The 4th annual Folding@Home Holiday Season Race: Race is on!

[MaskedAvenger]

Count me in! I'll be adding three more dual GPU rigs, but can't promise that they will be up & running during the entire race. My Folding name is mike9o.

 

[biodoc]

Welcome to the race MaskedAvenger!

 

[GLeeM]

Yes! Welcome to the race mike9o

I was thinking I might be passing you soon, but if you are adding three more dual GPU rigs ... maybe not

 

[Denithor]

Sign me up. I'll switch my folders to the AT team for a month for this race!

 

[MaskedAvenger]

Yes! Welcome to the race mike9o

I was thinking I might be passing you soon, but if you are adding three more dual GPU rigs ... maybe not

You would have passed me if you hadn't had whatever problem you had.

One of the dual GPU rigs stopped working earlier this year for reasons unknown. My attempts to revive it have been unsuccessful to date, but I should be able to get it up and running by this weekend. Last year I bought a card off ebay to diagnose boot problems - looks like its time to use it again.

Power to the Folders!

 

[winsantz]

Sounds like a great excuse to overhaul my i7-920 box for bigadv WUs. Count me in. I've also got my PS3 and possibly an older dual-core Opteron.

 

[biodoc]

Welcome aboard Denithor and winsantz!

 

[Insidious]

Is there any other information about this race besides this thread?

you know... incidental stuff like:

What kind of teams have we arrived at
How will our race progress be monitored and posted
When does it start
when does it end

Is this thing really going to happen?

-Sid

 

[GLeeM]

I imagine Petrus will start a stats thread after the first day of the race - December 1, 2009.

Petrus will sort out the teams soon or so it says in the edited OP.

Getting excited about starting!

We could use some more racers

 

[Insidious]

Getting excited about starting!

Me too. I had to re-learn how to install and set everything up, but I think I'm good to go! The last couple test WUs are crunching as I type!

-Sid

:whiste:

 

[biodoc]

Me too. I had to re-learn how to install and set everything up, but I think I'm good to go! The last couple test WUs are crunching as I type!

-Sid

:whiste:

I'm ramping up too! It's always good for me to come back to FAH at least once a year!

We definitely need more racers! Any ideas on recruiting? :hmm:

 

[biodoc]

OK, it is the time. At last ..

This is the official 4th Annual Folding@Home Holiday Season Race thread.

If all act quickly, we can start December 1, 00:00 GMT.

Please post in this thread if you want to take part. I'll then compile two teams (in the past races it has been TAS vs Folders) and December 1: all go.

Here are the rules:
1. Have fun.
2. Let others have fun.
3. Crunch as much as you can, as often as you can and as efficiently as you can.
4. Assimilating computers, adding members to the teams, switching teams, borging is allowed.
5: (Sid's rule) Whistle while you work; DON'T whistle while you sip.
6: (Sid's rule) No pouting.

Time frame:
Start: December 1, 2009, 00:00 UTC
End: January 1, 2010, 12:00 UTC

() Anybody there who really wants to collect the stats at 24:00 between December 31 and January 1? No? I thought so ... ()

I'll ask the mods to pin this thread until January 3rd, 2010.

Edit: Nov. 25, 2009:
Participants of the 4th Folding@home Holiday Season Race 2009
-- added Nov 17th ----
GLeeM
PCTC2
Markfw900
theAnimal
biodoc
petrusbroder
-- added Nov 19th ----
Orange Kid
Philippart
ksherman
Pokey
Baldurs_Gate
-- added Nov 20th ----
Drsignguy
-- added Nov 23th ----
Insidious
Hurricane Andrew
-- added Nov 25th ----
Denithor
winsantz!


I'll do the teams very soon! But:
We need more participants!

Stickied as requested...
AnandTech Moderator: Fullmetal Chocobo

Bump!!

We need more racers!!!!

EDIT: I just "bumped" a Sticky!!:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin:

 

[Insidious]

Bump!!

We need more racers!!!!

EDIT: I just "bumped" a Sticky!!:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin:

Talk about banging your head on the celing!

:awe:

-Sid

C'mon my apathetic lil' Darlin's.... Let's DO this thing :biggrin:

 

[GLeeM]

EDIT: I just "bumped" a Sticky!!

Talk about banging your head on the celing!

LOL!

I haven't LOLed in a long time, this is why I am excited!!

On a serious note, Sid - I hate to tell you this - if you re-learned how to set up WinSMP you might want to learn how to set up VMWare Player 3.0 and a Linux client virtual machine. It is actually easier than WinSMP and the Linux client gives way better ppd.
A few months ago I tried out notFreds virtual machine and was amazed.
A couple weeks ago I started with Player 3.0, (which allows more than two CPU cores per Player instance), and the evga forum guys' virtual machine.
Check em out.

 

[Insidious]

LOL!

I haven't LOLed in a long time, this is why I am excited!!

On a serious note, Sid - I hate to tell you this - if you re-learned how to set up WinSMP you might want to learn how to set up VMWare Player 3.0 and a Linux client virtual machine. It is actually easier than WinSMP and the Linux client gives way better ppd.
A few months ago I tried out notFreds virtual machine and was amazed.
A couple weeks ago I started with Player 3.0, (which allows more than two CPU cores per Player instance), and the evga forum guys' virtual machine.
Check em out.

Great advise GLeeM!!!

I don't have dedicated crunchers and with WXP32 at the helm, I can't affort to use my precious 3GB of RAM on a virtual machine.
For anyone else who is considering this, you get a BIG BOOST in your PPD by the methods GLeeM is describing.

