Join the MicroCenterOfficial Folding@Home Team: #257944

@MightyMayfield Do you guys have any secret tips for keeping your GPU's working? I feel like we have to restart our system every other hour or so in order to get new work units, or else half our GPU's sit ready for a long time. Our system has an estimated PPD of nearly 10M, but we get a fraction of that at the end of the day due to this phantom inefficiency that prevents our GPU's from getting work units until rebooting.

We've reinstalled the OS and client several times, but I don't know if it's a configuration issue or not. I've not seen any difference with the advanced flags enabled either. I've considered simply scheduling Windows to restart every 1-2 hours and see if that helps long-term.

TSMichaelB said:

@MightyMayfield Do you guys have any secret tips for keeping your GPU's working? I feel like we have to restart our system every other hour or so in order to get new work units, or else half our GPU's sit ready for a long time. Our system has an estimated PPD of nearly 10M, but we get a fraction of that at the end of the day due to this phantom inefficiency that prevents our GPU's from getting work units until rebooting.

We've reinstalled the OS and client several times, but I don't know if it's a configuration issue or not. I've not seen any difference with the advanced flags enabled either. I've considered simply scheduling Windows to restart every 1-2 hours and see if that helps long-term.

Yes! Without giving away too much of the automation secret sauce, if you pause a work slot and then resume it, it will reconnect to the download server in 2 minutes instead of the previously allotted time.

TSMichaelB said:

Thank you, that's extremely helpful to know. Now to figure out a way to do it with 4 GPU's and 5 clusters of 20 cores without it becoming tedious every time, lol. I think some scripting to grab some pixel colors might be required.

It is doable! I believe in you!  
Though I didn't use color recognition. I imagine that would work as well.

ChrisP said:

Mild gaming GPUs have way more folding@home power than expensive CPUs do.  Check it out - I'm folding with two 3950X systems and a 2700X system.  Folding with 80 cores *sounds* really impressive and it definitely heats up the room, but the reality is a single GTX1060 or 5500XT video card can fold twice as fast as all those CPUs combined!  If you want bang for the buck, fold with your video cards!!

True Dat....My 6 card RX580 rig produced over 175 work units and over 5 million points the first week and that was with significant down time due to startup and shakedown issues...….  When I built it for mining Etherium it cost about $4,500.  Today you could probably build it about $2K.

wuffy68 said:

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.

@MightyMayfield man are you ever crushing it. Guessing you found the warp drive now congrats on top 900.
Heck i was shocked to see i'm in the top 20k. LOL

First work unit I've noticed that isn't related to Covid-19 - not even any specific disease ("potassium ion channel inactivation and conduction").
My monthly statistics did not reset for May. Instead they just keep building on last month's results, showing the team at #47 for several days now. Five billion points, but not overtaking or losing position to nearby teams. Is this a problem with my web control?

MightyMayfield said:

Getting a lot of upload errors recently. Not sure if our firewall is causing issues or if it is FAHservers. Many 0 byte returned errors. Hm..

Might be the server I had that issue the other day took 35 attemps to send the packet.

Ladies and Gentlemen I'd like to congratulate everyone on the work so far to get into the top 100 teams. Let's keep up the great work.  

kmiller922 said:

Ladies and Gentlemen I'd like to congratulate everyone on the work so far to get into the top 100 teams. Let's keep up the great work.  

Awesome!  Keep on folding. 

cine_chris said:

@kmiller922 I'm a recent F@Her.  Yes, Folding is tedious, akin to watching paint dry or grass grow and not w/o frustrations like the WUs that were choking my 1660s.  As I'm located in the BDD (basement data dungeon), the upcoming summer temps will likely force me to throttle my F@H efforts, but these challenges have me thinking in terms of managing energy costs and looking at a Fall strategy as fancy new, higher efficiency gear begins to arrive. Little Mental Games that keep me interested in the Folding effort, like chasing the Thread-Ripper demons.  

I totally understand about temps and energy cost believe me. One of the first thing that i have been looking at over the past number of years of building my own systems is energy efficiency. What shocked me the most on energy cost was when i upgraded my monitors, when flat screens first came out i was seeing a reduction of energy usage by almost 30% by the time I changed all monitors and tv's in my house. The other thing I'm looking into now is there a energy savings going to water cooling versus fan as well as more efficient components to my builds. 

The biggest thing to me personally is the side effects that are now coming up that are effecting our children and a first for me now is grand children, For myself paying a bit more to assist in the research to save anyone with these issues is still and will be as long as i can possibly be able to be more than worth every cent that is put into it. That's just me being who I am, being in the fire and EMS field that's just the way the I am. Besides that I'm use to watching the grass grow LOL, I also work at a golf course.

Wommwalsh said:

Ahh-wooooooo! (lone wolf howl from Minnesota)

My main ‘point’s getter’ is a i9-9980XE / GTX2060S whose parts came from the St. Louis Park store. It must do its day job – but is folding nights and weekends.

My previous ‘mothballed’ workstation (a 10-year-old Dell T7400 with a pair of Xeon E5430’s and GTX660Ti), a spare laptop (i7-6700HQ / GTX 970M), and an extra RX570 are running full time.

I started on April 3rd when I received the MC email. Mrs. Ahh-wooooooo just saw the electric bill from last month (+$55) and is lobbying to turn one of them off.

@Yellowbillycat (another lone-wolf?) is chasing the store-teams too.  The weather is starting to heat up in the ATL area, so I'll have to start throttling back on the F@H effort soon.

teamtempest said:

Visited the suburban Minneapolis store today and watched the store's build work at F@H for a bit. Very pretty machine, but kind of strange in operation. Lots of F@H CPU threads going, maybe a half dozen or so, all apparently multitasking on a single physical CPU. The powerful GPU glowering in the case was doing nothing. My own machine isn't very powerful, but there's never any time the CPU and the GPU aren't both working unless I've set F@H to minimum power - then the GPU stops whatever it's doing until I turn it up again.

@teamtempest If you check out other forums (like EVGA) you see that they usually relegate the CPU to managing the box and feeding multi-GPUs.  I do have a couple of CPUs folding but they are efficient multi-core processors with robust heatsinks too.  CPUs just aren't as efficient as GPUs for this task.  I have a Ryzen 5 teamed with a MSI 2060 Super that is showing 2MilPPD (just checked) the Ryzen is producing a mere 90K of that 2 million PPD, but the combo works well.  I should point out that the cost of that combo you could probably build 3x systems for 1x of the sTRX4 ThreadRipper systems (just a WAG guess).  I have a 2070 super on an older system that is only slightly faster than the 2060, so IMO, architecture affects the total system efficiency.  Tinkering with the gear efficiency is interesting to me.  

teamtempest said:

Visited the suburban Minneapolis store today and watched the store's build work at F@H for a bit. Very pretty machine, but kind of strange in operation. Lots of F@H CPU threads going, maybe a half dozen or so, all apparently multitasking on a single physical CPU. The powerful GPU glowering in the case was doing nothing. My own machine isn't very powerful, but there's never any time the CPU and the GPU aren't both working unless I've set F@H to minimum power - then the GPU stops whatever it's doing until I turn it up again.

Its possible the WU wasn't currently active on their GPU. If not setup properly (or servers are down......) things do idle a lot as many of us have discovered.

Ok so you can say I come up with some insane ideas at times but thought I would run a thought I have past all of you for your thoughts.  I've recently came accross adds about external gpu. Now would there be away using the same type of thunderbolt port set up to add more gpu to a system other than just one? What would be the best way to go about it? Or is there a way to use the home network and use it like network storage is done? I know weird thought lol