11th Annual Folding@Home Holiday Season 3-way Race

[Chapbass]

Just signed up my measly main comp here. i5 3570k + amd 280. Looks like I'm getting 8k ppd on the proc and 78k on the gpu. Dunno if those numbers are right or not (gpu might be low?). Anyway, help is help i guess!

 

[KingstonU]

What the heck I might sign up for the contest. I have a couple weeks to set everything up. Someone remind me to launch it Before Dec 1st

 

[Markfw]

What the heck I might sign up for the contest. I have a couple weeks to set everything up. Someone remind me to launch it Before Dec 1st

You should fire it up now, so it can determine an average to use to create even teams

 

[MrCommunistGen]

I'm in. I'm MrCommunistGen on folding as well.

Time to pull my HD 7950 and HD 7870 out of mothballs, fire up a chassis I can throw them in and start warming up the server room again.

Edit: I probably can't start working on those builds until Monday. I'm slammed at the office today, and I'm going to be out of town this weekend.

 

[Orange Kid]

Used to be you got banned for spamming.
Nice, may bring some new life to DC.

 

[Orange Kid]

Welcome to all the new visitors to our quiet little corner of AT.
It would be best to start running Folding@Home so you can work out any issues you might come up with before the "official" start. This way we can help sort things out for you and get you in peak F@H performance asap.
I'll say thanks for joining us and vanquishing Tom's at least and if you wish, stay the whole month and help us kick Hardware Canucks Folding Team frosty arse.

 

[PCTC2]

FYI, I'll only be partaking in the second race, from Dec 1st until December 7th. I won't be able to maintain my PPD for an entire month. So unfortunately I won't be able to claim my spot in the top 5 of the team or back in the top 1000 folders in the world...

 

[CuriousMike]

I'm in; it'll be a small contribution but it'll be something.
user: curiousmike

 

[petrusbroder]

The OP has been edited. An number of "probably" have been removed and two spelling errors corrected.
The third post has been edited too. Three more TeAm-mates have been added bringing the total to 23 racers.
We still need more! racers ...

BTW, these are the stats as of just now ...

Rank .. Team name ............ active users ...... PPD ............. total points .... WUs folded
21 .... Hardware Canucks Forum .... 26 ........... 9,349,998 ....... 7,043,396,210 ... 1,495,840
24 .... Tom's Hardware ............ 47 .......... 15,273,724 ....... 6,769,177,205 ... 1,400,120
27 .... Team AnandTech ............ 38 .......... 14,481,186 ....... 6,570,251,839 ... 2,597,023

I expect the numbers to increase a lot!

 

[TennesseeTony]

Just signed up my measly main comp here. i5 3570k + amd 280. Looks like I'm getting 8k ppd on the proc and 78k on the gpu. Dunno if those numbers are right or not (gpu might be low?). Anyway, help is help i guess!

Is that a 280 or 280X? Low for a 280X, not sure about a 280. The good news is that Folding @ Home has different tasks, and you may have just gotten one or two of the lower scoring ones. Just be sure to allow one full core to assist the GPU, so you don't want but 3 cores running the CPU task. If you need to know how to do that, ask away! Good to have you, and the others too!

 

[smccloud]

Joining as runt. Next week my Dual E5-2660v4 server at work will be getting "burned-in" using F@H

Main machine is an i5-2500 with a Radeon HD 5450

 

[knight1138]

I joined the team as knightspawn.

 

[Kiska]

Argh, my LGA 771 dual socket motherboard has killed itself....... It doesn't like the Australian climate, so I think all the compute power I'll be providing will be the 2 servers that I have in the US...

 

[Storm Vanguard]

Good Evening guys, long time Anandtech reader here. Since i just dumped a truckload of money on a shiny, colorful and shamelessly powerful rig, i decided to answer your call to arms. I shall assist you with my full compute prowess, and hopefully help to assert once more Anandtech's unquestioned superiority in all things IT. I've already downloaded and installed the FaH client (FaH username StormVanguard) and after a quick look at the logs i guess everything is running ok from a software standpoint, except for the fact that FaH doesn't bring my two gtx970s to 3D frequencies. this, of course, is unacceptable; my system is idle most of the day and night and i intend to sacrifice every kilowatt necessary to hold the line while i'm not using it. can you please point me to where you usually discuss these configuration problems and what i'll need to post to clarify the situation? many thanks, and good folding.


EDIT: i seem to have pinpointed the problem; apparently the driver doesn't take well my trying to run the two gpus independently. plus, the software i'm using, msi afterburner with rivaTuner statistics server, apparently has some sort of conflict with the FaH client and will report incorrect frequency data, if FaH and the driver decide to butt heads (i've confirmed that while RivaTuner insisted i was running the gpu at 400mhz, the folding ETA and progress on that gpu while at full frequency didn't change.). I've yet to confirm is this is due to SLI being enabled in the driver and the consequent requirements for the two gpus to mirror each other, but for now, if i want SLI enabled, i'll probably have to use only one gpu at a time, the other returning a critical error in FaH if the first one is utilized for something intensive (like gaming or rendering videos). Tonight i'll test if they can both run different tasks and not give errors but i'm not too hopeful. if indeed i have to disable SLI, which i'd rather not do given my gaming schedule and the need for constant reconfiguration of the driver, it means my shiny rig has just become half a rig. sigh. :/ if anyone else has encountered similar problems with SLI and multi-gpu configs, any input is appreciated. :/

 

[BrainEater]

Woop !
Thanks Anandtech !!!

