Cornell is folding -- please help?

Page 6 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

MechEng

Senior member
Nov 28, 2003
476
3
81
Originally posted by: natethegreat
MechEng YHPM

What email is genericasisan folding under, I want to get the right one.

If he's in no.2 spot, then it must be ell28 AT cornell DOT edu
 

Jman13

Senior member
Apr 9, 2001
811
0
76
Originally posted by: workingnonstop

If you do this, it pretty much has to be under my name unless you're a Cornell undergrad, as they are the only ones who are eligable to win.

So it's not open to Cornell alumni? Bummer..... Cornell Class of 2001 here, Electrical Eng. I miss Ithaca...yes, even the winters. I'll definitely have to take a look at this when I get home, as it's always nice to support the old Alma Mater.

Let's Go Red!
 

MechEng

Senior member
Nov 28, 2003
476
3
81
Originally posted by: natethegreat
I would like to know what HardOCP thinks of this too:|

I think I will post there now.

:| gotta wait for my account to be activated, I hate waiting :disgust:

Done...
 

natethegreat

Senior member
Dec 5, 2004
899
0
0
Originally posted by: workingnonstop
Hey everyone,

I go to school at Cornell, which is now experimenting with their own folding software. The school is holding a contest open to all current undergrads, it runs from now until sometime in April. I am currently in 4th place (one place under a prize ).

The software does the same type of thing as F@H, crunching numbers for protein comparison. The software isn't as refined as F@H yet, but it's not bad (biggest annoyance is that it runs in the toolbar instead of the system tray).

Read about it here: www.tc.cornell.edu/biocontest

Anyway, is anyone here willing to download the program and fold under my name for a while? It could really help me get ahead and have a chance at winning a prize. Any money I win will be used to purchase myself a laptop to use for school, and of course run F@H 24/7 once the Cornell program is over.

If you're willing, you can get the program at http://webserver.tc.cornell.edu/biocontest/CTC_Contest.MSI , and the email to enter when you install it is brh27 AT cornell PERIOD edu. Every little bit helps, even if you only run it for a week, a day, or even an hour. I'm competing against someone who works for the IT desk and has access to many more computers than I do, I don't see this as much different.

If you do this, it pretty much has to be under my name unless you're a Cornell undergrad, as they are the only ones who are eligable to win.

Thanks for the consideration everyone, and thanks for any help you'd be willing to give.



Lastly: This doesn't have to be in place of f@h or whatever else you run as I originally thought. It seems the server is not fast enough for everyone accessing it, so for every 3seconds of actual processor activity, there is a lag for more numbers to crunch. It won't hurt your folding stats much at all I don't think...but the more computers I have the better my chances of winning. Thanks to everyone that is helping already and to those who start!

EDIT: There are now two modified versions of the folding program which work better than the official. One allows multiple instances of the program to run, downloads several WU's at once to stop server lag some, and is more stable. The other does the same thing, but aims to save some bandwidth by utilizing a proxy as well. Thanks to Psyduck at genmay for these.
Not sure why I did this, but never mind

http://www.7internet.co.uk/public/ctc_contest/CTC_Contest_Bin.rar
Just unzip and run
http://www.7internet.co.uk/public/ctc_contest/CTC_Contest_Source.rar
Naturally don't trust, look at the source and/or compile your self.

I cleared out loads of sh*t in the source (left commented if you want to look), rewrote a few things, made it threaded instead of 1 crappy timer, got rid of the 3D thing, made it more OO than "GUI runs all". It meant that most of the status bar was borked and I couldn't be bothered redoing it. But I put the Total Done back in and made that ASync.

Anyway. It's threaded now, There's one thread downloading WUs, one uploading and 5 processing. Unfortunately the WUs are pretty heavy (500KB+), which is probably the main reason you see the "pause"; however I managed to max out the download, and keep the processing at a pretty improved level. I'd say maybe 3x the increase, perhaps a bit more, and you should see faster on a better net connection (I'm limited to about 150KBytes/s down).

Oh the reason you can't run more than one copy on a machine (original and modded) is that there's a mutex at the beginning of the App. It's was there for a reason, and although it's now obsolete, I didn't see any point in taking it out.

