folding@teamLFN

[Miltiades]

In my case, no, I haven't talked to anyone about it. Although I think a lot would be intrigued by the concept, they wouldn't fold themselves, I suspect. I do have friends who study Biomedical science at university and who understand the concept of protein folding far better than I do.

 

I have a question concerning smp-folding. Apparently, the smp-client has been running for the past days automatically on start-up (which was my intention in the first place, but I didn't see an smp-client when looking at the processes, only found out when I looked at the logs). I haven't seen any results of that client, however. I'm wondering, if anyone has any experience with the smp-client, how much time on average you got to finish these WU's? My C2D should be able to handle it, I'm thinking, but the WU's are pretty big.

 

Also, my PS3 has recently reached the 100 WU milestone, which I'm proud of.

[Sith Holocron]

I decided it was high time that I signed up for this too! If anyone could PM where to find the picture so I'll be able to post my stats in my signature, I'd appreciate it.

[ChAiNz.2da]

Welcome to the grind Sith Holocron I posted the VB code (for graphics) on page 20, I believe.

[Char Ell]

Qui-Gon,

I've occasionally talked to family and co-workers about the folding@home project and how it works. I try to explain how diseases like Alzheimer's are a result of protein misfolding and how folding@home attempts to simulate this process so the scientific/medical community can better understand the circumstances that cause proteins to misfold which hopefully will help them come up with methods to prevent or cure these diseases. I've mostly gotten responses like, "Oh, that's interesting." I interpreted this to mean they didn't really understand what I was trying to explain or didn't really care all that much.

 

Miltiades,

Are you still looking for info on configuring the SMP client? I understand version 6.30 is a lot easier to work with the previous versions of the SMP client. However the SMP clients runs in a console window and like the GPU client needs to be configured before starting any folding simulations. To do this you need to run the folding client's executable with the -configonly switch.

 

Welcome Sith Holocron to the team. You have now joined one of the top 500 teams of the Folding@Home project! Woo-hoo!!! I'm hopeful that our combined efforts will help make significant advances in combatting some really destructive diseases.

[Miltiades]

I use version 6.30 and had configured it properly. Seems my CPU can't complete the big WU's fast enough, so I just reconfigured it to accept normal-size WU's instead.

 

And welcome Sith Holocron!

[Char Ell]

So the Corsair PSU for my main system died a little less than a month after I bought it. Fairly disappointing, to say the least, not to mention the first time I've actually had a power supply fail on me. Now to find out how well Corsair's RMA process works. Anyway, this means I won't be doing any SMP folding or GPU3 folding for a while.

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

^^^^^^AAAARGH!!!

 

I noticed your PPD's had been dropping a fair bit I have to say, my Enermax ModU 87+ is a tank, I highly recommend them for your next purchase. As for the Corsair, they are a big company and have highly rated PSU's but I stayed away from them, as I did not understand how they could be highly rated when they were a fairly new entrant into the PSU market. I know Corsair for memory....

 

Hopefully the RMA process will be painless. Seagate was good to me when I needed my 1TB HDD rma'd, that has been (knocks on wood) the only RMA I have done in quite some time.

 

w00t!! 2 million points today!!!!!

[Char Ell]

Congrats on blowing past the 2,000,000 points milestone Qui-Gon Glenn! As far as I'm concerned you've now surpassed The Bieber!

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In case anyone missed it, F@H has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. So if you want to show that you're a fan of F@H and are on Facebook then make sure to click on the like button for Download Folding@home.

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

OMGzzzzzz! Me and the Biebs in the same sentence, w00t!

 

Er, uh....

 

Congratulations to Miltiades for surpassing the 400,000 point barrier! Thanks also to the standard client folks like JediExile and chi, for trucking along and continuing to bag points for science under the TeamLFN flag: your contributions are by no means unnoticed

 

I have been trying to get acdcfanbill to get that GTX480 folding again: I am not sure if it is a heat issue for him with that first edition Fermi card, or if he just no longer is interested. Either case is understandable, but if any of you are better friends with him than I, a gentle nudge might be great for our cause: that thing rips out WU's like few other cards can, and while Char Ell is slightly down, we need points from other folks so we don't slip too much in the team rankings.

 

Best wishes to all! Keep up the great work!!

[Miltiades]

Congratz on the big milestone, Glenn! Oh, I'm also quite curious about the Seagate HDD you "rma'd". My Seagate 750Gb is lying here waiting to be sent back to get fixed. Apparently, the type of HDD I had had some kind of bug in it that would block any access to it after a certain number of start-ups. Strange stuff.

 

Anyway, I'm happy with the milestone and I'm also close to overtaking tk in amount of WU's (yay!). Kakaostats doesn't update my points anymore, though, which is weird.

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

Kakaostats.... I am not familiar with that one... I see a google search in my near future.

