Personal computing discussed

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Ragnar Dan
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:07 pm

Just don't hand them over to/fall to the Dark side (UGN). I'll never understand why someone with good production would want to get lost in a crowd. You can't even tell if something's going wrong with your output that way. Turrrrrible.
 
Hotdog
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:35 pm

Haha, I've been folding for UGN for awhile... did for a long time back in the QMD days, then went to SETI@Home since QMDs dried up and I got sad. Now I'm back. Back in black.

I love UGN. So many of the other "big PPD people" are folding on work machines, machines that aren't theirs, stuff like that... which just sort of rubs me the wrong way. Not because I don't appreciate the premise of folding at home, the science behind it... but because it's like... "Look at me! I have machines where I work... yeah... no, I don't pay for them... or the electricity... tee hee!", and that's just not right IMHO. And hell, it's not even because "I don't work somewhere where I could do it"- au contrare! I'm a domain admin for a little over 250 work stations, all of them either C2Ds or P4Ds, which are fully under my control. And since the business is good, no one cares about power usage, machines are on 24/7... it'd take me a total of 15 minutes to deploy F@H over Active Directory, but it wouldn't be ME folding. It wouldn't be MY donation. It'd be... corny.

Anyhoogle, alone I probably push out... ~3.5-3.8kish a day? Something like that. With other people in UGN, we're doing a lot more. And since numbers arouse me, there we go. As for noticing if my own personal output is falling... well, hell, all of the machines are in my basement. I check on them daily, since I do other things with them. It's not like I get them "lost in the crowd" or anything.

Dismounting soap box.... now. Damn, I'm short without it... *tear*

edit: Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I'm not hating on any corporate folders. Far from it. I've learned tons about folding from OC-AMD, who used a lot of his company's machines I believe, and I respect him and stuff. It's just... keep it separate. If I did ever fold on my work machines, I'd name them "CompanyNameFolding", not "Hotdog"... that's just not cool IMHO.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:55 pm

I'm in agreement about the naming thing. That 1920x1080i-How??? guy at Rage3D was using company machines as far as I recall, and even after he left they're still folding under that username. If one is management and made the decision to fold on company bills, that's one thing, but otherwise, there's a vaniity problem.

By the way in a little over 2.5 hours my Ubuntu clock is more than 2 minutes 15 seconds ahead.
 
Hotdog
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:02 pm

Yeah, that sounds familiar too, that he was using corporate machines.

Also, and it's overlooked a lot, but even people in management have no idea what is going on 95% of the time. Assuming I actually DID go to my bosses, and was like "Yeah, I want to fold@home on these machines... I'll shut some machines down at night, and fold on 1/2 of them to make up the power difference, so you'll see no difference... what is folding@home? Well, you'll be curing diseases... yeah"; it doesn't mean my boss would UNDERSTAND what I was doing... explaining folding@home to someone who doesn't know/care about computers is fruitless, there's no tax write off, there's no direct benefit from a business standpoint. I could convince them to do it since it'd be "helping the world" and stuff like that, but let's be honest: I just want those damn CPUs to fold under my name so my e-peen will grow.

If there was a distributed computing program that "counted to a really high number, then gave you points based on how high/how long it took to get to that number", promised to evolve as CPUs evolved, use SSE2, use SSE3, fully SMP, but had ZERO practical purpose... I'd probably do it. I honestly would. Because the numbers game is much, much more amusing to me. SETI@Home was fun for me since you could use different compilers: SSE2 compliers, SSE3, Pentium-specific... it was a clever, clever game of matching compliers to processors, and it was fun :D
 
Ragnar Dan
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:08 pm

Yeah, a lot of "selling" is done without telling the negative side, nor the positives of not doing the thing being sold. That's why generally it should be management's decision from start to finish.

The one downside of SETI, of course, is that it's a thing which is impractical, and implausible to have any real effect on anything.
 
Hotdog
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Thu Jan 25, 2007 9:18 pm

Yup, there is no "upside" to selling SETI@Home to businesses. You're not saving (or potentially saving) anything :D

I had so many run-ins with people running SETI@Home though, back before BOINC. I used to work at a Best Buy (gag), and even there, a few of the people back in the computer section loaded it up on display machines, it was amazing. This was back in the day when you could run that "Seti hide" thingy-mc-bobber, which hid it from Task Manager, and basically made it invisible to people. Crazyness.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 1:46 pm

It appears there are others doing... similar things, to say the least. Such as a certain folding competitor of ours. :o
 
Hotdog
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 2:05 pm

Yeah, there are a lot of people doing it. There was a big thread at... AMD64? or something that outlined doing it as well.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 2:12 pm

Did they mention Ubuntu 64 as the OS on AMD64 or whatever you mean? Seems a bit coincidental unless there's an original source that everyone's copying from.
 
Hotdog
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 2:17 pm

Yup, I believe so. Here's the link I remember reading, when I first heard of this.

http://www.planetamd64.com/index.php?showtopic=29163

I believe HardOCP might have done it first, but I think they used Ubuntu as well.