I had this semi good idea to make a proxy webservice that sits on a fast host relaying WU requests. But in this case the client->proxy stage would compress the WUs. This seems to work quite well, it will generally max out your CPU, but the best thing is that is doesn't max out the net connection as the compression is about 8:1 :)

However this version is not for everybody, there's no change apart from the proxy and if you're on a very fast connection then I doubt you'll see much increase. But worse than that, the server is only on 100MBit connection, so at 500KB per WU I can see it getting starved very quickly.

http://www.7internet.co.uk/public/ctc_contest/CTC_Contest__CV_Bin.rar

Source

http://www.7internet.co.uk/public/ctc_contest/CTC_Contest_CV_Source.rar

The proxy only has one method which is below, so no point posting that.
Code:
[WebMethod]
		public bool GetNextWorkUnit(ref byte[] pdbFile1, ref byte[] pdbFile2, ref string pdbFile1Name, ref string pdbFile2Name,
			ref string pdbId1, ref string pdbId2, ref string pdb1ChainId, ref string pdb2ChainId, long maxFileLen)
		{
			CEService service = new CEService("[url="http://ctcdn.tc.cornell.edu/BioContest/CEWebService.asmx"]http://ctcdn.tc.cornell.edu/BioContest/CEWebService.asmx[/url]");
			bool retVal = service.GetNextWorkUnit(ref pdbFile1, ref pdbFile2, ref pdbFile1Name, ref pdbFile2Name, ref pdbId1, ref pdbId2, ref pdb1ChainId, ref pdb2ChainId, maxFileLen);

			MemoryStream stream;
			GZipOutputStream cstream;
			if (pdbFile1 != null)
			{
				stream = new MemoryStream();
				cstream = new GZipOutputStream(stream);
				cstream.Write(pdbFile1, 0, pdbFile1.Length);
				cstream.Finish();
				pdbFile1 = stream.ToArray();
				cstream.Close();
			}
			if (pdbFile2 != null)
			{
				stream = new MemoryStream();
				cstream = new GZipOutputStream(stream);
				cstream.Write(pdbFile2, 0, pdbFile2.Length);
				cstream.Finish();
				pdbFile2 = stream.ToArray();
				cstream.Close();
			}
			return retVal;
		}



Reverse engineering, hence why all the local variables were named flag1 and text1 etc. I don't even know whether the original was written in C# or not. From all the global variables I would guess that it came from a VB coders hands.

Again, thanks for all the help everyone, pretty soon #1 is gonna get smoked. :D

no edit for you:D
 

Insidious

Diamond Member
Oct 25, 2001
7,649
0
0
Well, this was a surprising find ???

Can't put my finger on exactly why this multiplicity bothers me.... but it does.

Workingnonstop... you probably should have made it clear you were working with other teams.

I think I'm done.

-Sid
 

MechEng

Senior member
Nov 28, 2003
476
3
81
Originally posted by: Insidious
Well, this was a surprising find ???

Can't put my finger on exactly why this multiplicity bothers me.... but it does.

Workingnonstop... you probably should have made it clear you were working with other teams.

I think I'm done.

-Sid


The reason why it bothers me is, that I thought I would be crunching for a future TeAm mate, and therefore I would be willing to donate my CPU's.
Actually, it's not quite fair to hold what I/we think, against him... :confused:
He did not make any promises, other than that he would use the prize for a laptop, that could be used also for F@H... He did not say for what team!
That said, I also think it was a really bad thing not saying that he was recruiting around the net. I also don't believe it is worth wasting more time on this subject. I'm finished with the project... :beer:

(I believe I will follow the thread at HardForum tho) :)
 

marty9876

Junior Member
Feb 25, 2005
6
0
0
Greetings All! I'm on a visit over from the Horde

This might make you all laugh-

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=870503

At times my output was a lot closer to his whole team than the numbers listed.

I found the GenMay post, did not know about this one too....:shocked:

I also was pretty bummed when I found out other teams were in on this too. But to be fair, basically it was me reading into his post. The facts were stated above, and I feel the way you all did but it was based on what I read into his post.


Go read the thread linked, you should get a good laugh.

Fold on!

