Folding@Home

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
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Feb 7, 2002
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Nothing so nefarious. We are three days out from a new SAP system rollout - ERP, SRM, CRM, Portal, PI, BI, BobJ, PS-CD, SolMan, TREX and Productivity Pack, and I am the Basis team lead. I've been doing 65~85 hour weeks for the last three months and I don't think I've done a "regular" amount of hours in the last 18 months. So not enough time to keep an eye on my systems. The local electricity supplier had two whole day power outages this week, one scheduled, one not, so I've lost about a days production on both boxes.

And we've just had a cold snap, so maybe another month, six weeks of production left in me.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Québec, Québec
I hope it's worth it financially, but somehow I doubt it. I remember you complained about the electrical bill related to your F@H effort last year. If you'd earn what I consider a decent salary for the job you do, you wouldn't care about a 900$ bill.

I'm giving up again for the time being. My electricity bill for the last quarter was just over $900.

I hope at least that you like what you're doing. However, 70 hours weeks of stressful work will eventually take their toll on your health. Don't do that for too long. I know, I've been there.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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And Mark produced >63000 points for the past two days. If it's a permanent upgrade, then I won't catch him ever. I'm done upgrading for quite a while (two i7 2600) and I should now maintain ~58K-60Kppd. Catching a guy doing 63Kppd sustained and who's already almost 2.5 million points away would require a level of insanity that I have yet to reach.
 

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
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I hope it's worth it financially, but somehow I doubt it. I remember you complained about the electrical bill related to your F@H effort last year. If you'd earn what I consider a decent salary for the job you do, you wouldn't care about a 900$ bill.



I hope at least that you like what you're doing. However, 70 hours weeks of stressful work will eventually take their toll on your health. Don't do that for too long. I know, I've been there.

If I was a contractor on this project I would be earning a decent salary :) I'm not though. It will look good on the résumé.

I've already had to clamp down on who does what. I've got a guy on the team who has high blood pressure, and another who has type 2 diabetes. Both are dedicated and talented, but it's not worth it at the expense of their health.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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I forgot to mention it, but LiamC passed the 20 million milestone. :beer:

And after a long pause (two, three years?), Greg resumed his effort to the cause. Have you got your passkey? It's a quick step that will increase your point reward a lot. Ask SSDdrueding if you don't believe me.
 

CougTek

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Well, next time you (SSDdrueding) have a few hours to kill, you could hit the 101 and then the 280 to visit uncle Santilli and correctly setup his FAH client and then make the trip back from San Francisco to Monterey. He still hasn't gotten a passkey. I'm happy about his contribution, but not with the fact that he could get 3-5 times more points with no additional machine involved.

If he's online at the same time I am latter today (probably in the late evening), I'll try to convince him to start a Crossloop session with me so I can configure his client in an optimal way.
 
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Handruin

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Well, next time you (SSDdrueding) have a few hours to kill, you could hit the 101 and then the 280 to visit uncle Santilli and correctly setup his FAH client and then make the trip back from San Francisco to Monterey. He still hasn't gotten a passkey. I'm happy about his contribution, but not with the fact that he could get 3-5 times more points with no additional machine involved.

If he's online at the same time I am latter today (probably in the late evening), I'll try to convince him to start a Crossloop session with me so I can configure his client in an optimal way.

I've found from a simplistic view, that FAH client that Bozo mentioned works well for getting the passkey configured.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Santilli told me he got the passkey and configured the client with it. In about ten units, we should see if he gets the bonus or not. Cross your fingers.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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I'll add a powerful Celeron 420 1.6GHz with a Radeon HD 6870 to my folding farm. The purpose is mainly to test the reliability of the graphic card because it caused problems in certain games in another system. I don't expect spectacular results from this setup. Probably around 2000ppd.
 

Handruin

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I started back up again on 10/13 since it's getting cooler here. I should hopefully have one submitted in the next hour or so.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Good. We'll need to compensate for LiamC's forecoming departure. Maybe SSDdrueding will also be able to add another computer or two since it must be getting cooler on the Pacific coast too.

I helped Greg to configure his client, but he's not getting the output he should, considering the computer he has. I don't know what's wrong with his setup. It's certainly better than it was, but we're wasting precious points somewhere and I don't know where. He should produce between 5 and 10 times more than he currently does.
 

