Folding@home - Free Republic Team #36120 Breaks 30,000,000

Stanford University and ExtremeOverclocking.com ^ | 09/03/2007 | Texas Booster

[texas booster]

Time for an update. The Free Republic Folding team #36120 started about 4 years ago, and became popular in December of 2005. We will hit 30,000,000 points this week and congratulations are in order to all folders.

Our FreeRepublic team of 475 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 56th place (with 1000 active CPUs - 143,600 completed Work Units and 29.975 million points).

Please join us and hellp cure Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinsons Disease. You can make a difference!

[JosephW]

There is the flip side though. If I put the quad core to FR use then I’ll roughly equal their entire output myself.

Proving that 1 conservative equals 284 liberals in compassion, generosity and giving (although I suspect we already knew this)

[generally]

I’m hoping you can help me with a new glitch. It may or may not be related to Folding.

I have a Mac PowerBook, plenty of free disk space, and my iTunes is now stuttering - not just once in a while, but at least once every minute or two, i.e., at least once per song.

I’ve read threads on Mac forums about this and they all seem to say it’s a priority issue, that there is something running that has too high a priority. Folding never did this before. I’ve been folding for nearly 2 years and I’ve only had this problem for the last few weeks.

My guesses
1. iTunes changed and has a bug. (I’ve recently updated.) I think unlikely since there is no mention on Apple forums (that I’ve seen) and they are usually pretty good about airing and fixing these problems.
2. Folding has changed. Who knows? I just blindly fold and allow it to download whatever it needs. I’ve checked FAH forums and didn’t see this mentioned as a problem.
3. Some other software doing some unknown memory hogging activity.

(Note: I’m a software developer, so not entirely ignorant, but threading is not a topic I know a lot about. I thought maybe some of my own software could be an issue, but this happens after a restart with very little running, before I run anything homebrewed. I’ll do a little more testing, but frequently the only apps that have been run or are running are: Finder, Safari, iTunes, iCal, TextEdit, FAH.)

[texas booster]

Folding on Windows only has two priority options - idle and low. Idle only allows F@H to run when there are free CPU cycles, and low will allow F@H cycles in case another process is not well-behaved.

On a Mac, not sure. I’ll need to check the forums for that one. My guess is that there is another process running that is somehow related to iTunes - maybe DRM, and indexing service or a rootkit (JK!).

You might be seeing thrashing where F@H see open CPU cycles and then tries to load, only to release the memory/CPU cycles when it sees iTunes reading from the drive.

To check that, take a look at f@hlog.txt or F2Hlog-prev.txt and see what the latest entries have to say about how F@H is performing.

Are you running a new Mac? Have you tried running the SMP version of F@H? On most new macs, nearly 1200 points per day.

Of course, you could stop listening to music and see if that makes the problem go away ...

[generally]

Thanks, Tex!

I’ve been running on the same PowerBook G4 ever since I started folding. I only fold about 60 pts/day even if I’m not running anything else. Not a high-end system! Hoping to upgrade in a few more months, but this is it for the near term.

FAHlog.txt doesn’t look any different than it has for the last 18+ months.

I may just live with the stuttering music. (I don’t have iTunes running constantly, but it’s nice to have once in a while.)