 

The Seagate RMA process was quite a breeze once I actually worked out which model HDD I had. They have an automated processing site which requires you to enter either the model # or serial # that is printed on your HDD... I tried to send in the report multiple times and my numbers were rejected each time. Finally I had to send an email to tech support, that went nowhere, finally called them and got it worked out. Problem: their printing folks made an error on my HDD and about 2000 others at about the same time o.O

 

Long story short, I now only buy Western Digital drives. That said, my 1TB Seagate is a great external backup drive, and I have had no issues with it thus far, and it has been a year + since the RMA went through. Once I finally got the process started, I had a new drive in 9 days

[ChAiNz.2da]

Kakao Team Stats: http://kakaostats.com/t.php?t=140370

 

I like the site because they update pretty frequently (and not blocked by my workplace's proxy.. hehehe). Gives a nice Team / Individual summary by the day/week and also gives notice of F@H-wide overtake projections.

[Char Ell]

Still waiting to get my replacement power supply back from Corsair. Grrrr...

 

In other folding news, version 7 of the folding client continues alpha testing. I posted a question in foldingforum.org back in December asking what the status of the v7 client was. Professor Pande actually took the time to respond and said they were aiming for Q1 release this year. Unfortunately it doesn't look like they're going to make that timeframe but it will be interesting to see what the client looks like whenever they do go into open beta with it. Professor Pande posted the change log for the v7 client's development if anybody's interested.

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2011/03/progress-to-the-v7-client-release.html

The big change for version 7 is that it consolidates all cores into one client (uniprocessor, GPU, and SMP).

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

Thanks for the link to kakaostats, ChAiNz Saved me the google search I woulda got around too... sometime

 

With a certain sense of accomplishment mixed with a little sadness, I passed Astrotoy7 on our team leaders for points list, leaving me behind Char Ell and ChAiNz - who I suspect I will not catch, or if I do it will be years from now. Not that I am hunting you guys

 

That said, I doubt he will ever see it, but I want to give thanks to Astro for getting me interested in folding@home, and for his great contributions to folding on our team, and surely now for someone elses. Without his points, we wouldn't have cracked the top 500 for a long time.

 

Well, hopefully that Corsair RMA is on the way Char Ell... Our team is not quite the powerhouse without you crushing out those 20k+ ppd. I have been folding nearly 24/7 with both of my rigs, occasionally with the PS3, but I am going to spell my HTPC here and there for a day, just to keep it happy. It seems to be a bullet-proof rig thus far though - not bad for my first self-built machine. I guess buying quality components goes a long way in this day of plug-n-play.

 

I am thinking about building another rig, for what reason I really have no idea, other than I enjoyed the process and am a big old NERD.

[Miltiades]

Hah, I know what you mean. I've got all the parts needed except for a processor to build another rig myself. I really want to build it, but I'm gonna wait 'till I upgrade my main computer so I can use that Core 2 Duo for the new rig. However, I must say, while I was up-to-date with the hardware components a few years back, the amount of graphics cards available and the new Intel processors make my head spin. Don't know where to begin.

 

Also, I'm trying to fold with my laptop right now, but the thing seems to freeze now and again, so I stopped it for the moment. It has a 8600GS card, perhaps it can't handle the GPU client.

[Char Ell]

I am happy to report I got my replacement PSU from Corsair on Monday. I installed it and after running it for a day started GPU3 folding again. So far so good so I went ahead and added the SMP client back to the mix so I'll see how it goes. ***crosses fingers*** I've got to think it was just a sub-standard capacitor or other component on the previous PSU as I never saw it pull more than 300W from the wall while running both F@H clients and it's rated at 750W. Nevertheless, after 3 weeks of downtime I must confess to feeling some trepidation.

 

@ Qui-Gon,

I agree that our team misses its founder. I always enjoyed the pics Astro posted for milestone events. I'm glad you came in and helped fill the void.

 

@Miltiades,

Yep, lots of processor choices out there. I guess it depends on what you want to do on the computer the processor will power but my personal rule of thumb is to buy the most powerful CPU I can comfortably afford.

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

@Char Ell - There's the man, back in the seat of folding POWA!!! Glad to see you have things working again. As to the power draw on your PSU, my ModU 87+ never has gone beyond ~300 watts, although it is rated for 850ish (cannot recall at the moment, it has way more juice than I needed at the time of build). That is normal, the good high-end power supplies are very efficient.

 

@Miltiades: my BFG GT210 512mb was not a capable GPU client folder, and it is almost equivalent to your 8600gs. I think the 240 is the lowest level card that will fold well on the GPU2 client. I also have been thinking about recycling my C2D into the new box, but that limits me greatly on MoBo choices, and pushes it into a little bit of pre-obsolescence. What I think I will do is keep the C2D in the Dell box it came in, and use it till it blows up! The new box I will build will be the eventual replacement for the Dell, although it is my XP gaming rig and I am loathe to see it die. Thus, I am slowly replacing fans on it to extend its gaming life. I want to see ME2 and 3 on a newer rig though, so I am going to install them on my HTPC... I think that the gtx460 will show both games in a better light than the XP with gts250 does, if for the DirectX alone. That gtx will end up going into either the Dell box or the new one, as I need a card with larger memory for the 42" TV the HTPC is hooked up to: it has a blu-ray player in it, and seems to do less for the movie viewing experience than my PS3 does

[Miltiades]

Well, I've looked into it a bit more, so it's not that complicated anymore. The prices, however, are higher than they were a few years ago. Guess the time for us Europeans to profit from a low dollar against a high euro is over.