Handruin

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In Greg's post over here, he indicated he's not running the SMP version of F@H which may be the reason for him not producing results.

Sometime in Q1 2012 I'll be doing a refresh with Ivy Bridge once it becomes available. More accurately it'll be a second machine given me a little more folding power to add to the team.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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If any of you ever tries to run the client on a Linux box, be sure to disable the screen saver. On Lubuntu 11.10 (Ubuntu with LXDE), enabling the screen saver (which is enabled by default) increases the time-per-frame by 43%. That's with an i7 2600 CPU. With a slower processor, expect even worse. Neither Ubuntu or Fedora handle multitasking nearly as efficiently as Windows 7 does. I can use my Windows box normally without affecting significantly the performance of the FAH client, but the same isn't true for my Linux box. I used to use Fedora 15 on the same computer and even browsing the Net (not Youtube or anything challenging) affected the average time-per-frame tremendously.
 

CougTek

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DanShearer_FAH3000.jpg
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Sometimes, I believe the Pande Lab hired the bunch of morons who worked on Vista and were subsequently fired from Microsoft to create and maintain their folding@home client. This evening, I wanted to install a bunch of updates on my Linux box, so I stopped the FAH client cleanly, by pressing Ctrl+C. The client stopped. I installed my updates and rebooted the system. When I restarted the client afterwards, it game me a bunch of failures and stopped working. I exited the program by pressing Ctrl+C again, the way it should be done. When I restarted the client, all the previous work had been deleted and it restarted a fresh unit.

The only reason my computer only lost its front plate instead of being an entire modern art pile of scapped metal is that only 25% had been completed (and wasted). It did not reboot or crash when it flew two feet away to hit the wall behind it. It never exited the client either. I build good computers to run shitty softwares. Criss de Calice de Tabarnack. I didn't need this to end the week.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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How can the software cause the physical falling over?
The software caused a 12.5 hours lost of work and that forced me to kick the computer. If I had kept it inside, I might have developped cancer.

And Dan Shearer is Mark's best buddy. They go on camping and do other Oregon things together every week-end. With over one million points and 3000 units, I'm glad he joined us.
 
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LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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The software caused a 12.5 hours lost of work and that forced me to kick the computer. If I had kept it inside, I might have developped cancer.

Damn, you seem very stressed lately. I hope your health is OK.
 

CougTek

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Damnit! I'm only 2650 points ahead of Mark for the month and I have no other big units coming in before midnight. He'll have at least another 20K points before the end of the day, maybe even up to 40K. I think I'll lose the month.

If it hadn't been of the big unit shortage of the last three or four days, I would probably have some 20K-30K points more than I have now and I would have had much better chances to hold off Mark to the second rank.

I have a broken Quad Opteron system from a customer in the lab. I'll try to fix it quickly (it doesn't boot, might be the motherboard) and complete an SMP unit before the midnight bell rings (doubtful).
 

CougTek

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So he did beat me afterall. The worst part is that i don't think he improved his hardware at all. He simply uses the beta client (version 7) for the GPU folding client. That must be the reason why he went from ~48K ppd to ~60K ppd. He still has his aging Oc'ed Q6600 with two GTX 460 and his also old Oc'ed Q9450 with two GTX 460. I didn't read anything from him about additional gears. So he defeats my two i7 2600K with 4 previous-generation graphic cards and 2 two-to-three years old procesors. Hmmm. :???:

At least I use less electricity than he does and my setup is quieter.

I temporarily added a Pentium Dual Core E6600 and an old Athlon X2 4800+ to my folding farm, but neither is going to make a significant improvement to my stats.
 

Handruin

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If you want to send one of those to the east coast, I have plenty of cool rooms now that it's November. :)
 

CougTek

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Dan Shearer is now the equal of Tea : both sent 3019 work units so far.

And I haven't received a big unit in about a week (I completed my last one five days ago). Both LiamC and SSDdrueding have sent one during the last two days. Why not me! The server change, at Stanford, was supposed to take 2 weeks and it started around the 25th, so normally it should be over in 4 days at most. It won't be too soon.
 

Handruin

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Good, that wasn't my intent. My last unit was a big unit. I was just sharing that they've not given me another.
 
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