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What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 4:58 am
by npore
I don't know if there is already a thread for this, but I thought it'd be kinda cool to see what kinda hardware everyone is folding with - number of machines/specs/cooling etc.. I imagine there's quite a range of gear folding for the team... ancient - new, low end - high end, server stuff..

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 5:35 am
by GrimDanfango
Call me old-fashioned, but I haven't felt the need to upgrade from this:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GRXp0NJ2L.jpg

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 7:42 am
by Deanjo
I use the better half.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 10:32 am
by ThatStupidCat
I've read about folding but every time all I can think about is folding chairs. What is so fascinating about folding? Maybe enlighten us noobs on it. :-?

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 10:40 am
by GrimDanfango
I think it has something to do with discovering signs of extra-terrestrial life while sorting through your laundry.

...which happens more often than I'm comfortable admitting.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 10:50 am
by Prestige Worldwide
I think FlipFold is great and a huge time-saver.


LOL

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 10:54 am
by ThatStupidCat
GrimDanfango wrote:
I think it has something to do with discovering signs of extra-terrestrial life while sorting through your laundry.

...which happens more often than I'm comfortable admitting.


:o :o :D :roll: :D :wink:
I want some ET coins!

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 11:42 am
by GrimDanfango
Prestige Worldwide wrote:
I think FlipFold is great and a huge time-saver.


No need for that... Personally I just use the Ninja-fold!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK1nGpvaHno

Now that's true high-end folding!

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 11:54 am
by BIF
I am running a hex-core i7 and AMD 7980 GPU for over a year now. It brings in about 700,000 to 900,000 points per week and just keeps the home office toasty warm. I only shut down folding when I apply maintenance (about once every other week), or when I play a game, or if I'm working at home and don't want to compute nakedly... (from the heat, from the heat! :P )

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2014 12:10 pm
by Khali
I'm not folding now, but when I was, I was running a i5-3570k with a GTX 680 and a i7-2670QM laptop.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 1:03 am
by npore
Haha, perhaps not the best thread title :D But now my time folding t-shirts will be drastically reduced :)

I'm running an over-the-top 4930K + 2x GTX 780 Ti system, overclocked under water. Gets up to 3 million points a week, if I don't get too many Core 15 WUs. The heat (/power consumption) is..significant. It's the only heating I use over winter in my little flat. The utility of clothing is certainly reduced in the warmer months! :D

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:55 pm
by Kougar
Two haswell systems, one GTX 480 FTW and one 750 Ti. Amusingly the 750 Ti outfolds the 480 by 2x on Core 17 projects and does it with less than half the power draw.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 5:13 pm
by Meadows
People still do folding?

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:17 am
by npore
Yeah, seems the numbers folding are down a lot.

Maybe people are less willing to fork out for the extra power use. And the extra heat & noise would turn many off. Some maybe were pulled away by crypto mining.. Some have definitely switched to other distributed computing projects. I think many people had unrealistic expectations in terms of time it would take for some 'breakthrough' to come from the project. F@H has led to results already of course, but a lot of it is around testing and validating the modelling/simulation etc that the project is based on. This really should be no surprise to anyone with experience with this type of 'low level' research - it's a very new field, and a lot of ground work needs to be done to have greater understanding in the long term. But they are already running projects that could have (and have had) more immediate impact on the development of drugs or furthering understanding of the science behind different molecular systems and pathologies.

Is there a more worthy cause I could donate the extra power $$ to instead? Without a doubt. But they don't make use of the processing power of my PC, and keep my place warm over winter :) Are there more deserving/potentially more efficient distributed computing projects? Probably. I'm donating to F@H for now because it seems the software/infrastructure around it is more mature and the project has great potential in the long run for advancing understanding and development of treatment for many devastating diseases. I'll start looking at other projects and see if something is more deserving or interesting to me as time goes on.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:59 am
by just brew it!
I didn't switch to mining or other DC projects. The primary issue for me was the cost of the electricity and the heat generated by having multiple systems running at 100% load. I ramped down gradually; for a while was turning the folding clients off over the summer months. These days I generally run it only to burn in new system builds and for the annual TR Frankenbot challenge (for which I use a couple of Phenom IIs, and as of last year an FX-8320).

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 10:52 am
by Flying Fox
Power and heat are the main issues, but I also blame the points inflation brought on by the BigWU and the retirement of those. Those who custom-built setup's to fold BigWUs have been told rather bluntly that they are forced to go back to SMP folding where the points value are orders of magnitude smaller. So from a system perspective the points output for the entire cluster should have been down, and then we had some departures due to that and the continuous emphasis on GPU and the apparent neglect of SMP folders.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 2:21 pm
by Kougar
Flying Fox wrote:
Power and heat are the main issues, but I also blame the points inflation brought on by the BigWU and the retirement of those. Those who custom-built setup's to fold BigWUs have been told rather bluntly that they are forced to go back to SMP folding where the points value are orders of magnitude smaller. So from a system perspective the points output for the entire cluster should have been down, and then we had some departures due to that and the continuous emphasis on GPU and the apparent neglect of SMP folders.


