Personal computing discussed

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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Thu Jun 04, 2009 11:13 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
Ragnar Dan wrote:
FF: I agree that's a problem, but why does it seemingly affect TR's team more than others?

We've been left in the dust by 4 teams in the last year or so. Do you think that it's a simple matter of others recruiting a lot more than we are and even though they're having a similar rate of teammates quitting it doesn't affect them as much?

There are lots of factors, I have a few points that hopefully shed some light in the picture:
  • The TR community itself is smaller than the others. This is a fundamental issue that is not going to change any time soon. Compare to other sites like AnandTech and [H] we simply don't have as big communities as theirs. To solve this we need to dramatically step up our recruitment and retaining efforts. Problem is some of us old-timers are somewhat elitistknowledgeable and massive recruitment may mean dumbing down the audience. Notice the relatively "meh" reaction to TR joining the new fancy stuff like Facebook and you can get a glimpse of what kind of people usually hang around here. /no-offense-just-an-observation
  • Now, we may be small, but the fact that we have been hanging on for so long is a testament to something. I did a quick Excel exercise and it showed. I took the top 25 teams from EOC and calculated the "total points per active user". TR is at #5 at 2.8 million points per active user. If you look at the 5 teams above us they are near the bottom actually. So we just have a relatively small group but they are already pretty productive.
  • The other teams that are surpassing us most likely have a lot of members folding on one or 2 machines. We seem to have lots of people with a farm of some sort, thus jacking up the per user production numbers. This can be a focus of our next recruitment drive in which we ask people to fold on one GPU on one computer. Hopefully we can get more people this time.
  • The TR community also prides itself in living in the "bang for buck" realm. However, this hurts us in our folding efforts because most of us are more cost conscious and in general are just more mature. So the hotter weather, a/c costs, etc. all lead to people not folding as much as they can. Just look at how UGN and other big-time folders downsizing their farms and we can see how much that hurts us.
  • Some of our past leaders have farms of CPU nodes, but the SMP client is just in such a bad state that they have quit altogether (drfish and leor are the prime examples). For the corporate folders GPU folding is usually not accessible to them.
  • When we lost drfish we lost our de facto captain so to speak. UGN, FBW, FH, and PinTO have been carrying the torch but with such a disparity of points among them, it does not capture the imagination. We need more mid-range gauntlets!
  • Our other "drumming up support" efforts fizzled most of the time. We need to improve on that.
I'm generally in agreement, though I have a few variations:

1) Some of our competitors don't seem quite so large. Pande Lab is recently about to pass us like we're standing still. I believe I've seen them on our threat list before, but they've always petered out quickly, which made me think they were testing new machines or something, but this time they've been coming for longer than usual, and while they've slowed their pace somewhat, it's not so much yet that we won't be overtaken before the summer's over.
2-3) Yes, we've had several dedicated folders which kept us among the upper teams, but with people like drfish and Leor dropping out, as happened with some other big producers from earlier days, we're falling behind. I have to believe that people who are on a college campus but have a great gaming GPU, who don't have to pay for electricity, present an opportunity for recruitment.
4) Indeed I think this hurts TR especially because most of us pay our own way and TR attracts more mature regulars than other sites, or so my small sampling of some of the others would seem to indicate. Which means with the rise in electricity costs many of us are saving money by not folding as much or at all.
5) The Windows SMP client doesn't seem to have changed much, but it's always seemed to be in need of a rewrite. After a while, though, I'm sure that sort of babysitting machines thing becomes tiresome. The only real problems with the Linux SMP client lately are that it fails to delete expired data files and too often gets stuck at the FINISHED_UNIT point.
6) That's right, and we also don't seem to have anyone to get TR management interested in adding an article on the subject any more. For example, when on some Saturday TR doesn't have a Saturday science subject, it's a perfect opportunity to put in a push for new team members.

