Folding@Home

[CougTek]

AMD to the rescue.

I've found a way...Opteron 6272. 16 real cores at 2.1GHz.

2x Opteron 6272 = 1100$
1x Supermicro H8DGU = 400$

32 cores system for 1500$. Supercomputing on the cheap. Intel can't come anywhere near the level of performance that system offers for that amount of money.

 

[Handruin]

That seems like the logical thing to do given all the economical hardship you've complained about in the past several months.

 

[CougTek]

I, of course, have to sell my other two Core i7 2600 prior to building that thing.

One of my ancien collegues contacted me at the beginning of the week to ask me if I'd be interested to take care of all his customers. He's retiring from computer technologies and was looking for someone to send his customers to. When it will happen, it will give me a significant income boost (enough to fix my financial problems).

 

[Handruin]

Congrats. I'm happy to hear you have obtained new clientele. I hope it works out for you and helps your current situation.

 

[Howell]

Good to see you P5!

 

[CougTek]

Thanks.

 

[Howell]

Everything is coming up roses for you Coug.

 

[Santilli]

It's cold here, so the i7 is running, and the server.

All I've been getting are huge projects. The current one is 7000, and it's about 4130 right now. Last one took nearly two weeks to finish.

Can't seem to get the SMP hardware to work, so I'm clunking along using about 15% of my processor. Did have F@H offline, trying to figure out why SMP didn't work, but, I gave up, and went back to download from the F@H that works.

 

[ddrueding]

I wonder what a quad AMD Opteron 6274 Interlagos (64 2.2Ghz cores) would do with the -bigbeta units? It's only going to have 64GB of RAM...

 

[CougTek]

There's a guy on Stanford's forum that benched a system with 4 Opteron 6176SE (Magny-Cours 12 cores/CPU) and he gets ~6:12 minutes per frame on Project 6901 units, resulting in almost 400K ppd. The bigbeta units are even more rewarding than the regular big units. And an Opteron 6176 is slower than a 6274 for the FAH client...

 

[CougTek]

Don't forget than you must run on Linux in order to get bigbeta units.

 

[CougTek]

Project 6903 (bigbeta) takes more or less twice as much time as project 6901 (regular bigunit) to compute. Project 6904 units are even heavier than project 6903 units (by ~20%-30%).

 

[BingBangBop]

The new bulldozer server chips are going to suck at folding comparatively. Each two cores have to share one FP unit. Folding uses FP, so you only get 1/2 the cores. A 16 core 6200 series chip effectively only has 8 FP cores. The older 6100 Mangy-Cours series has one FP per core so a 12 core chip will have 12 FP cores and will work better at folding as well as being cheaper.

In case you missed it: Anantech review of 6200 series Interlagos (bulldozer for servers) -- Short synopsis: It sucks at least as bad for servers as it does for desktops.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks for the link. It looks like the 6100 would work better for the client as well, but it seems the secret is out. The 6100 2.2Ghz 12-core chip is twice the price of the 6200 2.2Ghz 16-core chip.

 

[CougTek]

I completely forgot about the one FP per two cores of Interlagos. Having a real 16-core chip for ~550$ was too good to be true, I guess.

 

[CougTek]

The 6100 2.2Ghz 12-core chip is twice the price of the 6200 2.2Ghz 16-core chip.

525$ used on eBay

 

[Stereodude]

The F@H people are geniuses for figuring out how to get other people to supply them hardware. Even totally impractical for home use server grade stuff.

 

[ddrueding]

Hardware and electricity. The crowd sourcing thing is helping all kinds of fields, turning peoples hobbies into actual productive work.

 

[Bozo]

Why can't you build a mini-cluster to get the cores you need?

 

[ddrueding]

I don't know that much about clustering, but the guy who is interested in a "beast system" says his load is "massively parallel". I figured 64 cores for under $10k would be the way to go.

His work is something scientific, mathematica? Something like that.

 

[CougTek]

I sold the puny Core 2 Duo E6300 that was part of my FAH farm and replaced it with a canceled customer order : a Core i3 2120. The FAH beta v.7.1.38 client is a breeze to install, even on Linux (Lubuntu). You download the Debian package, double-clic on it and then enter your name, team number and passkey. Voilà, you're done. Lubuntu's installation was also even simpler than a Windows 7 installation. Sound doesn't work, but since this installation's purpose is purely to run the FAH client, I couldn't care less.

For once, I thought about disabling the screen saver (screen saver lowers the performance of the FAH client tremendously in Linux).

My most pathetic computer still is an Athlon X2 4800+, followed by a Pentium E6600. Both of those are running under Windows XP.

 

[Santilli]

How can a a3 core.exe run 12 threads on a 940? I don't mind running this, or won't until I see my next electric bill. Still, it's generating enough heat to keep my room comfortable, and I know my heater would be in use if not for the computer.