BUTTTT

I promise to make a dent in those stats with my fossilized setup IF this race gets off the ground.

[size=+2]Peter... This is your show.... Where the ferk are you?[/size]

 

[GLeeM]

I can't affort to use my precious 3GB of RAM on a virtual machine.

It looks like the notFreds (not doing -bigadv) uses only 640MB ram?

Peter is Down Under, on vacation I think. Perhaps it would have been best to have waited until he got back in the middle of the month to start? Starting on Dec. 1st might be asking too much of him? Plus, he is not at his computers to be able to start F@H on them?
Would it put too much of a damper on things to wait until he gets back?
I know he said he was willing to start Dec. 1st, but ... ?

 

[Insidious]

I don't think you could put much more of a damper on things than to have the race unattended by it's sponsor. (We tried that last year... Fizzle City)

-Sid

 

[Insidious]

OK, that didn't read like I intended:

What I mean to say is that Peter's involvement is something I have really looked forward to in the past. I enjoy his company, his posts, his entheusiasm, and his stats.

I would like to vote for a "ring in the new year" race or something like that. Peter is so gracious and I don't want to make him miss out on his own fun!

-Sid

 

[Pokey]

Sid, FYI:

Buried in a post in another thread back mid-Nov. Peter posted we would not start until mid-Dec:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Markfw900
Why mid-dec ? we used to always start dec 1.

Quite simple: I do not have the time to get it all fixed because I'll be out of the country for three weeks and I'll not have the time to set it all up before that.
I'll give it a try --- but I won't promise ...

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

We may have to ring on the run...................

 

[biodoc]

Yeah, Peter originally wanted to start the race on the 15th because he was going to be travelling for 3 weeks.

I'm all for delaying the start to the 15th so Peter can fully participate as the sponsor AND the statsmaster!! :biggrin:

Anybody got new and exciting hardware this year??

I know GLeeM is doing well with his i7 & -bigadv WUs!!

I've got a GTX295 (dual gpu on single PCB). It's been a bit frustrating on most DC projects thus far but is working ok for FAH on the linux side.

Here's some stats:

Project : 5797
Core : GPUv2 Gromacs
Frames : 100
Credit : 787


-- gtx295_1 --

Min. Time / Frame : 1mn 29s - 7640.09 ppd
Avg. Time / Frame : 1mn 29s - 7640.09 ppd
No Cur. Time / Frame
No R3F. Time / Frame
No Eff. Time / Frame


-- gtx295_2 --

Min. Time / Frame : 1mn 29s - 7640.09 ppd
Avg. Time / Frame : 1mn 29s - 7640.09 ppd
No Cur. Time / Frame
No R3F. Time / Frame
No Eff. Time / Frame

Project : 5914
Core : GPU2 NV MT
Frames : 100
Credit : 1888


-- gtx295_1 --

Min. Time / Frame : 3mn 59s - 6825.24 ppd
Avg. Time / Frame : 3mn 59s - 6825.24 ppd
No Cur. Time / Frame
No R3F. Time / Frame
No Eff. Time / Frame


-- gtx295_2 --

Min. Time / Frame : 3mn 58s - 6853.92 ppd
Avg. Time / Frame : 3mn 58s - 6853.92 ppd
No Cur. Time / Frame
No R3F. Time / Frame
No Eff. Time / Frame

 

[Markfw]

Well, I have my new 920, but having a heck of a time with the big wu's. I haven;t got one done yet. One thing I have found out, is that the virtual machine goes black, and if you press "control-g" then ctrl-alt, it may then show you the screen, but quite often says "user asked to stop" or something like that. Now that I have fahmon working, I can see it didn;t die (yet), but it won't show my video clients ppd.

And I had just set it down to 3.6 ghz after having problems, hoping for more stability in VM, even though XP was happy @ 3.8 for a month with SMP clients....So I wake up to a BSOD, something about a driver corrupted data that was going to be written to disk. This VM client is crap. (or win 7 is crap)

OK, so now a new one...It says something about the virtual machine needs restarted....It did this 3 times, about every 2%.

I give up on the bigadv crap. its 11k ppd + a ?? bonus, but I will never get there. Better to use the 4k ppd I have in XP SMP clients.

 

[GLeeM]

One thing I have found out, is that the virtual machine goes black, and if you press "control-g" then ctrl-alt

The vm goes black to a screen saver?!? Click in the window and press Ctrl to inactivate screen saver. Press Ctrl + Alt to return to Windows. To disable screen saver type in - "setterm -blank 0". Looks like the 0.4 version fixes this and more.

Not sure what "driver corrupted data" is, sometimes my video card driver flakes out.

its 11k ppd + a ?? bonus

[
Looks like theAnimal and I will be doing 25,000+ ppd on just the -bigadv WUs ... hmm
Sure would be nice to figure out what is going wrong ... did you set the memory to 4600?
Did anyone check if notFreds can run in Player 3.0 and run eight cores/bigadv?

 

[Markfw]

I set the memory to 5040. Also, I had to change the disk space to 20,000 instead of 4k (well, I just had to go up, and picked a number)

As for the .4 version, do you have a link ?

And I am back to 3.8 ghz, and after 2 hours, no problems with 2 x smp and 2 x video clients. They also were doing odd things...in Win 7.

 

[MaskedAvenger]

I didn't see my alter ego mike9o on the list of racers.

 

[Drsignguy]

My fellow F@H Holiday racers. Just to inform you that I have to leave for a Funeral in Vegas for about a week. I will return on Dec. 6th. I left a message with Peter. Sorry Guys but it was my grandma and the entire Family will be there! So, with that being said, when I return I will have the farm up and running....