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So I've been out of the folding scene for a while and just came into a cache of 15 old dualcore Intel machines... several years ago I was using these same type of machines in a diskless folding farm that I put together form instructions here. I can't seem to find those same instructions. Is it no longer relevant to fold on a diskless folding farm due to GPU folding now?

If not what else am I going to do with these 15 diskless dualcore computers networked together? heh

Yup, I've dropped working on the diskless stuff for that reason (GPUs >>>> CPUs) and also some other stuff like Stanford not fixing very basic bugs in their code leaving all the users to work around hangs at completion, or basic library incompatibilities across Linux versions. I've even shut down my normal folding stuff.

If someone wants to take over, all of my source code is on Sourceforge and I can even walk them through the designs, but I haven't had any offers so far.

OK, thanks notfred. I understand. I wish I could take up where you left off but I am in no way shape or form a linux guy. Anything I do in Linux needs step-by-step instructions, heh.

I found a thing called Dotsch/UX which is a Ubuntu distro setup for use as a diskless Boink farm with a server and Pxe clients. I might set that up for academics but probably wont leave it running if it wont help the effort out much. A lot of power consumption there for poor returns I'm guessing.

You might consider using USB 2 flash drives for your OS and client installs. WinXP SP1 uses about 1.5GBs and SP3 probably doesn't add more than 0.5 to 1.0GB. Until recently I was seeing 4GB drives on sale for about $5 and 8GB drives on sale for less than $10. I've also seen pretty good deals on four packs of 4GB USB 2 flash drives.

In a recent Newegg comment I read that the NTFS file system caused a pretty severe performance hit, so you should probably stick with FAT 32.

Even on a dual core CPU the SMP client with the pass key bonus enabled produces ten to twenty times the PPD of the old single core client. At 2.0GHz you should see 1000 to 2000 PPD per system depending on the WU mix.

Note: Most of these numbers are guesstimates and YMMV.

My farm has been off for the summer due to the hot weather. I'll probably turn some of it back on when the weather cools down, since it'll be helping to heat the house instead of fighting with the A/C.

If I was setting up a new farm today, I'd probably go with farmpuma's suggestion of using USB thumbdrives as boot devices. Load Ubuntu Server on 'em and run the Linux command line SMP client.

just brew it! wrote:

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If I was setting up a new farm today, I'd probably go with farmpuma's suggestion of using USB thumbdrives as boot devices. Load Ubuntu Server on 'em and run the Linux command line SMP client.

is that as easy as puttin in some kind of install CD and then downloading some folding@home installation and running it? I'm really NOT a linux guy heh. I've never messed with it more than following someone else's instructions to get something running. (thanks notfred) If its linux would I need 4G thumbdrives, or could I find a bulk deal somewhere on like 15 1G thumb drives?

I believe I was getting about 1,000 ppd/cpu that many years ago with my setup at that time. I got the 5.8 mill points after about a years worth of crunching if I remember correctly. hell its been too long ago, lol.

PS, my 15 computers are all low-profile and have a single 16x pcie slot. Its probably prohibativly expensive for me but would 15x of these video cards for GPU folding be better than CPU folding? Just shootin out ideas....