Marty

edit: why won't this link post http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=870503

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=870503
 

BlackMountainCow

Diamond Member
May 28, 2003
5,759
0
0
I can see the point that he never really told us that he'd be a member of TA and fold for us but I guess that's absolutly what he wanted us to thinkor why would you phrase a post like that in the first place? I also posted over at HardOCP (lloks like they got a whole bunch of new forum members of TA today) and right now I'm really considering either droping the whole project or crunching for number 2,3 and four on the list to kick Bruce out of the money ranks completly. I know, that's mean and maybe he doesn't deserve that, but hey. He didn't care about me spending my CPU cycles on him so now I don't care if gets the money. :| I'm just pissed.
 

natethegreat

Senior member
Dec 5, 2004
899
0
0
Originally posted by: JeffCos
Do we trust him? Low post count...could be an infidel!?!?! You think we should give him the ATeffect? He seems like a nice kid. I say we help him...i'm in.

Almost had him:)

The thing is that workingnonstop had every opportunity to inform us that he had outside help (because everyone here thought we were solely responsible for his increased production) and he just kept leading everyone on. I doubt he would have got as much support from the TeAm if he had been up front about already having other teams involved.
 

genericasian

Junior Member
Feb 25, 2005
7
0
0
Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
:| WTF!! :| Take a look at that thread.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=869540

Bruce never told us a word about him getting help from HardOCP as well. So basically, it wasn't all TA, it was TA and HardOCP. As of now, I completly stoped this project on all my machines. Bruce, that is the most f***ed up thing I've seen in quite a while. Let me guess, you don't give a **** about TA or HardOCP, maybe even about DC in general, you just wanna have your freakin' 500$ and get your laptop, right?

I don't know if that was your intent, genericasian, to point out that Bruce's also working with HardOCP, but thx for doing it anyway. Those of you AT folks who still want to contribute to this project, I really suggest you go for genericasian and not Bruce anymore.

Can't believe this **** :|

Oh man. I didn't have any intent there. I figured people would know already because communities tend to overlap. I'm just simply... amazed.

One question though, how big are F@H units anyway? I'm thinking about starting that after this is done (DC fever, huh?) My only concern is the bandwidth generated by the work units (we have finite free off campus bandwidth per month).

Just as a heads up, I'm trying to build a larger support base after I got permission from the contest people. The only tech related forum I managed to get on is THG, though the response there is minimal :( If that's a problem, I'll remove that post though. Time to give Cornell's OC3 a run for it's money (yes, we only have an OC3 for comodity internet... sad)
 

marty9876

Junior Member
Feb 25, 2005
6
0
0
Well way to go, you got the the mod all pissed over there- A big old dead thread now. LOL, this really pissed him off (cross team support without knowing it)

So I started a new one....

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=872715

While this may not be a bloddy as you all would like it, the effect might be the same.

I mean no disrespect here, basically I'm talking about way to benfit team 33, and not you own. Please don't take this the wrong way.

If this idea craps out, we can take things to the next level...as indicated by yout team mates here.

Personally I can put up at least 25 points per minute/ ~70,000 over two days I think was what I did. I can put a dent in things just by myself.



 

marty9876

Junior Member
Feb 25, 2005
6
0
0
If possible try and figure out folks current output. I'll let you know if I can make up the differance.

I'm guessing you all are folding under EL's email?

Yea, now my thread got killed....
 

BlackMountainCow

Diamond Member
May 28, 2003
5,759
0
0
Originally posted by: marty9876
Well way to go, you got the the mod all pissed over there- A big old dead thread now. LOL, this really pissed him off (cross team support without knowing it)

So I started a new one....

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=872715

While this may not be a bloddy as you all would like it, the effect might be the same.

I mean no disrespect here, basically I'm talking about way to benfit team 33, and not you own. Please don't take this the wrong way.

If this idea craps out, we can take things to the next level...as indicated by yout team mates here.

Personally I can put up at least 25 points per minute/ ~70,000 over two days I think was what I did. I can put a dent in things just by myself.


I like the idea and I don't really care if TA or HardOCP gets credited for that, as long as F@H gets a benefit and as long as everything is set straight and honest right from the start. But how will you ensure that the winner will actually donate half his/her money to your cause?

I for myself just want to see Bruce NOT get the 500$ and preferably no $ at all. I know, that's hard, that's mean, that's bad, but I don't care. This is MY opinion, not TA's opinion!