Not sure I'd agree with all of that, what sort of neglect? SMP has been trudging along as it always has with decent usability improvements under the v7 client.

The entire BigADV fiasco could've been better handled certainly, but that was a separate issue from the SMP client. It also makes sense they would focus on GPUs as that's where the performance is at, a 780 can already hit 200K PPD and that reflects more on the amount of actual work being done instead of tacked on bonus points just for having a 4P box going. If the current rate of PPD growth in GPUs remains constant, then the PPD for a single GPU could hit 1 million within three generations.... which certainly would've begun ending the BigADV craze in of itself fairly quickly if it keeps scaling like that. Can't wait to see what an optimized client will be capable of on a Titan II...

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 3:14 pm
by Flying Fox
Kougar wrote:
Flying Fox wrote:
Power and heat are the main issues, but I also blame the points inflation brought on by the BigWU and the retirement of those. Those who custom-built setup's to fold BigWUs have been told rather bluntly that they are forced to go back to SMP folding where the points value are orders of magnitude smaller. So from a system perspective the points output for the entire cluster should have been down, and then we had some departures due to that and the continuous emphasis on GPU and the apparent neglect of SMP folders.


Not sure I'd agree with all of that, what sort of neglect? SMP has been trudging along as it always has with decent usability improvements under the v7 client.

Neglect in terms of writing proper SMP code (that can scale up with >4 cores) so better "science" can be done through CPUs. For folding, it is not entirely about the FLOPS, but the amount of "science" that is done. Points were supposed to be awarded that way. Given the current discrepancies of points generated per unit of GPU vs CPU, a lot of SMP-only folders are getting discouraged, especially the BigADV guys who are being forced back to "puny" SMP projects.

Kougar wrote:
The entire BigADV fiasco could've been better handled certainly, but that was a separate issue from the SMP client. It also makes sense they would focus on GPUs as that's where the performance is at, a 780 can already hit 200K PPD and that reflects more on the amount of actual work being done instead of tacked on bonus points just for having a 4P box going. If the current rate of PPD growth in GPUs remains constant, then the PPD for a single GPU could hit 1 million within three generations.... which certainly would've begun ending the BigADV craze in of itself fairly quickly if it keeps scaling like that. Can't wait to see what an optimized client will be capable of on a Titan II...

This will just mean the end of CPU folding, period. In that case, people will either stop or move on to other distributed computing projects which use CPUs. And that is fine, since there are lots of other worthwhile initiatives to be done.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 3:30 pm
by Arvald
personally I stick with paper Image
I've folded in past to see how things work.
I see no reason to start again... hydro is more expensive than ever, running my GPUs at full tilt for days on end is not only noisy but the heat!

Then you add on the drama. Sorry I try to live a drama free life.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:49 pm
by Khali
I gave it up because of the way the FAH team handled the end of the Big Adv. program. The science team ignored the donors who had concerns. The forum moderation team then proceeded to do Josef Stalin proud with their display of censorship and bannings for very lame reasons. When they were called on it they tried to delete the evidence to cover their back sides. It got bad enough that a lot of people were making copies of posts and putting them on other forums just so they had evidence of what was deleted or what they got banned for. In short it was a public relations disaster that was made worse by the forum moderation team and Dr. Pande's lack of doing anything to reign them in.

So I went over to Boinc to do distributed computing. There are several other projects that are studying proteins out there. I wasn't alone by looking at the ever shrinking of donor computers number. Then that number disappeared when it kept dropping to be replaced by a flops number that no one can verify.

Ok, its now time for some one to come along and give me grief for saying anything bad about FAH and mentioning Boinc. :-?

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:16 pm
by Meadows
Khali wrote:
Ok, its now time for some one to come along and give me grief for saying anything bad about FAH and mentioning Boinc. :-?

Don't worry, all forms of "distributed computing" are nonsense.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 8:05 pm
by Khali
Meadows wrote:
Khali wrote:
Ok, its now time for some one to come along and give me grief for saying anything bad about FAH and mentioning Boinc. :-?

Don't worry, all forms of "distributed computing" are nonsense.

Interesting stance to take considering how many people do it. Could you explain why its nonsense?

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 1:39 am
by Meadows
Yes.

I didn't come all this way upgrading my computer with ever more efficient parts over the years just so it can run full tilt doing something I'll never reap the benefits of.
It's been years and years since "idle cycles were wasted cycles". Today's computers barely have idle cycles anymore, with their ever more numerous power saving states.

