Join the MicroCenterOfficial Folding@Home Team: #257944

SpongeBob · April 2020

Have two computers folding. Thanks to Ryau and Microcenter for advising us on this opportunity to help.

Cannonfodder · April 2020

It was running like a banshee then turned into a pumpkin around midnight. Guess all the researchers went home for the weekend.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031942/uploads/editor/8y/dh064h3d7a46.png

Darbs · April 2020

Checo007 said:

In the section "I support research fighting" there is not COVID-19 option... do I have the wrong team code? Is showing only Alzheimer's, Cancer, Huntington's and Parkinson's...

Choose "any". It will currently default to the COVID-19 project.

Tramp78 · April 2020

Just a quick note. I use Acronis as a backup/ransomware application. Last night Acronis flagged Folding as a possible Ransomware candidate (stopped the process, recorded all the files it created, etc) and asked if I wanted to clean it off or allow it. I allowed it. I wanted people to know that whatever Folding is doing, it tripped the alarm bells in Acornis and might for other programs as well.

Cannonfodder · April 2020

Yes, windows defender will also pick it up but you can simply allow to continue. Looks like the app is talking over port 80 and 8080 with your local host running on port 36330 if you want to http to the interface. You can also set the checkpoint frequency to a higher threshold to increase speed, the default is 15min. I increased it to the 30min max. Down side if you have an unexpected terminate of the process you loose a half hour of processing work. It is in the advanced config.
Started picking up work units again around 10am EST and been cranking along since then.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031942/uploads/editor/1m/a4e6hcjzu9dw.png

wuffy68 · April 2020

Kudos to all the new Folding@home community members! But just one big question? Where was everyone when Folding@home Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, Ebola, Diabetes and Influenza needed help with research? The Curecoin team 224497 doesn't even get a nod for the 1.1 Trillion PPD they've already produced. Many Curecoin team folders have used their tokens to help fund their electric bills, subsidize their hardware (many like myself purchased from Microcenter), and gifts to charity since 2014 (beta started in 2013). Anyway, just a data point.

Cannonfodder · April 2020

wuffy68 said:

Many Curecoin team folders have used their tokens to help fund their electric bill

What is a token, aside what I use to put in the asteroids machine back in the early 80's?

Tramp78 · April 2020

wuffy68 said:

Where was everyone when Folding@home Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, Ebola, Diabetes and Influenza needed help with research?

I just heard about this yesterday. Should I stop?

ryau · April 2020

Tramp78 said:

wuffy68 said:

Where was everyone when Folding@home Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, Ebola, Diabetes and Influenza needed help with research?

I just heard about this yesterday. Should I stop?

No, keep going and then once COVID-19 is done, we can continue helping research for other diseases.

wuffy68 · April 2020

Cannonfodder said:

wuffy68 said:

Many Curecoin team folders have used their tokens to help fund their electric bill

What is a token, aside what I use to put in the asteroids machine back in the early 80's?

A cryptocurrency classified as a token by the FTC is issued by an organization that is not classified as a financial institution in and of itself. Curecoin rewards individuals and organizations who participate in Folding@home with CURE tokens that are tradable on US and International markets (Bittrex, Livecoin, a few others). It is based on a controlled supply, similar to other blockchains, so the more people fold, the more folding research each token represents (tied to daily FAH stats server output). A similar model to hashing algorithms in Bitcoin, without all the extra energy use in security the blockchain thanks to the utilization of Proof-of-Stake vs Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work. The organization has produced over 1.1 Trillion points on FAH since 2013.

wuffy68 · April 2020

Tramp78 said:

wuffy68 said:

Where was everyone when Folding@home Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, Ebola, Diabetes and Influenza needed help with research?

I just heard about this yesterday. Should I stop?

Ryau is absolutely correct ... COVID19 is Folding@home's number 1 priority right now ... but don't be surprised when they run out of COVID19 work units, you will also be receiving Cancer, Alzheimer, and Ebola work units as well. Curecoin merely rewards folding@home participants who register on their system no matter what work units are received. Not asking anyone to switch teams - just trying to highlight how there are some innovative teams on Folding@Home that rarely get credit.