While I'm a good editor, I'm not very good at coming up with an attractive solicitation for causes. I'm a bit too grouchy. :wink:
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 05, 2009 8:40 am

Ragnar Dan wrote:
1) Some of our competitors don't seem quite so large. Pande Lab is recently about to pass us like we're standing still. I believe I've seen them on our threat list before, but they've always petered out quickly, which made me think they were testing new machines or something, but this time they've been coming for longer than usual, and while they've slowed their pace somewhat, it's not so much yet that we won't be overtaken before the summer's over.

Considering that they're the organization running the whole show, I'd expect that every machine under their control has the client installed.

4) Indeed I think this hurts TR especially because most of us pay our own way and TR attracts more mature regulars than other sites, or so my small sampling of some of the others would seem to indicate. Which means with the rise in electricity costs many of us are saving money by not folding as much or at all.

Yup, that describes me perfectly. The crate farms have been retired because those old Athlon XPs were getting pretty long in the tooth, and I don't have the disposable income to upgrade them to something that produces more PPD/watt. My raw PPD is actually higher than in the crate farm days since the few machines I do still run the client on are newer SMP boxes; but the bar has been raised so much since then, I'm pretty far back in the pack.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 05, 2009 2:56 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Ragnar Dan wrote:
1) Some of our competitors don't seem quite so large. Pande Lab is recently about to pass us like we're standing still. I believe I've seen them on our threat list before, but they've always petered out quickly, which made me think they were testing new machines or something, but this time they've been coming for longer than usual, and while they've slowed their pace somewhat, it's not so much yet that we won't be overtaken before the summer's over.

Considering that they're the organization running the whole show, I'd expect that every machine under their control has the client installed.

Thanks for not correcting me on the takeover date. :oops:

It used to say months, but I realized it says 1.8 years now. Having seen them show up on our threat list before, I'd always thought they were testing and then retiring those machines. I decided that may be for one or both of a couple of reasons:
1) They don't have the machines to spare, and they're going to be used for the web serving/DB work, or WU production, distribution and collection, or whatnot.
2) Perhaps they received complaints that they, being a government-supported school, were competing against other (American) teams with their own tax money. But they could simply quit running the machines under their own team number to continue folding while not attracting negative attention.

just brew it! wrote:
4) Indeed I think this hurts TR especially because most of us pay our own way and TR attracts more mature regulars than other sites, or so my small sampling of some of the others would seem to indicate. Which means with the rise in electricity costs many of us are saving money by not folding as much or at all.

Yup, that describes me perfectly. The crate farms have been retired because those old Athlon XPs were getting pretty long in the tooth, and I don't have the disposable income to upgrade them to something that produces more PPD/watt. My raw PPD is actually higher than in the crate farm days since the few machines I do still run the client on are newer SMP boxes; but the bar has been raised so much since then, I'm pretty far back in the pack.

It's costing a shameful amount of money to keep the machines I have running, and even though I just bought an open box video card for the express purpose of folding, I've also been strongly considering retiring the machine I would put the one it's replacing in. That machine is a diskless notfred SMP box, and I can't run the GPU client on that, so I'd have to build my own distro with Wine and whatever drivers and other software it needs and make an ISO just for that machine. Or I could just throw a hard disk in it and do it more easily with no space or other worries. But I prefer to leave disks out of it. But, being an old S939 machine, it likely uses lots of power. I should really get rid of all my old machines, but it's past the time when I could have gotten a decent amount of money for them. It's sort of like the people who drive old beat up cars.

I did remove my overclocked Barton-2600 on W2k box, though, because I needed its spot on my network. And it was getting pathetic. The DVD drive quit working and a working replacement drive wasn't recognized either, so either the mobo or the PATA cable is bad, and I think I checked the cable elsewhere. And I'd been having to slow its overclock down a bit at a time, and hoping the Maxtor HDD it ran off of wouldn't die because that was the only way it could be booted. :lol:

If one wants to become an impressive producer for the team, a couple of GTX 260-216 vidcards will do a lot, and they're dropping in price lately. :)
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:38 pm

Ragnar Dan wrote:
But, being an old S939 machine, it likely uses lots of power.

