The new Hexus Teams - Setting up Folding at Home

[directhex]

big SMP WUs are worth a *LOT*

10.25, 12am 3,283 2

yeah, confirmed as ~1700 points per big SMP WU

[directhex]

yeah, confirmed as ~1700 points per big SMP WU

can't stress this enough, guys.

i have 3 machines at home working on f@h. my desktop (athlon fx55), ps3, and media machine (pentium-d 830). the athlon is completing roughly one "big" uniprocessor work unit a day, for about 300 points. the ps3 is completing 2-3 of its own special work units a day, at ~300 points each. the pentium-d is completing about three quarters of an SMP work unit a day, for 1700 points on completion.

the fx-55 is no slouch, certainly compared to pentium-d, but in f@h terms, nothing comes close to the rank-rising opportunities given by SMP work units. running 4 uniprocessor threads still means you're throwing away over a third of the potential points compared to a single smp instance, and that assumes they take the same time (on quad core, the smp units will be much faster)

i know it's hell to get it working on windows, but if you want points (and the increased team rank that comes with points), use smp wherever you can.

[kungpo]

I'd love to run the SMP client, but I'm struggling to get it to work on my Vista machines.

There has to be a quick'n'dirty way of getting it run? Having tried the enabling/disabling Administrator, installed as "administrator" run as administrator etc, I've lost the enthusiasm to get it working...

[directhex]

I'd love to run the SMP client, but I'm struggling to get it to work on my Vista machines.

There has to be a quick'n'dirty way of getting it run? Having tried the enabling/disabling Administrator, installed as "administrator" run as administrator etc, I've lost the enthusiasm to get it working...

god knows why windows makes things so complicated. on linux you just run "./fah6 -smp" and you're done

[kungpo]

You're not kidding. Although the SMP client could be a little easier to get working...

[Webby]

I have to say I had no problems getting the SMP client working Maybe I'm just lucky who knows.

Actually that's a lie it didn't work first time I tried because I didn't have a password set on my user account, but that was easily rectified and no problems ever since 1 SMP WU down and 41% of the next one Points, points, points, points, points!

[kungpo]

Go on then - how did you do it?

[nichomach]

Folding 5.91 beta SMP client seems to run fine on my machine here. Followed the instructions at the top of this thread, hey presto, 4 FahCore_a1.exe's running.

[TiG]

I disagree i've found the SMP client to be appallingly flakey. I often have the process completely die for no reason. With this kind of issue.

Delete mode
Deleting frame files
Deleting work files

Folding@home Core Shutdown: SPECIAL_EXIT

I get regular File_IO_error's on raid 5 (4+ disk arrays) on machines that are doing 0 work apart from folding.

If this was a piece of company software that was critical to the business i'd be screaming blue murder.

TiG

[nichomach]

Well, I've only just kicked it off, so maybe it just hasn't run long enough to display those issues.

[directhex]

I disagree i've found the SMP client to be appallingly flakey. I often have the process completely die for no reason. With this kind of issue.

Delete mode
Deleting frame files
Deleting work files

Folding@home Core Shutdown: SPECIAL_EXIT

I get regular File_IO_error's on raid 5 (4+ disk arrays) on machines that are doing 0 work apart from folding.

If this was a piece of company software that was critical to the business i'd be screaming blue murder.

TiG

isn't MPI on Windows fun!

there's a reason most of us in my line of work see windows cluster compute edition as an elaborate joke

[Webby]

Well its (the SMP client) has been running uninterrupted now for 6(?) days. I just followed the instructions at the start of this thread and away it went! I say again maybe I'm just lucky!

[DougMcDonald]

Apologies if this has already been answered, but is the folding done by ATi card significantly higher than that done by CPU's?

I think I had read something to that effect, but just wanted to confirm.

I've got two reasonably pokey pc's at home, my work laptop (and any work servers i can hi-jack) but non of them have ATi cards.

All I really want to know, is what's the best way to fold most on the kit I have?

[directhex]

Apologies if this has already been answered, but is the folding done by ATi card significantly higher than that done by CPU's?

I think I had read something to that effect, but just wanted to confirm.

I've got two reasonably pokey pc's at home, my work laptop (and any work servers i can hi-jack) but non of them have ATi cards.

All I really want to know, is what's the best way to fold most on the kit I have?

this was well explained by webby: http://forums.hexus.net/1268315-post10.html

[DougMcDonald]

Ah I see, so really, using the SMP thingy, I shouldn't really get low results, it just make take longer due to the units being bigger (or something (new to this! ))

One slightly separate question, how do I change the username I registered first time round on the smp console version? A re-install doesn't seem to do it

[EDIT] - Found it, just edited the registry manually

[Couger]

Joined as Couger.