EVGAAvery · April 2020

Ryau, the insane support you have received is a direct response to the products and services you and your company provide. Upon receiving your email about the team being started and the reason i added 2 servers always folding, and 2 gaming machines one of which is always folding for you guys. To all those supporting team microcenter keep up the great work and tell everyone you know that if there computer is on it should be folding for team MicroCenter its too easy to setup and the benefits are global!

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031942/uploads/editor/0y/vbdfac4fi7tt.png

ryau · April 2020

EVGAAvery said:

Ryau, the insane support you have received is a direct response to the products and services you and your company provide. Upon receiving your email about the team being started and the reason i added 2 servers always folding, and 2 gaming machines one of which is always folding for you guys. To all those supporting team microcenter keep up the great work and tell everyone you know that if there computer is on it should be folding for team MicroCenter its too easy to setup and the benefits are global!

Thank you, I'm amazed by the response, and am truly grateful to have the support from you and all of our customers.

Kirito · April 2020

Like many, I didn't know this existed. I would not assess blame, but better marketing is in order.

That said, I am here now and isn't that what is important?

Currently I have two Lenovo ThinkStations thrown at this, spinning a total of 24 cores and 64 GB of RAM across two machines acting independently. Who I am is a nurse RN fallen from grace and no longer accepted in medical facilities so I contribute what I can. For those who have gone before us, those who have made this a stable environment, made this available to us so we can help, I am grateful and thankful. Having also been a soldier and a combat medic I appreciate those who have walked before me and given me a lay of the land so I can be more beneficial to others.

Sadly, I can only contribute what I have. I pray it will be useful to the scientists trying to find an end to this. In time I will be able to leave at least one of these machines online for as long as the machine survives. There are unknowns for me about cost and maintenance I have yet to address but can hopefully rectify. What I do know is this...

I have had a machine that for the best part of its existence with me has sat idle as my home computer. Two xeon processors, 16 threads of core and 48 GB of Ram. Now it has a purpose. May we all be so fortunate in our lives.

Kirito

ryau · April 2020

Thank you for your service Kirito. Like all of us, we can only contribute the resources we have available, but every machine helps. The project has grown from approx 30,000 participants a few weeks ago to now having 600,000 CPUs and 440,000 GPUs providing over 1.5 exaFLOPS of computing power. That's 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second!

ryau · April 2020

Stats Update

As of 10:30am today (4/6):

Active CPUs within 50 days: 1,463

Grand Score 81,852,200

Work Unit Count 11,228

Team Ranking 1,138 of 248,375

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031942/uploads/editor/is/ffa46ylonoie.jpg

Not bad for 3 days!

Thank you for all your participation, this is amazing.

MightyMayfield · April 2020

Hiya hiya, MightyMayfield here. Look forward to working with everyone!

Kirito · April 2020

Glad to help. Let's find a way to kill this damn thing. May be able to bring another machine online today.

Nothing compared to what I'm running now, just a couple more CPU's threads to add to the pile.

It's just like Starship Troopers. We're killing bugs. "Everybody fights. Nobody quits." Thinking more of Heinlien than the movie.

Kirito

Kirito · April 2020

Congratulations everyone. I am impressed we have accomplished so much.

I am glad to be part of the team. Was in the Cambridge store Sunday to get parts to get another computer up.

Keep cranking!

Kirito

ryau · April 2020

MightyMayfield said:

Hiya hiya, MightyMayfield here. Look forward to working with everyone!

Go Mayfield!

fatherfork · April 2020

I had been folding on my own, but just joined the team when I learned about it here. Hopefully we all make a meaningful difference in this fight.

TSNickW · April 2020

Hello @fatherfork Thanks for joining the team.

PowerSpec_MichaelB · April 2020

We've almost breached the top 500 everyone, keep it up!

1TM · April 2020

We are hovering at 850-900 TeraFLOPs as a team (estimated as team points per day divided by 86400 seconds in a day). Few more machines and we will reach a 1 PetaFLOP

Multi-core CPUs with 4-channel memory controllers (Xeon or Threadripper) may get more work done by running multiple cases in several CPU folding slots instead of just one. CPUs with dual channel memory (AMD Ryzen, intel Core) may not benefit from this as much.

