Folding@Home

ddrueding

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I just Googled, and there is a Harbor Freight about 7 miles away (straight into the bad part of town), but that would involve going into a physical shop, and that does go against every fiber of my being ;)
 

Handruin

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sedrosken

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I think I managed to force it to fold on the GPU here -- but being a Radeon HD 3650, I'm not expecting anything stellar. Still, I looked up the specs on this card, and wouldn't you believe it... they completely obliterate the GeForce GT610 in every area but one, VRAM size. 256MB vs 2GB. I still laugh when I run Skyrim at high on this card and still get 45 fps. I don't know how it's doing it, but since the card has DDR2-800 RAM, same as the system, it just starts borrowing from the system when the honest-to-god VRAM well dries up. I imagine that's how it's not incurring a performance penalty by only having 256MB of VRAM and running Skyrim at high, which says it wants at least 512 MB VRAM to run at low.

How'd I get from folding to Skyrim? Whatever. I think GPU folding is actually going to be a thing with me now. You know, provided it doesn't start throwing up errors as soon as it finishes downloading the WU. I had to move the GPU core selection from -1 to 0 to force it through, letting it autodetect would return that it wasn't supported.

Edit: That was fast. Yep, it failed. I can't really say I was expecting anything less.
 

Handruin

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In a bit of hackery I've pieced together my old Core i7 860 system and setup Linux Mint 17.1 with the nvidia drivers and my GTX 780. It's booting off my old 160GB laptop hard drive and the PSU is just sitting all on the desk. I'm looking for a case to run this in a little more of a permanent setup to get another possible 200K PPD.

AKT4ueC.jpg
 

CougTek

Serial computer killer
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A single GTX 780 gives 200K ppd? I did not realize that.

In the past, when I used to GPU fold, what I didn't like was that 3 different graphic cards died on me after only a few months of running the client 24x7 (two Nvidia GTX 570 and one Radeon 7950, which only the fans started to make obnoxious noise). So I'm a bit hesitant to restart GPU folding because of that. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
 

Handruin

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That was the estimate shown after a couple hours of running. I don't know what to expect under Linux with GPU folding. I thought I was getting 150-175PPD on core 17 under Windows.

Maybe just bad luck with your GPUs? I run most of the fans at higher speeds when I'm not sitting at or near the system to keep temps down on the cores. I've only been buying EVGA nvidia cards and have had good luck so far running 24x7. Their ACX fans seem rugged, maybe give those a try In the future?

My two AMD cards have worked a hard life since day one and seem to be fine also. Those fans run near 100% all the time. It keeps that ridiculous Hawaii core around 65C vs 90C But it's pretty noisy.
 

Handruin

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I'm getting closer to the warmer season where I may have to stop folding some of my systems until I can get proper cooling in my office.
 

ddrueding

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Folding on "Home1" and "Home2" actually redlined the UPS that they live on. Even while gaming on one screen and playing video on the other on both machines the UPS never goes over 50%. Seems I found a use for those 1200W PSUs that isn't hard drives...
 

Handruin

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I've been seeing a lot of these on my basement rig. It's been doing very little work the last couple days because I assume it can't get to the core 17 server. My office rig is folding the annoying core 15 units so it's staying busy. My Linux system is also seeing occasional messages like shown below.

03:50:17:WU00:FS02:Connecting to 171.67.108.200:80
03:50:17:WU02:FS01:Connecting to 171.67.108.200:80
03:50:17:WARNING:WU00:FS02:Failed to get assignment from '171.67.108.200:80': 10001: Server responded: HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
03:50:17:WU00:FS02:Connecting to 171.67.108.204:80
03:50:17:WARNING:WU02:FS01:Failed to get assignment from '171.67.108.200:80': 10001: Server responded: HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
03:50:17:WU02:FS01:Connecting to 171.67.108.204:80
03:50:18:WARNING:WU02:FS01:Failed to get assignment from '171.67.108.204:80': Empty work server assignment
03:50:18:ERROR:WU02:FS01:Exception: Could not get an assignment


Seems others are having a similar issue in this thread here. I haven't seen a response to what's causing the issue.
 

Handruin

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There is an update in the thread I linked to.


Re: 171.67.108.200 - Internal Server Error
Postby VijayPande >> Thu May 07, 2015 1:33 pm

Sorry for the delay here. We’re on it. This one is taking longer than we expected.

We’re also looking into why the failover didn’t work –– this is something which in principle shouldn’t happen unless there’s something serious going on.
 

Handruin

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I'm going to have to take a small break from folding for a little bit. The power costs have doubled recently from the utility company and it's quite noticeable now that I'm running A/C units (over $400/month). My contributions may be sporadic for a while.
 

timwhit

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I'm going to have to take a small break from folding for a little bit. The power costs have doubled recently from the utility company and it's quite noticeable now that I'm running A/C units (over $400/month). My contributions may be sporadic for a while.

Noooooooo.
 

Handruin

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My folding was going well for a week or two but after a system hang and reboot, the folding @ home software will no longer open or start. There is no event log message or log I can find with an error. I've tried reinstalling the software and still nothing. My machine seems to function properly otherwise. Unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to sit and debug what's going on but it's caused me to stop contributing for a little bit of time.
 

Handruin

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I'll see about spending some time this weekend to fix the issue and get some more machines online. I've only been running one machine because my basement has been too warm now also.
 

CougTek

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Coug, can you get your company to buy a bunch of new servers?
I could start up to three servers during the week-ends, but with the end of the Big Units, it's not very rewarding. I could probably reach between 200K and 300K ppd for 2 days per week, no more.

What pays now is GPU power and we don't have that at the office.

2015 will be a slow year for me regarding F@H. We'll see what happens in 2016. We should still be in the top-100 teams by then.

Truth be told, what's preventing me from contributing more, besides cash, is knowing that whatever gear I add to my folding farm, I'll have to endure the noise and heat it'll make when running the client. During the past year, I've lived in a quiet environment for the first time in more than a decade. I've also improved the temperature control of my home since May of this year. Point is, I became used to a little confort in my life and I'm not too eager to sacrifice it.

I've looked into colocation options where I could send servers used for running the FAH client, but I don't find it cheap enough to be worth it over other priorities I have in my life at the moment.
 

sedrosken

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I've never been a very big producer, mainly because my most powerful machine is small fry compared to the fleet of servers you guys can make this stuff run on. I'm happy to have pushed my PPD from 400-something to over 10k in one fell swoop.

Maybe I'm just used to the noise? I have had my main running folding full-bore while I'm on it doing basic web browsing and the noise has never really bothered me, although this is the most noisy machine I've ever had. I do want to find a small, otherwise useless room and stuff my dedicated folding machines in it when I'm out on my own however -- and keep my main folding ONLY when I'm not at home.
 

Handruin

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I figured out my issue. I wasn't able to fold because my client couldn't download the required GPUs.txt file that the F@H client needed to approve my GPUs. Once I copied it from another system I'm back in business.
 

Handruin

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I got my two primary systems folding again. I'll see about getting my linux box back online tonight with my GTX780 and get our team some points.
 

sedrosken

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I'm having issues downloading the software. My connection to their website is very, very slow, and when I do manage to start downloading the deb files for use with Ubuntu, it fails less than a third into it. Are they having technical issues or is this something I need to look into myself?
 

Handruin

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Could be infrastructure issues on their site. I had issues downloading the GPUs.txt file for my own GPU setup which caused me a bunch of issues.
 
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