The S939 system might do better than you think.

I was just measuring power draw the other night, trying to decide which motherboard from my spares/junk collection to use to upgrade my decrepit old file server... the existing server is still running on a Slot A Athlon, believe it or not! The S939 A64 3800+ system idles at around 65W, and goes up to around 115W at full CPU load (and yes, I used the F@h client to create the load). Contrast this with the Socket A Athlon MP dually, which idles at around 140W unless I underclock it... and even underclocked, it idles at about what the S939 system draws at full load.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 05, 2009 5:14 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Ragnar Dan wrote:
But, being an old S939 machine, it likely uses lots of power.

The S939 system might do better than you think.

I was just measuring power draw the other night, trying to decide which motherboard from my spares/junk collection to use to upgrade my decrepit old file server... the existing server is still running on a Slot A Athlon, believe it or not! The S939 A64 3800+ system idles at around 65W, and goes up to around 115W at full CPU load (and yes, I used the F@h client to create the load). Contrast this with the Socket A Athlon MP dually, which idles at around 140W unless I underclock it... and even underclocked, it idles at about what the S939 system draws at full load.

Heh, yes, I imagine they're better than a dual Socket A (462 pins? I forget now, but I think the P4 had 478 pins and I get them mixed up) system.

It's also an X2-3800 (I assume that's what you're describing), and is in an Antec P182 case which seems to be cool (collects dust like crazy, though), but there's nothing in there but an old NF3 EPoX mobo I got from Hance 3⅔ years back and an old Hercules GF3-Ti200 video card I bought from derFunkenstein 4.5 years ago. Running constantly, it adds to electricity usage and I think it's a machine I can get rid of and replace by upgrading my Intel 6400 to a Q6600 or something. That will mean the same problem with Linux and Wine mentioned above if I also put the 9600GSO in there, but who knows.
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 05, 2009 6:13 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Ragnar Dan wrote:
But, being an old S939 machine, it likely uses lots of power.

The S939 system might do better than you think.

I was just measuring power draw the other night, trying to decide which motherboard from my spares/junk collection to use to upgrade my decrepit old file server... the existing server is still running on a Slot A Athlon, believe it or not! The S939 A64 3800+ system idles at around 65W, and goes up to around 115W at full CPU load (and yes, I used the F@h client to create the load). Contrast this with the Socket A Athlon MP dually, which idles at around 140W unless I underclock it... and even underclocked, it idles at about what the S939 system draws at full load.

++

My S939 X2 3800+ during its overclocked days drew about 110W when folding 100%. I am now back to stock so it can only go lower.

X2 3800+ @2.4GHz (no Vcore bump, just HTT straight to 240)
2x1GiB Corsair Value Select DDR400
Asus A8N-VM CSM Geforce 6150 chipset (using IGP)
Seagate 7200.7 120GB
Samsung SpinPoint P 250GB
Some DVD writer
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jun 06, 2009 3:19 pm

Bad news guys. It appears the problems I was having a few days ago may have been due to my GTX280. It's gone bad. I removed my GTX295 and put the GTX280 in the primary PCI-E slot to tourbleshoot it. It boots into windows, and then about the time aero should kick in I get a static screen of green splotches. I shall contact Zotac and RMA it. I'm hoping there are no more GTX280s out in the wild and they send me a GTX285, which would probably be more reliable. This AMP'd (700MHZ) edition of the GTX280 just doesn't seem to be able to fold for more than a couple of months before it goes bad.
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jun 06, 2009 4:40 pm

I think GPU longevity is now called into question with GPU Folding. GPU business is too cutthroat and I suppose the QC work is not as good as CPU companies? :-?
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jun 06, 2009 5:34 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
I think GPU longevity is now called into question with GPU Folding. GPU business is too cutthroat and I suppose the QC work is not as good as CPU companies? :-?


