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Ragnar Dan
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Dr. Evil, I'm coming for you

Tue May 15, 2007 10:57 am

Dr. Evil, it's sad to say that I'm within a week or so of overtaking you on our Folding team.

If you can kick it up a couple of notches, you can put it off. If you have a dual-core box you can probably hold me off entirely if you begin running the Linux SMP client on it. That's how I got my production above 1000 PPD, using VMware so I can keep running Windows XP as my main desktop. I also run two Windows console clients to use up the extra cycles VMware doesn't consume. They take a long time to complete, but so far they have made it through by the deadlines. They get most of the cycles when the Linux client finishes and uploads a WU, for about 10 minutes or so until the next one is downloaded and starts up.

You have been warned.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Tue May 15, 2007 7:33 pm

8 and a half hours later, I bump my thread, to continue giving due warning to the man I'm soon to overtake...



like a bug beneath my tread. :P :wink:
 
Dr. Evil
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Tue May 15, 2007 10:31 pm

I'll see what I can do...
 
Ragnar Dan
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Tue May 15, 2007 10:36 pm

Great news. 8)
 
just brew it!
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Tue May 15, 2007 10:40 pm

Heh... but you're not gonna catch me for nearly 11 years at the current rate. Better work on that, eh? :D

That's quite the impressive overtake list though. Looks like you're really moving up in the world! 8)
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Ragnar Dan
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Tue May 15, 2007 10:45 pm

I think it likely that I will never catch you, jbi!. If I could get a few bucks for my older systems, I might be able to do something, but I think the Tualatin Celeron system is worth zip now, and the Barton 2600+ system is worth only a wee bit more than that. :lol:

It looks OK, but I've got plenty coming from behind me, too. I need more powah. :o
 
just brew it!
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Tue May 15, 2007 10:54 pm

At least you're still moving up. After a pretty good run in the TR Top 20, there's nowhere for me to go but down! :cry:

(Though I do think getting that Opty 165 going will make for a much softer landing... guess I'd better get my butt in gear on that build!)
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Tue May 15, 2007 11:05 pm

Over 80% of my output is my VMwared Opteron 165. You should definitely get that sucker going.

Of course, I have mine overclocked more than 40%, and IIRC that isn't something you're likely to do (even though I've had few problems, and those that I have had have been cured by slowing it down a skosh -- for example, I get EUE's on my Windows console clients when running at max. speed and watching videos, sometimes. But if I slow it down temporarily I can watch the videos, and then speed it back up again. Oddly, playing video games hasn't given me that problem).
 
just brew it!
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Tue May 15, 2007 11:21 pm

I'd consider overclocking the Opty if it was going to be a dedicated folder. But the current plan is to also use it as my first serious stab at migrating my primary desktop to Linux. So stability is very important!
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Ragnar Dan
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Tue May 15, 2007 11:23 pm

I'll tell you my specs to give you an idea what I'm running.

S939 Opteron 165, stock 1.8 GHz with ... mind not bringing the word to me, but multiplier of 9. I started it at 8 and a higher hypertransport speed, but eventually my DFI NF4 LANParty Ultra-D board's built-in NIC burned up, and someone on TR in my build thread mentioned he had the same problem with the same NIC maker (Vitesse I believe). So I put the multiplier back to 9 and changed the HT and memory speeds again. I think the RAM's starting out at 150 MHz and overclocked to about 215 MHz.

The RAM is Corsair XMS, a pair of 1 GB sticks which cost me $208 after rebate, back in 2005. I have the CAS set at a relaxed 2.5 and it's happy, though it actually appears I should be raising the voltage to 2.75 instead of leaving it at near stock where I do. I sort of forgot about that stuff. :oops:

And I've got a ThermalRight XP-90C HS, with a Panaflo 90mm fan on top.

Everything seems to stay fairly cool, and I haven't tried for every last drop of performance. I'll do that when it's no longer my main system, though... if I remember to, anyway.

I'm booting at 2.556 GHz or so, and then I increase the speed a bit more using an older version of Clockgen for nForce4 which seems to be the best one since later versions didn't seem to work for me. That Clockgen is how I can watch videos and not lose WU's. I've got some preset speeds defined for it so I can just double click on a shortcut and slow things down, then watch the video, and run another shortcut to get back to speed again. Not a bad little system, considering. I figure the real problem is probably the mobo or the video card (a PNY 6600GT), and it's not a major priority for me.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Wed May 16, 2007 11:26 pm

Dr. Evil, it appears you have a machine that gave an Early Unit End, because I see 11 points from you today and don't see any WU's with that many.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Thu May 17, 2007 10:52 am

Argh! I lost a 2605 WU today (1760 points), and got no credit for it at all. It just up and puked about 2 hours ago. I'm definitely going to have to take the machine's heatsink off and re-apply the goop and see if it runs better after that. Speedfan shows a temperature which I have no clue whether it's accurate of 54-56 C for perhaps one of the cores, but 38 C for the other... probably. :-?

