There appears to be some confusion in this thread because of word choice.
Pardon me for being pedantic, but just to make sure no one gets the wrong impression...
A 32 bit host OS works perfectly well with a 64 bit guest OS through VMware, as long as the CPU is 64 bit capable and has virtualization features. All AMD CPU's appear to be capable since the first dual cores were released, but the Intels are different. You have to verify if the processor has
Virtualization Technology, from what I understand. Being able to run a 64 bit guest on a 32 bit host was the entire purpose of the
stickied 'The easy Linux SMP Install guide (including for Windows XP!)' thread that
Tarx originated and it is the reason TR's Team 2630 became competitive and among the top 7 teams for the first time, even though we have the fewest active members of any of the top ranked teams. The SMP information spread around to other teams, though, and we're heading for #11 if we don't turn things around soon.
I use Windows XP Pro, a 32 host OS, with an Opteron 64 bit processor, and with VMWare Server installed on it, running Ubuntu 64 on a VM as a guest OS. That works well. On multi-core machines I dedicate to folding I either use
notfred's Linux folding ISO (there are now more than a couple of threads mentioning it, and I can't keep track any longer) or if it's a secondary machine used for testing purposes or just to have another machine available in that room, it gets another Windows install and the single core client, since I don't have any dual-core PC's to spare yet.
With respect to the GPU2 client, according to the
'NVIDIA 6.12 beta 6.12 GPU client Released!' thread,
Forge was running the GPU2 client on XP-64, with no problems. He also says that Vista-64 works for him with
an ATi 4850 using the beta 8 client.
Here's a thread on FoldingForum.org about running the SMP client and the GPU2 client on the same machine. I haven't gone all the way through it but I imagine it has all the useful advice one might need. Check around that sub-forum and I'm sure something useful will be available.
Pegasus has the
SMP and GPU clients working on a 9450 quad, with the first 2 cores assigned to the first SMP installation, and the 2nd and 3rd cores to the 2nd SMP installation (thus sharing one core between the 2 SMP clients), leaving the 4th core free to run the GPU2 client. I don't know what his production is like, nor how to assign cores in Linux, and until he reports back with what his total setup is (including how many clients he runs), we won't be able to tell whether his idea is worth doing. Stanford reports 6 clients, and it appears his production has dropped precipitously recently, but until he reports what his situation is, it's hard to tell what is going on.
So, if your GPU is supported, use that (or all of them!) So far, running engineering apps and the SMP client and a GPU client, my machine is stable.
