Beyond3D_Team and Folding@home

Is your billing on tiered useage? Did you get hit-up pretty good for entering the next tier?

 

I dunno really, I just pay the bill.

Obviously not helped by my flatmates leaving the fridges/freezer (we have 3 between 4 people ) open but these have been the biggest bills in several years by a fair bit.

 

Sorry Bonobo, it finally came about

 

I know, I got around to checking the other day. Ah well, it couldn't last forever. I've been gradually winding back on the time spent folding as the winter bills start coming in and it gets bit more expensive!

Anyway, congratulations. The king is dead, long live the king!!

 

9800 Gtx+

Started folding with a 9800 GTX+ if enyone was interested

 

I just noticed that with all the graphics cards taking part now (NVidia at 2 teraflops!) and the PS3 still doing its thing at a fair pace combined, the whole project is at 5 Petaflops!

 

Petaflops surely!

Has anyone tested Nehalem in F@H? Would be interesting to see the kind of boost it brings over C2Q.

 

Nehalem Folding

An article I read showed the QX9775 was 25% faster than the i7-965 Extreme at folding. I found that on "The Tech Report".

 

Now I looked at the details better there where two QX9775,s in a skulltrail, so that is why it was faster. Still when it cost about $1000 per CPU I would rather fold with a GPU that cost me $185.

 

Cool, so it sounds like Nehalem would actually be a lot faster.

 

8800 Gts

I think your 8800 GTS would be a lot faster than the Nehalem are you using that for folding and if so what are you getting for PPD?

 

No I don't fold on my PC. My understanding was that CPU's earn more points than GPU's though because they are doing more complex work (albeit at a slower pace)?

 

From a strictly PPD perspective, GPU folding earns more than CPU folding. A Quad Core Q6600 at 3.4Ghz would do roughly 3400 PPD, if running two SMP instances with FAH Set Affinity tweak. A 8800GT / 8800GTX would do roughly 4000-4500 PPD depending on the unit, while a 280 GTX would do roughly 7000-7500 PPD. Lately the units have changed, but the relative scale remains the same.

 

Ah Cheers. So a stock i7 965 *might* just be able to hit 4000 ppd which is roughly in like with an 8800GT.

I assume you can't run the CPU and GPU clients simultaneously on a single box?

Also, how many PPD does the PS3 hit?

 

You can run multiple instances and client types at the same time, depending on the OS. Different OS's and clients have different overhead. To maximize points, you set the GPU clients as "low" priority, and CPU clients as "idle" priority. In Vista, depending on the units, the Nvidia GPU clients barely take 25% of a single core, leaving plenty of CPU left for the SMP instances. The AMD GPU clients use more or less CPU depending on the unit worked.

Combined my two systems with 3 video cards on average do roughly 13.5K - 15K PPD.

On my old system, AMD socket939 X2 4400+ @ 2.4Ghz , 1 8800GTX, 1 8800GT 256Meg, Vista 64bit, I run 1 SMP MPICH CPU client, and 2 GPU2 V6 clients. Task Manager shows both GPU clients COMBINED using anywhere from 7% to 12% CPU. The rest of the CPU is used by the SMP client. (That translates to about 25% of that single core for both cards.) The GPUs have gotten newer units, so today's points are down slightly; the PPD breakdown is 4544 GPU1, 3130 GPU2, 720 CPU.

On my main system, Intel Q6600 @ 3.4Ghz, AMD HD4870, Vista 64bit, I run 2 SMP MPICH CPU clients, and 1 GPU2 V6 client. Task manager shows GPU client using anywhere from 10% - 15% CPU. The rest is used by the two SMP clients. (That translates to about 40 - 60% of a single core for the video card). The PPD breakdown is 4384 GPU, 1480 CPU1, 1580 CPU2.

 

Cheers for the info! So anyone know how that compares to a PS3? It seems you can put together one ridiculously powerful folding machine if you go all out... i7 965 + 3x GTX 285!!

 

Actually a single i7 can do nearly 10 000 PPD with the a2 workloads that are available only on Linux.

Myself I have a Skulltrail motherboard with cheap Xeons at 3 GHz and I would get about 10 000 without my GPU clients. I'm running on Vista with four VMWare Linux instances to get all my 8 cores utilized.

 

Skulltrail

Nothing about Skulltrail is cheap even the 3 GHz Xeons are $900 or more and the motherboard is $600. I think you could get more PPD for the $ with GPU's, but the Skulltrail would be nice to have I am just jelous. What type of Ram is needed for that and how much is enough?

 

Yeah I meant cheap in the context of a Skulltrail system

I actually use 2.5 GHz Xeons OC'd to 3 GHz. These are around 1/5 of the price of the "real" Skulltrail processor QX9775. You also have to use registered FB-DIMM's which are expensive and relatively underperformant.

In my case the SMP clients frequently outproduce my GPU2 clients even though my my GPU's cost me more than the CPU's. I'm having utilization problems with my two ATI 4870 X2 cards though.

Now a Nehalem-based Skulltrail II would be a stunning folder, I'd say 20 000 PPD SMP output would be possible...

 

Points for the Week

We have increased our points for the week now we are in 244 th place last week we placed in the 350 or worse. Keep up the good folding guy's!