It would be helpful if these Linux SMP WU's wouldn't just commit suicide and get erased. Had I noticed it crash, I had a short period where I might have been able to recover it by killing the client and spawned processes, downclocking the machine and restarting the client. Drat. :x

Now it will be a couple of days longer before I pass you.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Thu May 17, 2007 9:18 pm

Well, I do believe I'm going to have some trouble with this particular conquest, if I can manage it at all. Good show, sir.

Cheers! :D

Oh, I forgot. I received my MSI K7D dual-MP board today. It won't help much since it's only a pair of MP-2000+ CPU's, but this Saturday I've got plenty of work to do, what with that one needing a place to live (main problem being it has only a cruddy and hopefully only $7.27 Ultra PSU to run on and no case for the time being) and my main machine needing maintenance. I'll try making it run Windows at some point if I can find a hard disk for it, but only to test whether I can get the Windows SMP client to run on it. I expect it won't make the deadlines, and intend to convert it to a Linux fileserver.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Fri May 25, 2007 4:29 pm

Well well. I concede defeat, Dr. Evil. Even if all the non-working machines I have were up and running, I still couldn't produce the kind of output you're making.

I congratulate you on your victory, and wish you continued success. :D
 
flybywire
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Sat May 26, 2007 1:39 pm

The Dr. really put the pedal to the medal there.
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Ragnar Dan
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:35 pm

I'm back to less than a week again. Let's see you pick it up again, Doc.
 
Dr. Evil
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:54 pm

Blame the stupid SMP client. It just spontaneously stopped working on one of the boxes and while I've found several people with the same problem, no solutions are forthcoming. :evil:
 
Usacomp2k3
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:54 pm

Dr. Evil wrote:
Blame the stupid SMP client. It just spontaneously stopped working on one of the boxes and while I've found several people with the same problem, no solutions are forthcoming. :evil:

Yeah, patience isn't exactly a solution, is it? :lol:
 
Dr. Evil
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:04 pm

Not when Ragnar Dan keeps taunting me about how he's going to pass me. :wink:
 
Usacomp2k3
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:05 pm

Well clearly you need to go out and buy a PS3 :wink:
 
mafropetee
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:59 pm

hah, i win against ALL of you. with a grand total of 0 MUAHAHAHAHA

but whenever the time comes that i finally build an up to date machine (ive made a goal for that around the time Vista SP2 comes out... whenever that will be), ill definately dedicate some of its power to folding.
"Here we stand at the threshold of paradise, stealing a new world. I never would have thought our place in history would come to this, but we are infinite. We are one."
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Ragnar Dan
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Mon Jul 16, 2007 9:12 pm

I assume you're running the Windows SMP client. That seems to be the one everybody has problems with for whatever reason. Is it doing like drfish's machines, with FILE_IO_ERROR showing up in the log file?

I think he just reboots them to get it working again, though I'm not certain. If it's dedicated you might consider running the VMware'd Linux client, since it's so reliable. Or even using notfred's folding CD, though with that you'll have to run an FTP server if you want checkpoint backups.
 
notfred
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Tue Jul 17, 2007 8:40 am

FYI it needs a TFTP server, not an FTP server, they are very different beasts. For windows I recommend tftpd32, for Linux just go with the standard one that comes with your distribution.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Tue Jul 17, 2007 3:33 pm

Whoops, I always forget that. Mainly because I've never read about what tftp really does aside from the help file's short explanation from a year and a half old version. For those interested, http://tftpd32.jounin.net/ is where the software notfred mentioned is located.

(By the way my Ubuntu 64 doesn't seem to have anything like tftp, though I only looked for it by using "apropos tftp" and "apropos ftp" to see what showed up.)

I can't recall where the information is about how to set things up to let his SMP iso do backups, but I think it's on notfred's site somewhere.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Tue Jul 17, 2007 10:06 pm

Oy vey... I overclocked a very little bit before leaving for the evening meal, an amount I often OC that never gives me problems, yet this time it made the Linux SMP client quit working, as though it just suspended. I only noticed it almost 5 hours later. I slowed the machine back down the entire 6.81 MHz difference, killed the client, restarted it, and things are back working again, luckily.