I agree. GPU retailers need to step up their game with more reliable components. It wouldn't surprise me if my card keeps failing due to that crappy soldier that was being used on nvidia cards for a while. As long as they honor the warranty though I will be satisfied.
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JPinTO
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:38 am

[preamble]The only reason I joined the techreport team is because I like the news format and reviews on the site. I jump to bittech, anandtech and fudzilla from time to time, but techreport keeps me up to date with tech news. Good job. I'm a techie (as all users of the site are) and like to keep at the leading edge of computing. Folding is a justification to keep at the bleeding edge of technology and lend the hp to a research team that needs the flops. [/preamble]

If I look at the top 20 folding users on team 2630, many of them were around long before I joined and were also at the bleeding edge of technology. It took me along time to reach 1 million, 2... 5 million points. Some of them were running huge farms and were the segfault's of their time. But we all know Moore's law and the technology marches forward, no doubt bumming some "old timers" out. Many are still active, but trickling the WU's in. (You know who you are: Leor, drfish, embuked, LordIcon... stand proud! :D )

They've worked hard in the past to fold, and their past efforts have been invaluable as a foundation for the current efforts. Without them, the fah program wouldn't be where it is now. You look at the current GPU2 client and it's absurd point production, but that has built on the foundation of the GPU client which was comparatively tepid. SImilarly, the SMP client (as onerous as it is) chews through the WU's and builds on the previous results of the CPU client. This is as expected with computing. Who would have thought that quad core processors would be available for $200! It's crazy. Tech marches on.

The high folding champ teams are just churning through WU's, as they have hardcore hardware geeks (watercooling) adding GPU's like crazy. You can add 5000PPD with a single Nvidia GPU for just over $100. If the 89 techreport millionaires each added a single low end GPU, we would have almost 1/2 million PPD increase... or increase the team point production by 70%. This would move techreport from 17th place team to 11th. And that's just with a single GTS250. People on techreport aren't buying the crappiest possible hardware, so I know they could do a tad better than that. :wink: I'll do my part.

A lot of those high folding website teams like overclock.net are heavily promoting folding to their user base with prizes or acknowledgments for folding efforts. It makes for strong communities. Perhaps techreport website owners can give some thought to that, although I don't know who they are or if they are particularly interested.

- JP
 
Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Mon Jun 08, 2009 8:19 pm

Gerbil Jedidiah wrote:
Flying Fox wrote:
I think GPU longevity is now called into question with GPU Folding. GPU business is too cutthroat and I suppose the QC work is not as good as CPU companies? :-?

I agree. GPU retailers need to step up their game with more reliable components. It wouldn't surprise me if my card keeps failing due to that crappy soldier that was being used on nvidia cards for a while. As long as they honor the warranty though I will be satisfied.

You could try that experiment FireGryphon found someone doing with his video card, baking it in his oven at 385°F for a while. That might make the solder stay. But one has to wonder what is different about lead-free solder that makes it so prone to failure, and why use something that isn't up to the performance requirements of lead & tin-based solder? :evil:
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Mon Jun 08, 2009 8:35 pm

JPinTO wrote:
[preamble]The only reason I joined the techreport team is because I like the news format and reviews on the site. I jump to bittech, anandtech and fudzilla from time to time, but techreport keeps me up to date with tech news. Good job. I'm a techie (as all users of the site are) and like to keep at the leading edge of computing. Folding is a justification to keep at the bleeding edge of technology and lend the hp to a research team that needs the flops. [/preamble]

If I look at the top 20 folding users on team 2630, many of them were around long before I joined and were also at the bleeding edge of technology. It took me along time to reach 1 million, 2... 5 million points. Some of them were running huge farms and were the segfault's of their time. But we all know Moore's law and the technology marches forward, no doubt bumming some "old timers" out. Many are still active, but trickling the WU's in. (You know who you are: Leor, drfish, embuked, LordIcon... stand proud! :D )

They've worked hard in the past to fold, and their past efforts have been invaluable as a foundation for the current efforts. Without them, the fah program wouldn't be where it is now. You look at the current GPU2 client and it's absurd point production, but that has built on the foundation of the GPU client which was comparatively tepid. SImilarly, the SMP client (as onerous as it is) chews through the WU's and builds on the previous results of the CPU client. This is as expected with computing. Who would have thought that quad core processors would be available for $200! It's crazy. Tech marches on.