They should do what the coin mining people do and develop custom circuitry for this stuff that are a hundred times more efficient. Then all the Mother Theresas of the world could buy a couple and stick them wherever they please (wall socket or spare USB port) and "help humanity" without burning the goddamn house down.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 2:46 am
by Khali
Hmm, not sure you will never ever get any benefits from a distributed computing project. You probably won't make a buck off of doing DC work so I guess your "whats in it for me?" approach has one point.

The Bio/Medical projects just might find a cure or treatment for a disease you might have or come down with in the future. For example, scientist in Japan have found 7 new drugs for the treatment of cancer in children and possibly adults earlier this year with the help of distributed computing via World Community Grid's Childhood Cancer project.

Then there are all the other projects in mathematics, physical sciences, etc. Who knows what might or might not come out of them. One little piece of information from a DC donors computer might show the way to all kinds of things like cheap non polluting power generation to finding ET coming to visit the Earth. Some of the possibilities are not very probable but they are still possible.

Its your, and my, choice to participate or not. You don't choose to and that's fine. I, and others, do choose to, for now.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 3:48 am
by LostCat
Khali wrote:
The Bio/Medical projects just might find a cure or treatment for a disease you might have or come down with in the future.

I've always felt on the other side of that coin the inefficiency of it all is likely causing a lot of pollution and making me more likely to get ill in the first place.

Solving problems after making them worse...not really my thing.

(I would leave the thread alone normally though, since some people really dig this stuff.)

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 3:52 am
by LostCat
Meadows wrote:
Don't worry, all forms of "distributed computing" are nonsense.

Coming into a subforum dedicated to DC just to crap on it seems like a poor choice.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 6:03 am
by just brew it!
I tended to view it as a form of charity. Actually, I still do; it is just that for me, my desire to "donate" isn't strong enough to outweigh the downsides any more. If electricity was cheaper (or if I could itemize the estimated electricity cost on my taxes as a charitable donation...) and I had more spare time, I'd consider assembling some sort of F@h farm in the attic.

As far as Meadows helicoptering in and taking a dump on things goes, it's just what he does. :roll:

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 12:59 pm
by Meadows
Savyg wrote:
Coming into a subforum dedicated to DC just to crap on it seems like a poor choice.


I'm not against the idea in itself, but I do believe the current implementation is at least inefficient, if not outright bad. There exist better ways and we've seen them happen elsewhere.

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 5:37 pm
by Kougar
Flying Fox wrote:
Neglect in terms of writing proper SMP code (that can scale up with >4 cores) so better "science" can be done through CPUs. For folding, it is not entirely about the FLOPS, but the amount of "science" that is done. Points were supposed to be awarded that way. Given the current discrepancies of points generated per unit of GPU vs CPU, a lot of SMP-only folders are getting discouraged, especially the BigADV guys who are being forced back to "puny" SMP projects.


Not to defend everything they've done... but the CPU work they're doing these days isn't highly parallel to begin with. All the projects types that benefit the most from parallel processing were migrated over to the GPU.

This was the problem with Bigadv folding, the SMP core & projects didn't lend themselves to multiprocessing well. A 4P system in reality folded around 3.5x instead of 4x of a single CPU. That was the specific reason they started the BigADV program, was to add enough bonus points to offset the performance loss. The entire thing got out of hand and they ended it badly... but I do agree it needed to be ended as it was simply harming Folding overall at that point.


Meadows wrote:
They should do what the coin mining people do and develop custom circuitry for this stuff that are a hundred times more efficient. Then all the Mother Theresas of the world could buy a couple and stick them wherever they please (wall socket or spare USB port) and "help humanity" without burning the goddamn house down.


That isn't physically possible. ASIC hardware requires what is being computed to not change... in effect, they would have to design a new ASIC every single time they added new projects which is almost weekly.

If you want to understand why it isn't possible, go read some Ars Technica posts on ASICs and coin mining. :wink:

Re: What are you guys folding with?

Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 11:02 am
by BIF
just brew it! wrote:
I tended to view it as a form of charity...


I do too. Still do; still run at maximum warp, though now I have Process Lasso making sure I always have "just enough" CPU available for UI responsiveness.

Anybody looking at a chart of my numbers can easily see the days I am doing graphic rendering or other work. One x17 WU can take 15-16 hours when I'm not messing about with other stuff, so even one hour's delay for that work unit can push that "2nd WU" to the next calendar day, appearing to hurt my production.

My plans to build a new machine keep getting waylaid by life in general. Got some more house work coming up; will probably end up costing me $5k+ which was money I was expecting to spend on a new rendering server. Oh well. Gotta keep the rain out... :P