Of course, it means something is screwed up since within the last day or two I was able to OC by 13.62 MHz with no problem, but oh well.

Meanwhile, I'm closing on my target. :o
 
BenWang
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Wed Jul 18, 2007 2:25 am

Overclocking or even running 100% at stock leads to Electromigration, which is why the old Celeron 300A chips used to quit after 3 or 4 years of running.

Now GPU folders are finding that 1950pros at 3D Clocks tend to quit after a while too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

http://www.tweak3d.net/joomla/tweak-gui ... king-101_2
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eitje
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Wed Jul 18, 2007 8:12 am

i can't fold on my X1950Pro anymore. :(
Your ideas intrigue me; I would like to purchase stock in your company.
 
notfred
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Wed Jul 18, 2007 10:23 am

Ragnar Dan wrote:
(By the way my Ubuntu 64 doesn't seem to have anything like tftp, though I only looked for it by using "apropos tftp" and "apropos ftp" to see what showed up.)

sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa
Ragnar Dan wrote:
I can't recall where the information is about how to set things up to let his SMP iso do backups, but I think it's on notfred's site somewhere.

For Linux: http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/linux.html
For Windows: http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/diskless.html

Basically you set up the network boot infrastructure and it will backup and restore to that. FYI if you have that setup, I've found that VMWare will network boot the diskless stuff if you have bridged networking enabled - it's made my development a lot easier!

Backup to USB is going to hopefully be part of my next release to make it easier for everyone.
 
notfred
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Wed Jul 18, 2007 10:28 am

Ragnar Dan wrote:
Oy vey... I overclocked a very little bit before leaving for the evening meal, an amount I often OC that never gives me problems, yet this time it made the Linux SMP client quit working, as though it just suspended. I only noticed it almost 5 hours later. I slowed the machine back down the entire 6.81 MHz difference, killed the client, restarted it, and things are back working again, luckily.

The Linux SMP client is rock solid IF your hardware is rock solid, however it WILL find the slightest weakness and lockup or crash if it isn't. My main file server had been folding 2 single core clients for at least 6 months with no errors, I loaded the SMP client on it and about every 3rd one would lock up - log file shows "INTERRUPTED" and dmesg shows a segfault in one of the cores. Have to kill -9 the remaining cores and restart to get it going again. Memtest was 100% clean, but on the off chance I swapped the RAM with my HTPC (which I don't fold on due to Wife Approval Factor regarding noisy PCs whilst she is watching TV) and it hasn't stopped folding yet.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Thu Jul 19, 2007 5:09 pm

I forgot about replying to this, or anything else. Sleep deprivation does wonders. :roll:

BenWang: I've heard talk of electromigration, but never heard of a case of it. My 300A Celeron is in the hands of Starfalcon, and though I haven't seen any posting from him in a fair amount of time (and it appears that even though he's a forum moderator he hasn't posted anything since December 2006), I wouldn't be surprised if it was still working fine at that speed. I built it in the spring/summer of 1998, ran it at 450 MHz every day of its life, and it never indicated a problem. I'm not sure how long it's been since Starfalcon has had it, but maybe since 2004 or so.

Anyway, I'm not overvolting much at all, and while the OC is over 40%, it's still well within tolerances for the processors since they were selling faster ones than this one is running at the time I bought mine. I have to clean out my system again but I lost my can of compressed air somewhere and keep forgetting to pick up a new one. After I do that, and re-apply the thermal goop, I expect it to behave better.

notfred: No wonder I couldn't find tftp.

I have no idea how to find out about available software for Linux distros, because most of that online networking stuff is newer than what existed when I first played with Linux.

I've not read about it, but I never saw anything that looked like it would help in the output of dmesg. Of course, I have yet to run it when the folding client has crashed. The odd thing, though, is that the entire virtual machine just froze up the last 2 times, as if I'd pushed the suspend button on the console. Just pushing the restart button after lowering the clock speed got everything working fine again. I've been running the Linux SMP client for I believe today makes 6 months, and never had a problem until recently. I mean, yeah, I've OC'd too far before, but never had these recent minor OC problems. And, every time in the past the client has crashed but not the Linux VM, and when it crashed the client eventually killed the WU and downloaded a new one and started it from 0. This time things are worse in the fact that it's failing more easily, but better in that I only lose a bit of time but keep the progress in the WU... and some of that loss is made up for by the dual Windows clients taking up the free CPU cycles.

For now, I'm putting the problems down to the machine needing a "refresh" to clear out dust and get better heatsink contact.

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