The high folding champ teams are just churning through WU's, as they have hardcore hardware geeks (watercooling) adding GPU's like crazy. You can add 5000PPD with a single Nvidia GPU for just over $100. If the 89 techreport millionaires each added a single low end GPU, we would have almost 1/2 million PPD increase... or increase the team point production by 70%. This would move techreport from 17th place team to 11th. And that's just with a single GTS250. People on techreport aren't buying the crappiest possible hardware, so I know they could do a tad better than that. :wink: I'll do my part.

A lot of those high folding website teams like overclock.net are heavily promoting folding to their user base with prizes or acknowledgments for folding efforts. It makes for strong communities. Perhaps techreport website owners can give some thought to that, although I don't know who they are or if they are particularly interested.

- JP

JP: I agree with you. The biggest problem I believe is that TR has a relatively small staff with enough duties that none of them have the time to devote to promoting folding. Damage has responded to threads about the lack of promotion before stating that he wanted to help but that it was up to someone to produce whatever he would publish for the team, and we haven't apparently had anyone interested in doing that since idchafee and drfish wrote up a few articles in the past and then each left the field.

Some of us even contributed to (small) advertising efforts on other sites. I still have a domain registered which points to the team's welcome page from http://TRfolding.org/, but as far as I know it's providng no value for my annual renewal fee.

One thing that would make a great deal of difference is if Stanford fixed the simple bugs in their code that screw things up for so many contributors. And yes, also the more complicated bugs, too. But extremely simple things like failure to delete temporary files and failure to kill processes should never have happened in the first place, let alone last all this time. The Windows SMP client's bugs are why drfish quit, as I remember, and probably also lots of others whose names are unknown. The Linux SMP client has bugs that shouldn't be acceptable to Stanford, too, and it's only because of people writing scripts, as you have made multiple posts about, that things are somewhat better. But it shouldn't be necessary for contributors to do that in the first place.

But our team's main problem seems to be the comparatively less traffic TR gets, and the difference in readership. I'd say the best bet is for new contributors to cut their teeth on the regular old client that doesn't produce the headaches while also not delivering the high production of the beta clients that the highest performing machines run. If they become interested in greater production, they can move that way after they become comfortable with the simpler setup, and learn the differences for themselves.
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Mon Jun 08, 2009 10:03 pm

It's not all bad news. Our PPD went up by several hundred thousand after the "That felt good. Where's the pride?" thread. If you guys would put as much energy into getting new folders on board as you do to ranting... :wink: :wink: :wink:

I know I vent a bit in this thread when things don't go as I would hope, but overall my machines are still putting out a lot of research, so I feel good about that, and I keep hammering away in the systems builder forum thread by offering build advice then politely offering the noobs new ways to use their new rigs. It's a little effective at least.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Tue Jun 09, 2009 10:44 pm

That is good of you, and I'm sure it produces a lot of our new folders. I'm sure others appreciate it as I do.

And since this is the thread where I posted info on my GTX260 card, I'll update. I sent it back today, after getting a credit of my original shipping cost to my "source of payment", which is what I was after. So I'm out almost nothing for the card except time, annoyance, and gasoline. It's unfortunate I had to email them first mentioning that the product specifications were inaccurate, inducing me to make a purchase I wouldn't otherwise have made in order to receive the refund, but at least it worked out.