Example how to set one multi-core CPU as several slots (example 8-core 16-thread CPU, Windows10):
1. find how many threads CPU has. press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, MoreDetails,Performance, see Logical processors.
2. In the screen bottom right corner click on ^ and on FAH folding icon and on Advanced Control.
3. note the current points per day.
4. When CPU run reaches 100%, click Configure-Slots-cpu-Edit, set threads to 4, OK
5. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
6. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
7. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
8. by now you used up all threads (4+4+4+4=16), click Save
if CPU has more threads, repeat step 7.

After a while, when all cases download and are running in each slot, see if total estimated points per day eventually increases. To undo the change, remove non-running cpu slots in Configure-Slots, then edit the top cpu slot threads back to -1.

Note that if you run GPUs, free up 2-4 CPU threads to handle GPU data or disable CPU slots altogether to get maximum points from just GPU folding.

PowerSpec_MichaelB · April 2020

1TM said:

We are hovering at 850-900 TeraFLOPs as a team (estimated as team points per day divided by 86400 seconds in a day). Few more machines and we will reach a 1 PetaFLOP

Multi-core CPUs with 4-channel memory controllers (Xeon or Threadripper) may get more work done by running multiple cases in several CPU folding slots instead of just one. CPUs with dual channel memory (AMD Ryzen, intel Core) may not benefit from this as much.
Example how to set one multi-core CPU as several slots (example 8-core 16-thread CPU, Windows10):
1. find how many threads CPU has. press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, MoreDetails,Performance, see Logical processors.
2. In the screen bottom right corner click on ^ and on FAH folding icon and on Advanced Control.
3. note the current points per day.
4. When CPU run reaches 100%, click Configure-Slots-cpu-Edit, set threads to 4, OK
5. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
6. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
7. click +Add, click on CPU button, set threads to 4, OK
8. by now you used up all threads (4+4+4+4=16), click Save
if CPU has more threads, repeat step 7.
After a while, when all cases download and are running in each slot, see if total estimated points per day eventually increases. To undo the change, remove non-running cpu slots in Configure-Slots, then edit the top cpu slot threads back to -1.
Note that if you run GPUs, free up 2-4 CPU threads to handle GPU data or disable CPU slots altogether to get maximum points from just GPU folding.

This is extremely useful info, and exactly what I needed to do with our 3990X. I made 5 slots with 24 threads each, leaving 8 threads available to both GPU's on the system. I've been testing with and without the advanced flags however I have not really noticed much of a difference in the amount of points earned, so I think for now I'll leave those disabled.

Bandwidth definitely appears to be a key component as using 3600mhz dual rank kits in a quad channel configuration appears to yield the highest bandwidth and PPD, with each cluster of 24 cores averaging around 10k-20k PPD a piece depending on the WU. While not as efficient as a high end GPU, it's still enough to warrant the use.

1TM · April 2020

I think we may have just reached a petaflop as a team.
As team score increased from 211192070 to 212512848 between 16:05 and 16:25 time, peak performance went to 1.096 PetaFLOPs..

ryau · April 2020

Agreed, thanks 1TM for sharing that info, super useful, since we're getting some threadripper machines online, which is probably we just passed the PetaFLOP barrier.

ryau · April 2020

When we launched the AMD Threadripper 3990X processor, part of the promotion included having Linus go to our Denver store and build a machine, valued at around $10k. Well, since it's still there we wanted to make sure it wasn't just gathering dust, so we put it to work folding! It's listed as MileHighMC in our team

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031942/uploads/editor/ta/v7zx2n1kjqp2.jpg

ryau · April 2020

A fun tidbit I thought I'd share with you guys - one of our stores was running F@H clients on so many machines it tripped a circuit breaker, so they had to reduce the number of working machines

1TM · April 2020

I see it. She's a beauty. Rows
2F80875ECC9CDB66
3080875ECC9CDB66
3180875ECC9CDB66
in https://apps.foldingathome.org/cpu?q=MileHighMC

Join the MicroCenterOfficial Folding@Home Team: #257944

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