Join the MicroCenterOfficial Folding@Home Team: #257944

ryau

Happy to offer a giveaway for our Folding@Home team members, as a way to say thanks and give back to you: https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/3763/july-folding-home-giveaway

Good luck!

kmiller922

@cine_chris and @MightyMayfield congrats nice work!

cine_chris

Yellowbillycat said:

cine_chris said:

@kmiller922 From what I read on the EVGA forum you don't go less than a 4x PCIE slot and they talk about running i3s with Linux.

Interesting.  I have a 1x PCIe riser on the way ($6) to get an idle P106-90 running.  I'll have to compare it to the other P106 that's in an 8x slot right now.  4x risers are cheap, but out of China, so sloooow delivery.
Currently running:
R7 1700 + RTX 2070 Ubuntu 18.04
i5-6600K + GTX 1070 + P106-90 Ubuntu 18.04
i5-2400 + GTX 1650 (when it itsn't running Zwift) Windows 10
Core2Duo + GT 1030 Ubuntu 20.04
P71 Laptop i7-7700HQ + Quadro M620 Windows 10

@Yellowbillycat
The info above about running FAH on pcie 4x Nvidia GPU was out-of-date.  Apparently, about a yr-ago, Nvidia killed running on pcie 4x connections (also M2 feeds).  I suspect these connections were not able to handle the GPUs power needs & frying systems.  So that scrapped my plan to use a Supermicro server mobo with to 2-8x & 2-4x.  The 8x slots worked great, but the 4x had zero GPU compute capability.  Lesson learned.

MightyMayfield

cine_chris said:
Another huge milestone, 2B points for @MightyMayfield .
I did a sprint self-challenge attempting to hit 200M points before MM hit 2B.  Yes, I lost, by 2M points, but I hit my top PPD 8.5M, now ranked in the top 4K & completed 2,500 WUs.  So, it was a worthwhile effort. 

kmiller922 said:

@cine_chris and @MightyMayfield congrats nice work!

Thank you and congratulations!
ryau said:

Happy to offer a giveaway for our Folding@Home team members, as a way to say thanks and give back to you: https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/3763/july-folding-home-giveaway

Good luck!

I see that "sponsor's employees need eligible" clause 
Very nice! Always cool to see these sorts of things

Yellowbillycat

cine_chris said:

@Yellowbillycat
The info above about running FAH on pcie 4x Nvidia GPU was out-of-date.  Apparently, about a yr-ago, Nvidia killed running on pcie 4x connections (also M2 feeds).  I suspect these connections were not able to handle the GPUs power needs & frying systems.  So that scrapped my plan to use a Supermicro server mobo with to 2-8x & 2-4x.  The 8x slots worked great, but the 4x had zero GPU compute capability.  Lesson learned.

@cine_chris
Good to know.  I only tried the 1x PCIE riser.  It did work, and if there was any slowdown, it was inside the normal run-to-run variation in PPD.  I had 2 P106-90's, one in an 8x slot and one using the 1x riser.

cine_chris

Yellowbillycat said:

@cine_chris
Good to know.  I only tried the 1x PCIE riser.  It did work, and if there was any slowdown, it was inside the normal run-to-run variation in PPD.  I had 2 P106-90's, one in an 8x slot and one using the 1x riser.

@Yellowbillycat
The crypto-cards must be immune to the current GPU 4x limitations? I tried 4x with a 1050Ti & 1660super on Windows 10. Perhaps Linux with an earlier driver might work?

kmiller922

@JADO & @Pittbug Welcome to the 100 Million club

cine_chris

cine_chris said:

Yellowbillycat said:

@cine_chris
Good to know.  I only tried the 1x PCIE riser.  It did work, and if there was any slowdown, it was inside the normal run-to-run variation in PPD.  I had 2 P106-90's, one in an 8x slot and one using the 1x riser.

@Yellowbillycat
The crypto-cards must be immune to the current GPU 4x limitations? I tried 4x with a 1050Ti & 1660super on Windows 10. Perhaps Linux with an earlier driver might work?

@Yellowbillycat
Not an OS issue, apparently at the lowest level, it's a motherboard bios related function and what the motherboard mfg chooses to support from what I've been able to determine.      

ryau

We're making progress with COVID-19 research! I've pasted below a Facebook post from the F@H team:

With your help, F@h became the first #exascale computer, collected 100,000X more data than a normal paper, learned how the #Demogorgon evades our immune system, and discovered drug targets called ‘cryptic’ pockets (#FAHPockets)!
Read it for free on the biorxiv preprint server! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.27.175430v1

pittbug

kmiller922 said:

@JADO & @Pittbug Welcome to the 100 Million club

Thanks! Seems the latest Windows update has helped a little as I'm now seeing 2M PPD on a regular basis.

teamtempest

I notice some of the entrants in the July folding giveaway (thanks, Ryau!) have done appreciable work but the fine print in the screenshots say "0 go to MicrocenterOfficials's total of ….". Is this a misconfiguration or just something that sometimes happens even after you join a team?

ryau

teamtempest said:

I notice some of the entrants in the July folding giveaway (thanks, Ryau!) have done appreciable work but the fine print in the screenshots say "0 go to MicrocenterOfficials's total of ….". Is this a misconfiguration or just something that sometimes happens even after you join a team?