 

[CougTek]

How can a a3 core.exe run 12 threads on a 940?

It can't. Nothing can run 12 simultaneous threads on an i7 940 because it's an 8-threads processor. An A3 core can use up to 8 threads on your CPU.

 

[Santilli]

Well, it seems to have fooled resource monitor...

 

[Handruin]

Well, it seems to have fooled resource monitor...

No, the key word that Cougtek said was simultaneous. Task manager may show when an application has more threads listed than actual cpus, but they wont all run at the same time.

 

[LiamC]

Is anybody getting A5's? I haven't had one in weeks.

 

[CougTek]

I do. Half of the units I receive these days are A5. It's been like this for the past week or so. The three weeks before that, all I received were regular A3 units.

 

[LunarMist]

One of my ancien collegues contacted me at the beginning of the week to ask me if I'd be interested to take care of all his customers. He's retiring from computer technologies and was looking for someone to send his customers to. When it will happen, it will give me a significant income boost (enough to fix my financial problems).

I missed this one. Great news. :beer:

P.S. Maybe you will get rich and can pay off just one of my CC bills. Over $15K this month with a minimum of two thousand something.

 

[ddrueding]

I had missed it as well. Congratulations.

 

[CougTek]

Unless Mark produces 836957 more points than I do in December, I'll be the one who'll have contributed the most in the team for 2011. Leading the team was easy at the beginning of the year, but some of you guys have given me quite a run since. SDBardwick will certainly be hard to outproduce next year if he maintains the rythm he currently has. Mark too.

 

[ddrueding]

Wow, F@H absolutely kills performance with the vSphere client...

 

[CougTek]

Since AMD's Magny-Cours cores are about as fast as Intel's Core 2 Duo core, I thought : "Why not get a used 4-sockets server?". Hélas, even oldies like Dunnington and Tigerton servers are still several thousands dollars nowadays. No luck on the used/refurbished side. It's cheaper to get a new motherboard and processors.

 

[LunarMist]

Yes I am sadly adddicted to FAH. It's a costly addiction too, but probably less than cocain. I think I'm better than Mark in that regard because he never admitted to be addicted to FAH and his effort has been even more insane than mine so far. If I succeed to replace my SandyBridge by a 6 cores i7 980, then it might change (I'll be even sicker than Mark).

It does not appear too serious to me. There are many arguments about addictions, but the commonality is whether the activity has a significantly deleterious affect on the person's (and other's) health and welfare.

 

[mubs]

And finances.

 

[CougTek]

Both SDBardwick and Santilli should pass their previous month's production today and it's only the 9th of the month.

We haven't seen numbers like those SDBardwick produces since the glory days of SSDdrueding, when the bonus for big units was 50% instead of the 20% they give now. And SDBardwick doesn't crunch big units, all the more impressive. Way to go.

 

[sdbardwick]

Well, I was only up and running for the last 10 days of November, so no surprise that the Dec. stats are better

Daily production will likely decrease by 20K-30K as some of the older space heaters (assorted C2D's and Phenom 1's) are dropped (it has been unseasonably cool here lately).

 

[CougTek]

I don't know if two Xeon E5620 would be faster than two Opteron 6172 for running the FAH client. The Xeon solution would actually be cheaper. Of course, there's less real cores with two Xeon 5620 (4 cores/8 threads, 2.4GHz per CPU), but the IPC should be higher. It would be an interesting comparison. I'll check Stanford's forums for an answer to that.

 

[CougTek]

Ok, I screwed up again. It's the Xeon 5645 I wanted to compare to the Opteron 6172. It's a 6 cores/12 threads, 2.4GHz CPU. It cost ~550$ per CPU. Two of those plus an EVGA Classified SR-2 would cost ~1700$. Less than two 12-cores Opteron Magny-Cours with a dual-socket motherboard. It might also very well outproduce it too. It would perform better as a workstation (better single thread performance) and would be easier to resale.

 

[ddrueding]

Ok, I screwed up again. It's the Xeon 5645 I wanted to compare to the Opteron 6172. It's a 6 cores/12 threads, 2.4GHz CPU. It cost ~550$ per CPU. Two of those plus an EVGA Classified SR-2 would cost ~1700$. Less than two 12-cores Opteron Magny-Cours with a dual-socket motherboard. It might also very well outproduce it too. It would perform better as a workstation (better single thread performance) and would be easier to resale.

Would one of those be good enough long term for the bigbeta units?

 

[CougTek]

There's no long term warranty for the beta projects, but a dual E5620 is plenty fast to complete the big beta units well within the prefered deadline. Even a dual Opteron 6128 (8 cores each at 2.0GHz) is able to complete a Project 6904 unit in time (the fattest unit there currently is).