BTW, I'm already having to downclock my 8800GT because of warmth in its room, but I'm doing it in small steps.
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:43 pm

JPinTO wrote:
[preamble]The only reason I joined the techreport team is because I like the news format and reviews on the site. I jump to bittech, anandtech and fudzilla from time to time, but techreport keeps me up to date with tech news. Good job. I'm a techie (as all users of the site are) and like to keep at the leading edge of computing. Folding is a justification to keep at the bleeding edge of technology and lend the hp to a research team that needs the flops. [/preamble]

If I look at the top 20 folding users on team 2630, many of them were around long before I joined and were also at the bleeding edge of technology. It took me along time to reach 1 million, 2... 5 million points. Some of them were running huge farms and were the segfault's of their time. But we all know Moore's law and the technology marches forward, no doubt bumming some "old timers" out. Many are still active, but trickling the WU's in. (You know who you are: Leor, drfish, embuked, LordIcon... stand proud! :D )

They've worked hard in the past to fold, and their past efforts have been invaluable as a foundation for the current efforts. Without them, the fah program wouldn't be where it is now. You look at the current GPU2 client and it's absurd point production, but that has built on the foundation of the GPU client which was comparatively tepid. SImilarly, the SMP client (as onerous as it is) chews through the WU's and builds on the previous results of the CPU client. This is as expected with computing. Who would have thought that quad core processors would be available for $200! It's crazy. Tech marches on.

The high folding champ teams are just churning through WU's, as they have hardcore hardware geeks (watercooling) adding GPU's like crazy. You can add 5000PPD with a single Nvidia GPU for just over $100. If the 89 techreport millionaires each added a single low end GPU, we would have almost 1/2 million PPD increase... or increase the team point production by 70%. This would move techreport from 17th place team to 11th. And that's just with a single GTS250. People on techreport aren't buying the crappiest possible hardware, so I know they could do a tad better than that. :wink: I'll do my part.

A lot of those high folding website teams like overclock.net are heavily promoting folding to their user base with prizes or acknowledgments for folding efforts. It makes for strong communities. Perhaps techreport website owners can give some thought to that, although I don't know who they are or if they are particularly interested.

- JP

Yeah, it's a shame that more of the TR faithful don't realize how much even one moderately powerful video card (nVidia 8000 and higher or ATI-AMD 3000 and higher) folding part-time (night folding only) can help the TR folding team and the Stanford research that could one day greatly improve or maybe even save their life. The work unit download and upload files are tiny, and the deadlines allow for part-time folding on most decent video cards.
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Fahcore_14 Unstable Machine failures

Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:59 pm

Four of my last five core14 GPU work units have failed with the "Unstable Machine" error. I've seen 5905, 5910, and 5911s all fail on my 9600GSO with well over 1000 completed work units. It runs under 60C in an ambient of between 22 and 24C. I just deleted the core and the same vers. 1.25 core was downloaded. I don't expect any improvement and suspect a double batch (servers .70 and .20) of bad work units. These work units have been problematic since the beginning. Good Luck...

---- edit ----

Lady Luck is NOT my friend, sigh -

3AM EDT 14 June: 5911 (R10, C164, G1) - early_unit_end - at 98% !? At least I was watching and it didn't sit idle for four hours this time.
6PM ditto: I did receive an 1856 point credit at 6AM CDT.

12:24AM EDT 19 June: I successfully uploaded a fully completed 5911 (R12, C603, G1)! I am now two for seven.
Last edited by farmpuma on Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:04 am, edited 7 times in total.
Reason: Work unit Failure updates
 
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jun 13, 2009 7:50 pm

FYI I think that the best way to bring new folders on board is to get them started folding under their own names and not under the collective such as UGN. I think if new folders see their name rise up the ranks they are more likely to stay in the fold. I may direct new folders to the UGN thread for advice on how to get started, but I think for the betterment of the team I will no longer try and get them in the UGN collective. I really think they are more likely to stick around if they see their own individual progress.

