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

[TennesseeTony]

I am NOT a vid card expert, but I think most artifacts are memory speed related. Sorry to hear this though.

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/download-utilities/ Here are some tools if you wanted to try and pinpoint the problem.

 

[Kiska]

Very sorry to hear of the near continuous setbacks, friend. Look on the bright side, you get to crunch all you want 6 months from now when winter hits! We certainly appreciate you doing your best, especially considering the high temperatures.

Setbacks is one way of putting it, another way is annoyances......
But I just got note that the mobo has arrived in Portland Oregon, which is awaiting processing by Australia post
Grrr I really wanted the seller to directly post, but NOPE! Posts in the US only, well I'll get it, but I have to pay a little extra since well I am redirecting mail....

 

[petrusbroder]

Here are the stats for December 4, 2016, the third full day of the race. The stats are from http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php?s=, updated at 18:00 UTC (=12pm CST). Only the points count. The ppd is there for information only.

The Teams' race stats

Here is a diagram of the production of each team (Y-axis) for each day (X-axis)

Well, TeAm Anandtech is still in the lead...

The overtake stats

The Yetis vs. The Snowmen

The daily production for the teams

The daily production for the racers

The total production for the racers as of today
The Yetis-racers are in blue, The Snowmen-racers are in green

Well folded, everybody!

 

[Markfw]

Thanks Peter !

 

[biodoc]

Thanks for the stats, Peter!

 

[borandi]

The Barnacules Nerdgasm team (I assume he got his youtube subscribers to start folding back in September) their output has now dropped below ours after they raced to #20 in 4 months.
They had 3b/mo output at one point - lots and lots of people with a single NVIDIA card on the team. Ultimately this is where FAH makes a punch - lots of side users with a single card, rather than big individuals.
But we should overtake them in.... 3 months.

Actually, TeAm is #8 in daily average. Noice.

 

[TennesseeTony]

 

[Markfw]

Quote from their thread over at Toms:

Quote from Sakkura --Dec 4, 2016, 4:47 PM
"Well, no reason to concede. The points still count, and if we keep up the pressure they don't get an excuse to slack off.

And hey, if they overtake us in December, maybe we can catch back up in the following months. Looks like they take competition season VERY seriously over there (seriously, they were doing 30 million per week just a couple months ago, now they're bordering on 50 million per DAY)."

So, when this race is over we need to be a little serious about this, as we don't want to give up what we worked so hard to get. We will pass them in a little over 5 days, and we need to stay ahead of them. I will turn off some of my stuff in Jan, but should still be at 3-4 million ppd in Jan.

 

[petrusbroder]

I am considering to fold until I get 100 M points - approx 5 - 6 months ...not much, but every point counts!

 

[TennesseeTony]

POEM was on my list for the winter, but they've shut down BOINC and gone private. I have more heat than I need for winter, the 980's will have to go after Jan 1st, possibly some 980Ti's. But I have considered, am still considering, replacing my POEM goal with Folding. 500,000,000 sounds like a nice place to start from this time next year.

 

[bds71]

I was planning to only fold for the short term, but if enough persist I see no reason why I cant continue on after. it ain't nowhere near what you big dogs is pushing out, but every little bit counts eh?

 

[Storm Vanguard]

unfortunately i'm the kind of guy who likes to buy expensive things he can't really afford by saving for a loong time. long story short, i have the rig, but not the money to donate a year's worth of folding in electricity. things however may change over the year because of a couple projects i'm starting up, and if i manage to reach a decent income, you bet i'll be back asap. fun races aside, i realized my hardware is capable of helping a lot more than i thought when it comes to aiding research, and i really prefer to donate compute time directly to scientists than bet my charity money on associations that i cannot monitor adequately. worst case scenario, i'll still be at the starting line for the race next year, that much i can guarantee. honestly, i'm rewatching star trek right now and reading this thread feels a lot like working on Engineering on a spaceship not really designed for what we are asking her to do. between dropping voltages, people scrambling to buy more stuff, break boxes almost catching fire and overheating of any possible kind, it's all extremely charming and fun. better than the church raffle for sure

 

[bds71]

for those interested, I worked out the math (how much does it cost to fold)
since the average single card folding machine runs around 250W, that's what I based the numbers on (and 10c per kW/hr cost for ease of calculation) note: GPU folding only since it is way more efficient
for each 1/4 kW here in the states I pay roughly 60c/day or 18$/mo. for those running multiple cards/systems it may be easier to calculate for a full kW: approx. 2.40$/day or 72$/mo.

please feel free to check my numbers

 

[TennesseeTony]

And most of us are in the Northern Hemisphere, and need to heat the home anyway.... Intelligent heat, someone said, half a dozen pages back.

