Posted on 11/19/2006 8:46:45 AM PST by texas booster
Time for a new Free Republic folding@home thread.
Our Free Republic team of 402 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).
Currently, the team is in 60th place (with 1,052 active CPUs - 82,250 completed Work Units and 15.4 million points).
This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the links posted below (or read one of the previous 20+ folding threads)
Oh and is there an FAQ page for setting advanced options? The old, DOS-looking console appealed to me more than the GUI so I downloaded that. Now that it's running, the fan on this laptop is spinning up at top speed. Will that cause a problem? I can always shut it down if so.
This is pretty inteesting, I hope it doesn't work this old CPU to death!
Oh and my username at F@H is vdavisson, my real name. BTTT!
Since no work units have completed you can still change your F@H name. I recommend that folks use their F@h name for better privacy, but it really doen't matter much.
If you are running a laptop then keep the CPU % to 75% or 80%. Laptops can overheat and shorten their lifespan.
Back later!
I stopped the program and will restart when I figure out how to restrict its CPU usage. Can I restrict the CPU isage under Services on my computer?
It would make sense to do it there, since the remote setup wouldn't know what 70% on my machine was. Anyway, I'll proceed when I hear back. Thanks!
I presume that you are running the console version of F@H. If so take a look at your client.cfg file with Notepad.
Edit it to the settings that you want.
My client.cfg is posted on this thread.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1742439/posts?page=102#102
Reboot and you should be fine.
OK I will do that tomorrow. I opened the .cfg file with Notepad but wasn't sure what settings to change or add safely, so I will take a look at yours. Am I right about setting the CPU usage to 75% under Services in Windows XP? Thanks again...
You have the right idea, but when I looked under my services tabs under Administrative Tools I did not see anywhere to set the CPU usage. Let me know if you can do it from there.
Try the client.cfg tomorrow and let me know what happens.
Your config file has a setting CPU=75 so I assume that's a signal to the client to use no more than 75 percent of available CPU capacity. I've successfully shut down the program either by closing the console window or by going into services and stopping the service, or by logging off (of course then it starts again when I log back in) so I know how to control it running or not.
I'll let it run today and see what it does. I had let the extra SSE boost be turned and since your config file doesn't mention that, I'll read the log file to see if it's a setting that's managed here or at the host. Maybe that's spinning the fan up.
Thanks for the help!
Actually F@H is only running on PS3 and PCs. Maybe one day we will get the other gamers to contribute but not yet.
It is probably the third thread on the PS3 and F@H, but I don't know if it is actually running or not.
If anyone wants to set their PS3 to run F@H I would be willing to work on the setup with them.
FReepmail me!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1749108/posts
Please pop over to this thread about Dylan, a friend of papasmurf. Dylan needs our prayers now for a new medical battle.
Merry Christmas Ya'll!
If anyone would like a copy of the spreadsheet, they can FReepmail me their home e-mail address.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Our production will drop slightly over Christmas when the energy nazis shut down Klutz's folding farms.
We will gain several new folders over Christmas and lots of our current folders will get newer, faster equipment.
I am still hopeful of an ATI X1900 video card for our home brew PVR. It looks like the ATI cards are worth from 330 ppd to 660 ppd just by themselves.
For now I will be a responsible adult and pay bills, instead of buying toys.
I have one additional machine running at home but it is so old and slow it might take close to a year to do one folding task unit. It is good enough for the kids to do homework research on though.
I hate having to be a responsible adult too.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Video cards do not help regular folding. Speed is determined by CPU power and memory.
F@H has released a special GPU version of F@H that runs on ATI video cards that have a lot of pixel shaders. These pixel shaders, 48 of them on an X1900, can significantly increase the processing speed of WUs written for it. The same basic process was used to write F@H for the Playstation 3.
The new graphic processors are best thought of as very high speed custom chips, which they are. GPUs do not do general processing, though.
If you will load the F@H console on the slow machine then you will complete a WU every few weeks. The Stanford servers try not to send out massive WUs to older systems. Running the GUI version will work but it is not as fast.
*sigh*.... energy nazis...
But yet, it's coming up on the 1st anniversary, and it hasn't been a bad run a'tall, has it? Should break 4 million by morning, or at least by sometime tommorrow.
Its pretty amazing that it has already been a year.
4,000,000 points. Not a bad way to end your first year folding.
I need to find the time to start a new thread and grab new folders. There are lots of milestones that we can highlight.
Hey, you don't think that you could snag a PO for an X1900 XTX? I hear those cards are good for about 660 points per day each. Team ATI has had a real jump in points since October.
Now if you could bulk purchase about 400 of those babies, I'd even volunteer some time over the holidays to help you ... update virus protection and install Winders updates ...
if the central planners would let us.
yeah, we've come a long way. Let's see where we are next year.
Let's get a new thread going, and get a little advertising to put a little shot in the arm. I'll keep what I've got chugging along for good old team 36120. :)
Starting a new thread over here. Please come and visit!
Better yet, borg a few friends and help them to get started.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1754766/posts
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