I'm still a UGNer, but it's mainly because I want to fold for science, not to demo how awesome my PC is. With my contribution combined in UGN I can contribute without seeming like I am doing it just for a rank...
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farmpuma
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No credit for my 353 pt WUs

Sat Jun 20, 2009 3:57 am

In the last couple of days I've uploaded three or four of the 353 point GPU work units from server 171.67.108.11 and still haven't seen any credit posted. Anyone else seeing this problem?
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JPinTO
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:55 pm

 
farmpuma
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Mon Jun 22, 2009 7:10 am

Thanks for the link.

And thanks for reminding me I have an on going issue over there with double gromacs (SSE2) work unit failures addressed in this thread: 128.143.48.226 : server reports problem with unit.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Wed Jun 24, 2009 3:01 pm

Lots of WU's credited today I notice. I think the update about to post at http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ will give me my best day in a long while (since the last time credits weren't posted for a while), and more to come.
 
Shinare
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:41 am

Wow thats quite a bump in production. Someone turn on their cray yesterday? :)

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Gerbil Jedidiah
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:47 am

Shinare wrote:
Wow thats quite a bump in production. Someone turn on their cray yesterday? :)

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I'm running the GPU and SMP clients on my netbook! 8)
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Flying Fox
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Thu Jun 25, 2009 1:03 pm

More like they finally give back the credits we deserved over the past few days! :x
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JPinTO
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jun 26, 2009 7:43 am

That's exactly what happened. Missing WU's were finally credited.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Fri Jul 03, 2009 5:26 pm

I noticed this reference PNY GTX 260-216 video card at a decent price after rebate ($172.99 - $30 MIR, free shipping) this weekend (while supplies last, as they put it) so I bought it. It will give me an excuse to install a hard drive in one of my folding boxes and to put Win 7 on it¹. Though it looks like there's a problem with my Western Digital 750 GB drive since XP wants to check it every now and then when I restart the machine, so I'll have to be careful about which disk I put in that machine in case the WD drive dies.

(1) The problem I've found, though, is that I can't run a utility like RivaTuner on the "server machine" when I'm RDP'd into it. It runs, but it doesn't detect the server machine's video card as local so it doesn't do anything useful for me. Maybe there's a way to run that thing with command line parameters to change the settings. I haven't checked that notion yet.

Edit: But I think it makes at least one remote machine's GPU crash repeatedly on WU's when I do that... I forgot about that. :x
 
JPinTO
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Sat Jul 04, 2009 6:02 am

You can't touch the Graphic properties of a PC while you are RDP'd into it as the RDP protocol makes it's own "graphic driver" superseding the physical graphic driver. That's why you can't GPU fold on a box after RDPing it.

Use VNC.

- JP
 
farmpuma
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Win SMP 5.91 and 5.92 clients renewed!

Sat Jul 04, 2009 6:47 am

Their beta has been extended until 03 July 2010. My sincere thanks to Stanford, from those of us who micromanage our SMP folding.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Mon Jul 06, 2009 10:45 pm

JPinTO wrote:
You can't touch the Graphic properties of a PC while you are RDP'd into it as the RDP protocol makes it's own "graphic driver" superseding the physical graphic driver. That's why you can't GPU fold on a box after RDPing it.

Use VNC.

- JP

Thanks. I sort of remember that from a while back, but can't recall the good reason for it working the way it does, so I keep forgetting. It's too bad one has to run extra software to do that, especially considering how uncommon the need is.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Re: As the Work Unit Crunches

Tue Jul 07, 2009 11:50 pm

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=100769306

There's a thread about Tigerdirect selling a cheapish 216 SP GTX 260 after rebate. I'm not so interested in that thing as in the forum itself, where the team with the most output resides. Their output is impressive, and recent from the Top 20 list's indications. We should copy them, their behavior, esp. with respect to recruitment drive and membership maintenance. :o
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