Folding Question

[Nebor]

Alright, I've rejoined the folding race with a 2.3 ghz Athlon XP and a 3ghz p4c.

I'm running two instances on the P4C as outlined in Maximum PC. I've correctly set the affinity stuff.

My question is, on the project information page, when it says a particular Work Unit has a deadline of 15 days, and hopes to be done in 11 days, is that accurate? I hear people talking about turning out 20 WUs a day on P4Cs, but just watching mine so far in the last half hour, it's done 10,000 out of 500,000 steps. That doesn't add up to many per day. And the projects (546 and 549, both Gromacs) are projected at 11 days....

This is the reason most people don't get into Folding, it's unnecessarily complex to set up and seemingly fruitless.

Edit: And i'm running -local -advmethods and -foreasm.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

not all of them run quickly, but most of the WU's I get don't seem to be as large, I think I've only gotten 2 of the 500,000 step WU's myself (don't know what the deadline was on either of them), one took 2 days on my 2800+, the other only took a day. are you using the screen saver, the gui, or the cli?

 

[Nebor]

I'm using the basic console on my intel machine and the GUI on the amd.

 

[ProviaFan]

If it's done 10,000 out of 500,000 in the past half hour, then it's on track to get the WU done in just slightly over a day. The WUs are of various sizes, and take various times to complete. That is perfectly in order with the times you should be getting, especially if you run two instances on the same CPU (they will each run slower than an individual instance would, but the combined output should be a bit higher than if you just ran one).

I would avoid making generalizations about the difficulty of setting up Folding@Home. There's always the GUI client, which doesn't have the issues that some other project GUIs have with lack of speed. It's really the preferred client, IMHO, if you don't need to run two, or if you don't need to run them as a service. Additionally, I don't quite see what's "fruitless" about it. Yes, the WUs are larger, so you don't get as many done per day as in some other projects (I'd hate to see what you'd have to say about WU "fruitfulness" and Lifemapper!), but then F@H has the potential to do something useful, unlike a certain project that won't be done for another 1,000 years, and doesn't seem to.... well, nevermind.

Anyway, please don't try to figure out how it's going by looking at the output of your CLIs, especially when you're first starting out and haven't learned how its output differs with different types of WUs. Try a program like FAH LogStats that can monitor multiple clients, and additional clients over a network. It provides a nice summary that is more understandable than the CLI output.

 

[Nebor]

Yeah, I like the GUI on my AMD machine, but I have hyperthreading here.

It seems to be going alright, it's up to 100,000 now on both WUs.

 

[GLeeM]

Welcome back to the TeAm, Nebor! 🙂
It's great to have another forum user with us. Give Hyperfocals stats page a bump sometimes. (I have slow connection and hate when I have to go to page two)

I too have a 3ghz p4c. You don't need to set the affinity. WinXP will take care of it. If those boxes are on all day you don't have to worry about deadlines.

Running two instances on HT box will increase production by 11% to 31% depending on WUs, in my experience.

I just use consoles now and FAH LogStats to see what is happening.

I never heard of anyone getting 20 WUs done in a day. Maybe long ago when WUs were much smaller.

With those 2 boxes you should be able to climb up the ranks VERY fast. 😉

I don't use the -advmethods flag, soon I will try it on one console to see what difference it makes. I'll let you know.

Have fun!