Looking for a good project for a Core i7 and ATI 5870

[apriest]

Well, this forum has certainly waned over time! I used to be in the top 10 for Rosetta@Home back a few years ago before work and the number of computers I had changed. Recently I built a Core i7 with an ATI 5870 and I thought I'd see what Team Anandtech was up to these days. How is everyone?!

I see Rosetta isn't used much anymore. I thought I'd look into F@H, but I've run into a few snags, and maybe someone could give me a few pointers. First, I see that GPU3 isn't out yet and is necessary to get any real boost from the 5870 video card, oh well. Secondly, I see that the bigadv WUs only work on Linux and I run Windows 7 as my primary OS. Third, I use VMWare Workstation 7 and I cannot get it to support more than 4 CPUs, no matter what I try. Lastly, VMWare Player 3 cannot co-exist with Workstation 7 it would seem as it uninstalls Workstation every time I attempt installing Player. I can't go without Workstation for work stuff though. Argh!

In a nutshell, it appears F@H is not yet ready to take advantage of my hardware until GPU3 and a Windows client that supports bigadv. Rosetta won't take advantage of 64-bit or the 5870 either. Got any suggestions to make F@H work with Workstation 7 or a project that would be advantageous to run on my machine?

 

[GLeeM]

Welcome back apriest

Looks like you gave it a good effort to get F@H to work in your situation!

If you are not averse to crunching more than one project, which actually seems to help HT do more, I think you could run smaller Linux WUs on four cores on Workstation 7 (probably get 5,000 ppd) and then another project on the other four cores and another one on the GPU?

 

[waffleironhead]

As far as gpu clients go you might want to look here

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=316927

or this one

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2022809

 

[biodoc]

theAnimal posted this link in another thread for running FAH smp -bigadv on 8 cores (hardware or virual) with VMware Player 3.0.

I haven't tried it but it looks interesting.

 

[apriest]

biodoc, I read all that. The problem, as I posted, is that VMWare Workstation 7 and Player 3 will not co-exist, and I can't ditch Workstation.

GLeeM, thanks! I considered running two VMWare Workstation sessions, but didn't see the point over a Windows native client if I wasn't doing -bigadv. Unless you've got compelling reason? Is running emulated on Linux that much faster without -bigadv to be worth it over a native client?

waffleironhead, for the moment I setup F@H MPICH SMP client. I haven't tried any GPU clients yet, though I may try adding one next. I'm only averaging 50% CPU usage so far, so I'm wondering if I should attempt to setup a 2nd SMP client to run at the same time? Maybe with hyper threading it wouldn't really help to go over Windows 7's reported 50% though.

 

[theAnimal]

I'm only averaging 50% CPU usage so far, so I'm wondering if I should attempt to setup a 2nd SMP client to run at the same time? Maybe with hyper threading it wouldn't really help to go over Windows 7's reported 50% though.

You won't double your output, but it would be a significant increase.

 

[biodoc]

biodoc, I read all that. The problem, as I posted, is that VMWare Workstation 7 and Player 3 will not co-exist, and I can't ditch Workstation.

Sorry, I missed that. On second thought, you should be able to run it directly on workstation 7, right? Here's another link that describes running "notfred" on vmware workstation. Apparently you can edit the folding.vmx file to get it to run on 8 "cores". I don't have an i7, so I can't test this but it looks promising.

 

[apriest]

biodoc, yeah, I tried that trick from the first link. Maybe it worked under VMWare 6.5.x, I'm not sure, but it's not working for me in Workstation 7 with Windows 7 on a Core i7 (and I thought the number 7 was perfection!). If I put anything higher than numvcpus = "4" Workstation 7 won't start. Just says VMWare Workstation only supports up to 4 CPUs. It must do some sort of hardware detection that 6.5.x didn't do.

 

[GLeeM]

Is running emulated on Linux that much faster without -bigadv to be worth it over a native client?

Over the native windows client? YES!! The Linux clients' "core_a2" does much better, it gets almost as much running on only two cores as Win SMP does on four.

Maybe with hyper threading it wouldn't really help to go over Windows 7's reported 50% though.

Yeah, to run more of the same program, HT only helps a little. But if you can find the right combination of different programs that use different parts of the CPU it can help more.