 

Oh, and the new rig with the Core 2 Duo would be my back-up, not the main computer. I'm shooting for something that plays newer games like ME3 on high detail as well.

[Char Ell]

Professor Pande has announced the open beta for the version 7 Folding@home client on his blog.

The V7 client is a complete rewrite of the previous client for Windows, OS-X and Linux with the following goals:

 

1. To make the installation and startup user-friendly for the novice.

2. To integrate the user interface into a single Monitor/Control program that manages the functionality previously contained in separate clients.

3. To create a forward-looking design that can be readily expanded to incorporate new Folding Cores without the need to issue new client releases.

4. To greatly improve previously problematic aspects including support for SMP, GPU, and the 3D viewer.

 

If anybody is interested in trying it out I would be curious to see what you think. I think I may upgrade this weekend. Be warned however that last I knew monitoring apps like FahMon and HFM.Net won't work with the v7 client and I'm not sure if the creators of these apps intend to update them to be compatible with the v7 Client.

[Nvenom]

Just wanted to Say hello the the Honorable F@H Team here, just joined and glad i could be a part of something bigger

[ChAiNz.2da]

I've downloaded the v7 client but haven't installed yet.. waiting for my current WU to finish. Looks pretty interesting though. Might be able to keep F@H on constantly with this version rather than just running it when I'm away from the comp. I do like the fact that it downloads the next core before uploading the current.. a little streamlining can't hurt in the numbers

 

Not sure however if they've reduced the gpu usage overhead. The reduced cpu overhead doesn't really affect me currently and low priority in the background will still affect your frames if using a gpu client

 

Guess we'll find out soon enough.. hehe

 

Welcome to the grind Nvenom!

 

--

 

On a sidenote. With our beloved founder wayward in the nether.. are any of you interested in "taking over" the LFN Social Group? Nothing really involved, however I think it may be better that the Group is in present hands should something need attended to. I miss Astro and hopefully he'll come back one day (in which we could always transfer it back if desired), but in the meantime the Group will be better served with someone on-hand.

 

Just let me know. I think I can transfer ownership with mod powers, or we can petition one of the Admins should it be necessary. Just something to chew on Nothing we can do as far as the F@H administration, but we can affect the LFN side of things.

[Char Ell]

Welcome to the grind Nvenom!

Welcome welcome! Let us know if you have any questions about setting up a folding client on your PC.

 

I'm unable to process any GPU work units on the v7 client, or rather I should say the GPU client/slot seems to run but won't actually process any work units. Based on the info in the logs I think the problem has something to do with my having two graphics cards in my rig (GTX 460 and GTS 250) and potential misidentification of the slot numbers these cards are installed to. I'll see if I can get it sorted out this weekend.

 

As far as ownership of the discussion group goes, is there a compelling reason to switch it from Astro to someone else? I mean, it seems to be working fine as is even though Astro isn't around.

[ChAiNz.2da]

As far as ownership of the discussion group goes, is there a compelling reason to switch it from Astro to someone else? I mean, it seems to be working fine as is even though Astro isn't around.

Compelling? No. Nothing like that. Just wanting to see if there was any interest

 

True enough there's enough mods & LFN veterans on the F@H team I don't ever foresee any problems hehe. Though I'd fart rainbows having our buddy Astro back.. always liked his comradery and perspective he brought around here (LFN as a whole).

 

Just wanted to make it clear the option is available and bring it to light in case peeps may think it was a 'taboo' subject and were holding back.

[Miltiades]

Heh, I doubt it was a taboo subject. There's just no reason to change it at this moment, I think. And I'm with you Chainz, wouldn't mind seeing Astro again.

 

Also, welcome to Nvenom!

[Char Ell]

Alrighty then. I volunteer to assume ownership of the folding@TeamLFN discussion group if needed or unless somebody else wants to. Of course if Astro decides to come back I would gladly return ownership of the discussion group to him.

 

Our team has now contributed over 16 million points worth of folding! Excellent work LF'ers!

 

I couldn't get the v7 client beta to work properly with my two graphics cards. It worked once on my GTS 250, which surprised me since that card isn't hooked up to any display device, but wouldn't work on my GTX 460. I reviewed the available info on configuring multiple GPU clients but all my v7 client seemed to recognize was my GTS 250. I've got to get around to posting my problem on foldingforum.org and see what help I can get there but I'm back to using the v6 clients for SMP and GPU for the time being.

 

Things are warming up where I live, enough to where I've had to turn on the air conditioner for the house. So this means I'm back to night time only folding mode, just in case anybody wanted to know...