It's just a stupidly friendly OS, I think that's why everyone chose it.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 3:20 pm

Well, I have to say the name is odd, and the "togetherness" whatever the heck crap thing from their site sort of puts me off a bit, too. But I don't care enough to go find a replacement for myself.

I'd have to see something showing me that I'd gain a double-digit percentage performance increase to switch, because like you say, this is easy. And laziness is an attribute I cultivate. :lol:

Edit: For example, every morning when I start preparing to work I look at the full screen folding client output and ask myself... how the hell do I get out of this thing? I keep forgetting the CTRL-ALT thing. I could write me a help text or something, but... eventually, repetition will make me remember.
 
Hotdog
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 3:26 pm

Haha, yes, it can be confusing. What's even weirder is that, at least on the system I have running here @ work, my VMWare of Windows 2000... like, you can drag the mouse into the VMWare window, and drag it right out... you don't need to ctrl-alt. It's so confusing. It's so weird.

Anyways...

Yeah, if I could find something, hell, even a simple command line only, that would boot up, and let me type apt-get-whatever, then ./fah5 -advmethods -forceasm etc, and it'd give me 10, 20% faster... I'd do it in a heartbeat. but for now... laziness wins.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Fri Jan 26, 2007 4:10 pm

There is a list you can generate at Linux.org of "minimalist" distributions. I tried to specify 64 bit the first time and got 0 results, so switched to Intel compatible. 101 results. Can't find any info on 64 bits yet, though, so one would have to check each result individually. Once again, ZZZ. I noticed a review mentioning that Gentoo is supposed to be fast. But nobody will do all my work for me, dagnabbit. At best it's optimized, but still running the full X complement, so it's probably not so much better.

I played with the information about the Vmware tools/optimizations today, and it seems like it synched up the clock. I'll know more in a bit about how it works.

Edit: Can't tell about time yet, but I've been running it for the last half hour and it's not perfectly synchronized, but it's within a minute. I'm getting ~9 - 9.5 minutes a frame depending on what I'm doing in Windows. Lot of clicking around makes Vmbuntu go slower.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Sat Jan 27, 2007 6:29 pm

It finally went through, and got me a new WU, about 13 hours after it stopped folding.

Fortunately, it did download a 3027 WU which is 716 points, and when I'm doing nothing else on the machine it takes 9:20 per frame, which means I'm now getting over 1100 PPD on that one machine. I couldn't get close to that even if I was running the fast 364 pointers.

Everyone with a dual core should be running this thing, if at all possible.
 
Hotdog
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Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:39 pm

Yup, it's crazy fast.

The bad thing is, as I'm sure you noticed, the SMP server was down last night... thus, a huge drop off in points.

*tear*
 
Ragnar Dan
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Sat Jan 27, 2007 11:21 pm

Their lousy system management/maintenance is very annoying.

But at least my regular folding clients got nearly 100% of cycles, so that was at least something. Not much, since they're crappy 2125 and 2126 WUs, but at least the thing was making points, even if they won't be done until about 13 days and a bit more than 10, respectively, as long as the SMP client keeps running. I had set them with the -oneunit and -pause flags, but now I'm not so sure that's a good idea.
 
Hotdog
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Sun Jan 28, 2007 12:51 pm

Do you notice ANY performance difference for the SMP client with running the Windows FAH along with the Linux client? I know the priority difference should keep the Windows one from getting nearly anything, but I never trusted Windows with that.
 
ifittakesforever
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Sun Jan 28, 2007 10:04 pm

I just took the plunge and set this up on my x2 4400. My first WU is about half way done, so maybe by morning I'll see the results. The hardest part about setting it all up was the terminal commands, but most of that was self-inflicted. This makes me want to "upgrade" the wifey's computer to a dual core!
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Ragnar Dan
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Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:07 pm

I can't remember if I ever went any extended period w/o the Windows clients running. I assume it would do a small amount better, but one would have to test to be certain.

Since the heroes at Stanford can't keep their assignment servers working, I keep getting lots of time on the Windows clients. At least they allowed me to upload my last SMP WU, anyway. Any gain I might get from not running the Windows clients is more than defeated by the loss of folding time because of repeated problems getting new WUs for the Linux SMP client. :evil:
 
vortexzpd
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Mon Jan 29, 2007 11:50 pm

I havent tried the VMWare method but i have installed Mandriva 2007 x86-64 and the linux SMP client. I can say that WOW the points difference is amazing.
Since I switched from the winblows two clients to the one linux SMP client i have moved into the top 20 and have remained there for about two weeks now. Depending on the projects my PPD is 1000 to 1400 or so with just one system. Huge increase @ no cost.
I do wish that FAHMON will soon be updated to support this new client.
And i have been really happy with Mandriva. No SMP issues @ all. No hanging, no early WU's, not one problem. It just works and works FAST.

In fact it works so well that soon I am going to build another dual core system so i can simple shutdown some of my many older Folding computers (11 of them) and replace them. Combined they average around 1000 PPD. My PPD should still be 2000+ with just two computers. Nice!!

Maybe i can pawn off the old comps for enough money to build yet another dual system.
Any takers? lol

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