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

[BrainEater]

I had to edit it quick before another mod found it.

But there is a possibility we could pass you during the race if some of the resources I think are here, start crunching. hehe

Yes , Thank you for that !
I had intended to come back and edit it 5 mins later , but got sidetracked.


Yep . I think both you and toms will probably overtake us during the race, That's cool.
We are doing everything we can.

 

[Markfw]

Yep . I think both you and toms will probably overtake us during the race, That's cool.
We are doing everything we can.

Hey, its all for a good cause, wipe out cancer !

 

[alpha754293]

373.06 is the best version I have found for nvidia drivers

Thanks.

 

[BrainEater]

Mark , you are running SMP stuff....any ' (adv) beta flags' still work for 20+ core machines or is that gone ?

----

I'm excited.
This contest starts the day before my first ski trip of the season.
I'm going to be kicking cancer in the nuts , and kickin up snow trails at the same time.

Let's go teams !!

 

[TennesseeTony]

Big Advantage is gone bro.

Regarding kicking cancer where it hurts, I have a much too young friend who recently experienced cancer there, and had them removed.

I heard about it 2nd hand from his father, my friend didn't have the balls to tell me himself.

(As this is a true story, I know it's not funny, but Scott would be the first to crack a joke about it. )

 

[Markfw]

Mark , you are running SMP stuff....any ' (adv) beta flags' still work for 20+ core machines or is that gone ?

----

I'm excited.
This contest starts the day before my first ski trip of the season.
I'm going to be kicking cancer in the nuts , and kickin up snow trails at the same time.

Let's go teams !!

Well, the flag can be there, but there are no "bigadv" units or bonus anymore. Right now my 24 cores are producing 40k ppd, and my 12 "cores" are doing 20k ppd. All other computers have the CPU client removed to make sure the GPU's are fed all the info they need for maximum ppd.

 

[Pokey]

Regarding drivers:

I dare say everybody is using a different driver. I am using Nvidia Ver. 368.39 on all my rigs. My experience has been to keep whatever driver you use when you install FAH. If it works keep it. The different driver updates are usually aimed at gamers not DCers.

The only drivers I have heard anything negative about are the 375.xx ones.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Markfw]

Regarding drivers:

I dare say everybody is using a different driver. I am using Nvidia Ver. 368.39 on all my rigs. My experience has been to keep whatever driver you use when you install FAH. If it works keep it. The different driver updates are usually aimed at gamers not DCers.

The only drivers I have heard anything negative about are the 375.xx ones.

Just my 2 cents.

I don't know about whatever drivers when you install it, but I sure agree that if it works, don;t mess with it. Maybe saying the same thing.

 

[FoldingSolutions]

Count me in, 700k PPD to contribute from two GTX 970s keeping my front room warm!

Folding name = FoldingSolutions

I accidentally recently contributed 6 million points to team Singapore (team 197) before I realised I'd put the wrong team number in my client

 

[Assimilator1]

Lol, gutted!

Btw Mark, does a GPU need a real CPU core or will a virtual (HT) one do?
Currently got 10/12 threads for the CPU client.

 

[theAnimal]

You will find that Folding CONTINUOUSLY uses 100% of one core per GPU. The faster the core the better for fast cards, therefore the recommendation to disable HT.

This is not my experience on either one of my rigs.

I have an i7 970 3.2 GHz and dual Xeon X5650 2.66 GHz all currently running at default, and both systems only show about 50% of one thread used for the GPU, and my PPD is definitely not low for either one.

 

[Markfw]

Lol, gutted!

Btw Mark, does a GPU need a real CPU core or will a virtual (HT) one do?
Currently got 10/12 threads for the CPU client.

Well, for some reason, its likes even numbers when HT is on, so I think you are good.

 

[Markfw]

This is not my experience on either one of my rigs.

I have an i7 970 3.2 GHz and dual Xeon X5650 2.66 GHz all currently running at default, and both systems only show about 50% of one thread used for the GPU, and my PPD is definitely not low for either one.

What video card do you have ? and is HT on ?

 

[TennesseeTony]

Mark, I believe theAnimal is the one who heated up the arms race last year, with upwards of 650k ppd from a 980Ti factory clocked in the 1400MHz range. But now he has a second card....and he's not telling. Or he's gobbling turkey for the 3rd time today and can't type right now.

My question theAnimal, is what flavor is your operating system, and is it 32bit or 64bit? Mark and I have experienced 100% usage on Win10, 64bit. I saw this with both task manager and 3rd party apps (CPUID HWmonitor).