We won't just be going by the screenshots to view participation of team members. If someone has just switched team, the stats probably won't have updated in the client yet.

0legravy_leg

24 hours in after switching teams and making some good progress, putting all that microcenter merch to work on the down time
2080ti xc hydro / 3900x
5700xt (asus refrence on water block) / 3950x
5700 (asus refrence on water block) / 3600x
2060 ko ultra / 1600x
typically produces 3 - 6 million a day depending on which systems are folding and how efficiently Folding@home feeds me work units.  

MightyMayfield

0legravy_leg said:

24 hours in after switching teams and making some good progress, putting all that microcenter merch to work on the down time
2080ti xc hydro / 3900x
5700xt (asus refrence on water block) / 3950x
5700 (asus refrence on water block) / 3600x
2060 ko ultra / 1600x
typically produces 3 - 6 million a day depending on which systems are folding and how efficiently Folding@home feeds me work units.  

Welcome! Yeah, the FAH network stability seems a bit wavy these days. Can make anything from 18-33m PPD depending on how it feels 

cine_chris

MightyMayfield said:
Yeah, the FAH network stability seems a bit wavy these days. Can make anything from 18-33m PPD depending on how it feels 

I noticed several of the MC donors were low #`s today.  I`m not folding on any CPUs currently & my #`s were up ~400k.  That`s despite having to replace a dead mobo & losing a couple of WUs in the process.   I guess Forrest Gumpisms apply to folding too,  WUs are like a box of chocloates  

MightyMayfield

cine_chris said:

MightyMayfield said:
Yeah, the FAH network stability seems a bit wavy these days. Can make anything from 18-33m PPD depending on how it feels 

I noticed several of the MC donors were low #`s today.  I`m not folding on any CPUs currently & my #`s were up ~400k.  That`s despite having to replace a dead mobo & losing a couple of WUs in the process.   I guess Forrest Gumpisms apply to folding too,  WUs are like a box of chocloates  

I'm pretty sure our local network protection does some overzealous protecting things sometimes as well. I can't really blame it for doing its job, but man is it frustrating to see a handful of machines with like a dozen units stuck on UPLOAD for a few days until they time out. Ah well, science still gets done.

cine_chris

teamtempest said:

I notice some of the entrants in the July folding giveaway (thanks, Ryau!) have done appreciable work but the fine print in the screenshots say "0 go to MicrocenterOfficials's total of ….". Is this a misconfiguration or just something that sometimes happens even after you join a team?

@teamtempest As a note, your team points don`t follow you, they stay with the team at the time they were accumulated.  Reading in the docs yesterday,  you can even assign slots to different teams with advanced config features.  Kinda makes sense as allegiances change & competitions at any level can make people do funny things.  

teamtempest

Yeah, that seems like reasonable explanation. I'll go with it.
Another note: my measly little GT-730 that only draws 30 watts still manages to have a very noticeable effect:

teamtempest

I was stupid. I let M$oft update do its thing. It installed a new browser and promptly broke a whole lot of things that were working perfectly fine. Among them the FAH client, which just kept causing the screen to "blink" every few seconds without doing anything else. I used a system restore in hopes it would get rid of the "new, improved, super duper browser!". No joy; it's still the newest piece of junk. I downloaded and installed the latest client. It worked once, but I left it on minimum power because I planned to turn it up later. But now, while I'm sure it's running, the client refuses to talk to me. It just spins its little cursor thing, and after a while it shows a little menu of other things I might try, none of which actually do anything useful.  Is there something else I might try to get control back?

cine_chris

teamtempest said:

Yeah, that seems like reasonable explanation. I'll go with it.
Another note: my measly little GT-730 that only draws 30 watts still manages to have a very noticeable effect:

That looks like your billing plan was changed to a level-cost plan or could be a faulty meter perhaps?  A typical 100 watt device should be <$9/month.  I`d call their customer support and ask why.  Also, CPUs can have a much lower PPD/watt efficiency, especially with older gear.
   

