Might I suggest a short tour an overview of their home page? http://folding.stanford.edu/
CPU power's cheap, but add them up... a hundred thousand CPUs there, another hundred thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. And, indeed, there are over a million CPUs involved here, which is why it is impressive that we've gotten into the top 850.
Think of it as SETI, except it actually does something worthwhile. It's a Stanford project that seeks to simulate protein behavior, in hopes of knowing the dynamics of mutation (such as in Alzheimer's and Mad Cow Disease) in hopes of developing a way to arrest it. http://folding.stanford.edu
It's legit and I'll place my computer science education, and far more importantly, my word behind this.
Oh, and by the way... no one's asking you to open up your CPUs; Malsua was just asking about the appropriateness of these threads for certain forum topics. Some of us have offered suggestions like in #179 and #194. :o)
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