Have you tried non-HT to see if the ppd changes any? Even at 50% CPU usage, it seems logical that a more powerful 50% would be beneficial to ppd. Can't hurt to try if you haven't already.

 

[Kiska]

While I have just ordered a LGA1366 mobo, but I don't have a CPU for it, so I am looking for that as well....

 

[Ken g6]

I've been experimenting on my i3. 2 CPU threads has no impact on the GPU that I can see. 3 had minimal impact too...unless some other process also needs the CPU for awhile, in which case the GPU takes a noticeable hit.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Kiska:
Looking for an i7 or second gen XEON with 6 cores?

 

[Markfw]

@Kiska, And yes these will work in MOST socket 1366 motherboards. I have 4 different mobos with Xeon processors, that are all just plain socket 1366

I have an idle 920, but I would love to get some $ for the motherboard along with it as a pair. Otherwise the mobo is worthless.

But how about this:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-E5606-...80035638&sr=8-1&keywords=socket+1366+cpu+xeon

$46

There are too many for me to look through. BUT Xeons will be way cheaper than I7's, I have a pile of them.

Or a X5560 for $51.45

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-BX8060...8-1-fkmr0&keywords=socket+1366+cpu+xeon+x5560

Or a X5570 for $40.40

https://www.amazon.com/2-93GHz-Inte...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZAB2H5SD68KYDZA3GSC1

 

[theAnimal]

What video card do you have ? and is HT on ?

Mark, I believe theAnimal is the one who heated up the arms race last year, with upwards of 650k ppd from a 980Ti factory clocked in the 1400MHz range. But now he has a second card....and he's not telling. Or he's gobbling turkey for the 3rd time today and can't type right now.

My question theAnimal, is what flavor is your operating system, and is it 32bit or 64bit? Mark and I have experienced 100% usage on Win10, 64bit. I saw this with both task manager and 3rd party apps (CPUID HWmonitor).

Have you tried non-HT to see if the ppd changes any? Even at 50% CPU usage, it seems logical that a more powerful 50% would be beneficial to ppd. Can't hurt to try if you haven't already.

The i7 is running my 980Ti (clocked at 1474 rock solid, close to 700k ppd) and the Xeons have a 980 (about 400k ppd), both Win7 64 bit, HT on.

 

[alpha754293]

Seems like with the new v7 client, it is harder to do configuration testing than it did with the v6 command-line client. We used to do a bunch of configuration testing for PandeGroup (between driver versions, HTT on/off, etc.) because we would keep the WU that has been uploaded back to the servers already and then run it again with the different configurations so that we can at least keep the WU consistent.

Otherwise, it's a lot harder to tell (you have to turn around more WUs to get a statistical running average).

I'm currently running tests, but have been having network connectivity issues lately, so my PPD is a bit all over the map right now, so I'm trying to run it for at least 3 days before I would have some kind of an answer, except that the official start of the race is in 7 days. So, I'm going to run out of time (a little bit) to be able to properly test/vet the configuration before being required to start turning in WUs and generating results/points for the race.

Pity.

And with the WU assignment servers seeming having issues with 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, etc. threads...that makes for a lot of these higher core counts with GPUs somewhat problematic. *sigh...*

 

[alpha754293]

For those that are wondering, I might have some answers to some of those questions that people were asking (e.g. for GPU folding, does it need a physical core or will a logical core suffice?)

It doesn't look like that a physical core is absolutely required in order for it to run the GPU slot at the fastest/most efficient speed possible.

I'm still currently doing some more testing with that, but I've enabled HTT on both the systems now.

One of the systems (which has the bad CPU core) is running with 8 threads and one GPU slot and the other one right now is running with 10 threads and also a single GPU slot as well.

I should have started this kind of testing like at the beginning of November if I had known that I was going to be joining in in these efforts.

 

[alpha754293]

Question for y'all - which would be faster? Tesla K40 or GTX 1080?

 

[Markfw]

My reply got lost. Tesla is probably faster, but may not even be supported by F@H software.

However, I bet the 2.5 million PPD you get from 4 1080 cards would cost less and still have more PPD than the tesla.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Aaaaargh! Where are today's previous posts???

Since Sunday's Weekly Stats, we have gained 100+ folders, and doubled out daily output.

 

[Ken g6]

Aaaaargh! Where are today's previous posts???

Gone, unfortunately.

Fortunately, our new members aren't.