Kirito

teamtempest said:

I was stupid. I let M$oft update do its thing. It installed a new browser and promptly broke a whole lot of things that were working perfectly fine. Among them the FAH client, which just kept causing the screen to "blink" every few seconds without doing anything else. I used a system restore in hopes it would get rid of the "new, improved, super duper browser!". No joy; it's still the newest piece of junk. I downloaded and installed the latest client. It worked once, but I left it on minimum power because I planned to turn it up later. But now, while I'm sure it's running, the client refuses to talk to me. It just spins its little cursor thing, and after a while it shows a little menu of other things I might try, none of which actually do anything useful.  Is there something else I might try to get control back?

I had the same issue after a Win Update, followed by some sort of forced update when my computer completely slowed to a crawl until I did the update.  I didn't trust it so I sandboxed the update on a linux box to test it first but it seems clean.  I let the install go on the Windows machine and it broke a lot of stuff.  Once I figured out most of it, mostly related to my security settings not allowing cookies, tracking, location (all of which had been turned on somehow) the last thing was FAH.  Low and behold I had to uninstall it and reload the whole thing again.  Fortunately I had written my passkey down and re-entered it.  Once I got it to reconnect to the host, which was listed in my MS firewall as to be excluded, and fixed that everything was working again. 

Not sure why all that happened. Scanned the windows machine six ways from Sunday and didn't find malware, virus's or anything else.  I presume I have in some small way pi**ed off MS by not allowing them to have any data.  It's the reason I usually use a ToR browser and Fedora Linux.  I have three machines running FAH on Linux and not one has given me much of a problem.  One did hiccup when I upgraded the OS but otherwise they spin all day long.  My Windows box requires much more attention.

So the short answer is to save your passkey as a text doc on 2 dimensional media (what used to be referred to as paper) unistall FAH and reinstall it.  That was the only solution I found.

Kirito

MightyMayfield

Not looking forward to reinstalling FAH on dozens of machines...guess I know what I'll be doing holiday weekend.

cine_chris

My little motivational Folding goal for this month is a July Hat Trick... (3`s) Top3k, 300M PPD, 3k WU.  Just something to help keep the fire lit & noticing the 3`s commonality, 3 goals with 3s.  For my first setup, it was to reach 5M/5days.

kmiller922

As its said in the Navy darn the torpedos full speed ahead

MightyMayfield

Trying some new settings configurations today. So far seems promising.

Kirito

If someone finds abetter answer than mine please post it.  I'm not a computer science major and I only have one Windows machine running this. It was easy for me to go to the nuclear option.  There may very well be a better answer out there.

Kirito

cine_chris

Kirito said:

If someone finds abetter answer than mine please post it.  I'm not a computer science major and I only have one Windows machine running this. It was easy for me to go to the nuclear option.  There may very well be a better answer out there.

Kirito

What I do, FWIW..
 1) sometimes the windows network mode can get set to Public, set it  Private. 
2) setting fixed IP addresses rather than DHCP random seemed to also help, especially for the remote access/control which also requires a restart of both systems. to connect
3) & most weird to fix windows strangeness is defragging with a real defrag util, although it`s no longer supported, I still use myDeFrag, Auslogics is another I`ve used.  (pause or shutdown other apps while running)
4) Temporarily disable Windows Firewall to test if it`s the hang.
5) I also set the DNS servers to Google in the NIC manual settings, 8.8.4.4 8.8.8.8 
6) for virus scan I like Malwarebytes, not that it fixes anything, but it often blocks malware sites.  
also, I seldom do CPU folding & only with later-faster CPUs when I do.  Try pausing CPU folding to see if it affects anything.
HTH

ChrisHarshman

I got a "new" old computer this week, setting up an I7-2600 with a motherboard that is actually capable of running multiple graphics cards.  This case has much better air circulation than my other cases too.  I can finally retire that old Core 2 Duo I was using.  So far the 2 graphics cards seem okay together (GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1650 Super) and are estimating good PPD numbers without getting hot enough to throttle down.

Anyone have tips on running multiple GPU cards in the same box?

cine_chris

ChrisHarshman said:

Anyone have tips on running multiple GPU cards in the same box?

I have 3 tower closed boxes... two of them are Antec 300 cases.  All 3 have a 120mm Cooler Master Sickleflow 60cfm fan side-mounted pumping room air directly into the GPUs.  I still power cap to keep them in the mid60Cs temp range as req`d.   One of the reasons I run Windows is to get the MSI Afterburner S/W for monitoring & tuning.  I even have the GPU fans tuned to minimize temp fluctuations during the F@H checkpoints.  Note the negligible temp drop during the checkpoint spike.  This system is a GTX1050Ti running at 59C at 90% power, it`s relatively quiet.

ChrisHarshman

This case is an Antec Twelve Hundred and does have the option to mount a side fan like you're saying, but unfortunately right now the CPU cooler is in the way.  I run Lubuntu 18.04 so I just have NVIDIA X Server tool and the nvidia-smi command line tool, but that's okay for now.