Personal computing discussed
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Ragnar Dan wrote:There's no value in 4 instances of the SMP client, since the faster the WU is returned the greater value to Stanford, and of course you get more points for it. You (or emkubed as the case would appear to be) can obviously do what I was doing for a number of years, which is running Windows XP (which in my experience is still the best for GPU folding) on a cheap HD and run notfred's SMP client / Linux distro on a VM running under Windows. That's still probably pretty efficient, and except for the forever-taking-to-fix problem of the Linux SMP client not allowing -bigadv for the time being, it's probably the way to go for most machines unless they've got >= 8 cores or hyperthreads or whatever. Only Windows does the GPU client, and in the one machine I tried to get it running under wine, it was a bigger PITA than it was worth, since only particular GPU's allowed you to modify their clocks. Windows is simpler because of the utilities available and the fact that it's over 80% of everything out there.
Ragnar Dan wrote:I mentioned the Linux under VM thing because I assume it's still more efficient than the latest Windows one, and the only reason to run the Windows client is for its unique -bigadv capacity, as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I haven't done any experiments, and though I think someone has an SMP test utility somewhere (I forget where I saw it mentioned now, maybe someone pointed to it here, and it may have been on HardOCP or on Foldingforum.org), I still doubt Windows is as efficient at SMP as Linux is.
Flying Fox wrote:AFAIK the inefficiencies were mainly due to mpich/deino in the A1/A2 cores where they have to go multiprocess. Now for A3 everything is multithreaded Linux and Windows should be the same, with Windows having the advantage of -bigadv. I have no reference data on regular WUs with WinSMP vs LinuxSMP someone else can chime in, but I expect at least par or more performance from WinSMP now (not to mention I can run it now as a service in the background again, like the old single core client).
Ragnar Dan wrote:But still, it's Windows, and you know how bad Windows is at a lot of things. It doesn't have as good priority control, and of course there's all the crapware and wasted cycles on things people don't notice running, esp. since Windows all too often doesn't even show them in taskman. Not that the crapware wouldn't still be there with a VM running Linux, but things still ran very well for me when I was running my Opteron 165 (dual core bought in late 2005) at ~2.5 GHz with VMware and a full UI-laden Ubuntu distro.
If we were talking about an 8 thread machine, there'd be no argument. But for now, unless someone can find an ISO with all the necessary goodies to run a GPU client under Wine, which should be possible if the user has enough understanding to do some manual setting up, and probably downloads too, it seems like the best is the Windows + Linux under VM if there are < 8 threads available. One bit of evidence I have for that is the wild variation in frame times on my machine even when its otherwise quiescent. I know that can't be blamed on Windows only, but compared to my Q8400 running notfred's ISO, it's all over the place, varying by more than 10%.
Ragnar Dan wrote:If I could get the Windows SMP client to run as a service on Windows 7 (or I assume any 6.x version), I'd probably be a lot less bothered. But as it is, I have to run it all manually for the time being, and Stanford makes it sound as though that won't be changing. Which sucks.
Flying Fox wrote:Ragnar Dan wrote:If I could get the Windows SMP client to run as a service on Windows 7 (or I assume any 6.x version), I'd probably be a lot less bothered. But as it is, I have to run it all manually for the time being, and Stanford makes it sound as though that won't be changing. Which sucks.
Your information is quite out of date. Please read the new 6.3 info in the install guide. My brother is running Windows 7 right now, with 2 cores out of his 965BE running WinSMP. I just did not want him to see maxed out CPU and may be reduce some heat output. Really, WinSMP has finally come back in decent shape. It has been close to a couple of weeks. I can report back later for some longer-term explanations, but right now that set up has folded close to a dozen WUs with no issues so far.
Ragnar Dan wrote:Flying Fox wrote:Ragnar Dan wrote:If I could get the Windows SMP client to run as a service on Windows 7 (or I assume any 6.x version), I'd probably be a lot less bothered. But as it is, I have to run it all manually for the time being, and Stanford makes it sound as though that won't be changing. Which sucks.
Your information is quite out of date. Please read the new 6.3 info in the install guide. My brother is running Windows 7 right now, with 2 cores out of his 965BE running WinSMP. I just did not want him to see maxed out CPU and may be reduce some heat output. Really, WinSMP has finally come back in decent shape. It has been close to a couple of weeks. I can report back later for some longer-term explanations, but right now that set up has folded close to a dozen WUs with no issues so far.
Hm. I'll have to test the new client if I don't already have it, or at least try installing it as a service, but I recall reading on foldingforum.org not so long ago (or so it seems) how they thought making a service which could interact with the desktop was impossible, and after reading that I pretty much gave up on them. Apparently someone with more patience got through to them.
Ragnar Dan wrote:One more thing: this conversation of ours should probably be split off from notfred's thread.