Looks like all of our teams are way up , that's awesome.
I've decided I don't have enough money for this competition , but that's cool. 15 million a day will have to do.
we are borg is yet to come (as paltry as 4 video cards is..)

Let's kick cancer in the nuts.

 

[Markfw]

Good Evening guys, long time Anandtech reader here. Since i just dumped a truckload of money on a shiny, colorful and shamelessly powerful rig, i decided to answer your call to arms. I shall assist you with my full compute prowess, and hopefully help to assert once more Anandtech's unquestioned superiority in all things IT. I've already downloaded and installed the FaH client (FaH username StormVanguard) and after a quick look at the logs i guess everything is running ok from a software standpoint, except for the fact that FaH doesn't bring my two gtx970s to 3D frequencies. this, of course, is unacceptable; my system is idle most of the day and night and i intend to sacrifice every kilowatt necessary to hold the line while i'm not using it. can you please point me to where you usually discuss these configuration problems and what i'll need to post to clarify the situation? many thanks, and good folding.

Well, even for cards that are NOT evga brand, I download the evga Precision application. It brings the cards to the greatest spped I think you could get out of them, and allows for fan override control. I set the fans to manual, and make sure the temps are below 73c

 

[Markfw]

Woop !
Thanks Anandtech !!!

Looks like all of our teams are way up , that's awesome.
I've decided I don't have enough money for this competition , but that's cool. 15 million a day will have to do.
we are borg is yet to come (as paltry as 4 video cards is..)

Let's kick cancer in the nuts.

Wait until Tony turns his F@H farm back on. at least 6.3 million ppd more. And I am sure there are others in the same spot.

 

[TennesseeTony]

.......if anyone else has encountered similar problems with SLI and multi-gpu configs, any input is appreciated. :/

Thanks for joining Storm Vanguard, and welcome! I can't help with the SLI question, but I can give you a few more monitoring tools to work with. GPU Shark is both basic and simple. GPUz has a monitoring/recording function.

I do know we have had some issues with another member recently, with GPU tasks failing, and the solution was to roll back to a more stable driver. The short answer: Driver version 373.06.

 

[Storm Vanguard]

Thank you Tennessee, i'll try those tools and the driver rollback once i confirm it has the sli profiles i need (it should, i'm not into playing stuff day one). i usually prefer rivaTuner because has a broad range of sensors, and in fact, i can see in my graphs pretty clearly what's going on. while my master GPU (the one connected to the screen) was working on rendering a video with madVR, the instant the second one would complete the download of her WU a sharp drop in core utilization happens on the master GPU with a corresponding spike up on the second. after that:

00:54:02:WU01:FS01:0x21:ERROR:exception: Error downloading array interactionCount: clEnqueueReadBuffer (-5)
00:54:02:WU01:FS01:0x21:Saving result file logfile_01.txt
00:54:02:WU01:FS01:0x21:Saving result file log.txt
00:54:02:WU01:FS01:0x21:Folding@home Core Shutdown: BAD_WORK_UNIT
00:54:05:WARNING:WU01:FS01:FahCore returned: BAD_WORK_UNIT (114 = 0x72)
00:54:05:WU01:FS01:Sending unit results: id:01 state:SEND error:FAULTY project:11403 run:6 clone:42 gen:120 core:0x21 unit:0x000000ac8ca304f255ed4f71a53718a1

this repeated 3 or 4 times, with a noticeable drop in frame rendering to confirm the graph is right. this strange synchronicity between the two gpus is why i fear there is some hiccup with the driver or the SLI mode. we'll see tomorrow with the old drivers. let's hope it works, i have proteins to fold dammit

 

[Markfw]

Storm,even though F@H supposedly works in SLI mode, I have not seen it yet work successfully, and recommend that you turn that mode off while folding.

 

[Orange Kid]

F@H will not work with the 375.XX drivers.
They recommend 372.70 but the forums consensus is that the 373.06 drivers are fine

EDIT ...and the latest, 375.95 don't work either

...and here

 

[Qasar]

im in as well.. should be Qasar on folding, forums and on the site ...

 

[petrusbroder]

Edited third post (with the racers) added 4 more.
smccloud and knight1138, please post your f@h usernames here so I can compile the stats when the race starts!

 

[Ryan Smith]

The news article is live! It's gotten a bit more competitive now that the editorial team is involved, and the editors are chomping at the bits to beat each other down for the bragging rights. Don't let @Ryan Smith down! His job might be on the line here! (Not really, but you can bet the Tom's Hardware writers will give him grief if you guys lose)

While I know you guys are going to win - I've seen you trash Slashdot, so Tom's Hardware is easy pickings - I'm going to provide a little extra encouragement anyhow.

When Team AnandTech wins, I will select one participant at random and, paying out of my own pocket, ship them an item from my personal pile of loot as a gesture of my appreciation. What will it be?* You'll just have to win to find out.

* Don't expect anything too fancy, if only for customs reasons

 

[Pokey]

For those that feel their contribution may be too “small” just remember that in a close race that small amount may be the difference between your team winning or losing. So jump right in. You can be on my team anytime.