 

[Ionstream]

Have mercy on those living in the tropics My room gets pretty toasty, and a normal day over here in sunny Singapore is considered unbearable by most tourists.

 

[wonderboyP8NT]

*singing (manly voice with cheese-its in mouth)*

Do you want to build a snowman?
No I don't 'cuz im a Yeti!
I never see you fold anymore
Come out and score
Im ahead of VirtualLarry!

 

[alpha754293]

a) Not sure if anybody was having this issue as well, but apparently my cpu:10 slot was having problems picking up a WU since the-day-before-yesterday, hence the slight drop off in PPD. (Fixed that by closing and ending the process and then starting it back up again.)
Was trying to run the system in a near headless state and letting it do its thing. Didn't catch that it was having problems with it until a couple of hours ago - was probably like that for about a day-and-a-half.

b) I'll likely drop off again once this/competition is over. CPU based systems just simply can't compete with the new GPU hardware (still struggling to justify getting 6 Teslas because I don't run enough FEAs for that, and even then, at 2x-3x improvement, not quite nearly substantial enough yet to warrant doing that), especially when a CPU-based system would be of vastly greater use for me for all the other stuff that I normally do. (And having 6 GTX1080s would be nice for F@H, but that's all that I would have use for, which again, makes it a tough sale (to the wife).)

c) The systems will likely have to return to running CFD/FEAs for me so that I can make money with those systems which will enable me to buy new/more toys. My current CFD that's running is estimated to take a total of 75 DAYS(!) (running continuously, 24/7). (External aerodynamics for a full semi/tractor-trailer/18-wheeler, 7.2 million elements/cells, 20,000 timesteps, DES). And this is my "small" case. Each result file is just shy of 1 GB, and I had to restart it a couple of times to write LESS data (because if I wrote it all to disk, it would consume almost 20 TB.) So, the other two systems would have to go back to CFD research for me.

d) Not sure if the GPU power calculations above includes the power for the supporting/host system or if that's the GPU only. My electricity bill is already pushing close to $300/month, so...it's a difficult sale.

 

[wonderboyP8NT]

In response to A) Yes, only 2 of my 4 computers doing F@H are getting any WUs for the CPU, and they were all running yesterday. All of the GPUs have work.

In response to B) I agree that CPUs seem pointless. My overclocked 5820K is doing 1/10 what my GTX 950 is doing on less power.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Im ahead of VirtualLarry!

WUT? That was weird, I didn't even notice. Honest.

I had my EOC stats page open in my browser, I refreshed it, breathed a sigh of relief, as Ken_g6 is still behind me, then I went back to my AT forums tabs. I didn't even notice that my team rank was now showing 53. Sigh.

You leapfrogged all of the five guys ahead of me too, I guess. Or maybe you wouldn't show up there, as you're not an overtake for me any more. Maybe I'm reading the stats the wrong way round.

Anyways, congrats.

 

[wonderboyP8NT]

Maybe I'm reading the stats the wrong way round.

Anyways, congrats.

I have no idea. I just looked at the Yetis VS Snowman chart above and I was right above you. I doubt I can hold my pace much longer though my machines are unhappy.

 

[petrusbroder]

@wonderboyP8NT and VirtualLarry:
The stats are as follows according to EOC:

name ...................team rank ........... total points
VirtualLarry .............. 53 ................ 14 762 925
wonderboyP8NT .... 161 .................. 1 963 360

I don't know how you read the stats, but please note, that in the tables above, all the racers are in alphabetical order ...

 

[borandi]

We quietly passed 7b points total since the team was founded.

8b by the end of the month?

I just had to take a GPU offline Replaced it with something half as good. I have a set of Malta GPUs in my daily rig that I tried to spin up but after 3 years of gathering dust and light gaming, it was hitting 100ºC and eventually caused a BSOD.
Got things to do today otherwise I'd take them out and spin up another 700k PPD (Ideally I'd like to ebay them and replace with a single 1070, but last time I sold old Malta cards they took 4 weeks to shift)

 

[Kiska]

And my GT840m dGPU has failed, in a catastrophic way. Leaving scorch marks on the motherboard, so a RMA is in progress. That GPU was outputting 80k as well.

 

[marksgii]

Sorry I'm late but I would like to join in with team Anandtech

 

[borandi]

Team Hewlett Packard just ate our dust. TeAm is now #23 worldwide. Scalps a-coming:

Days to Overtake
2.8 - Hardware Canucks Forum
4.8 - Tom's Hardware
27   - Team MacOS X
42   - Barnacules Nerdgasm
51   - Tekzilla