Folding@home News 18th - 25th Feb 2011

[dekez]

Team OcUK Folding@Home News 18th - 25th Feb 2011

Current Team Position: 36th
Current Team Score: 502,180,722
Crunched This Week: 5,790,368 (24hr avg. 825,427 ) down 148,590

Change from Last Week: -1,227,744


Next on the stomping horizon

Pande Lab - 3.3 Years
fold4life.com - 2.9 Months
EOC Folding@Home Team - 2.1 Years
Team RSF - 12.1 Months
DSL Reports Team Helix - 8.8 Months

Teams stomped since last news

none

Ones to keep an eye on

Pleasuredome Community - 4.3 Months
Poland - 7.9 months
awachs - 1 Year
Ukraine - 1.1 Years
ComputerBase-HardwareLuxx Folding Team - 2.2 Years


We are currently 38th in team production



This Week's Top Crunchers

The Team 10 Leaderboard - Top 100

This Week's Top Stompers

Top 20 Producers (PPD)

This Week's New Members

ps3-beny
Jonnyt1000

A warm welcome to the team

Info for new people

Help on setting up folding@home:
OcUk F@H Sticky
Stanford Windows SMP Guide
Stanford GPU guide
OcUK SMP guide
Bigadv guide
F@H Monitoring Programs:
HFM.NET
FahMon
FahSpy
Folding Stats:
EOC Folding Stats
Stanford Stats
Kakao Stats
Stats sigs:
EOC Stats sigs
Fancy image sigs
Other:
Folding@home server status

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Down again this week but this should make us feel better:

500 million!!!!! Congrats guys, excellent effort all round

Not much happening with me, only folding on bigadv and one 460 now.

 

[Delboy]

Thanks for the news once again - good work.

I blame Ba for the downfall in production this week

Also, I've had a bit of a mare with my folders in the office lab, someone decided to tidy things up and pull random network cables out the back of machines in there - needless to say they'll be off work for a few weeks while their legs heal.

 

[Biffa]

I also had a bit of a dip last week while I was away, but back to full steam ahead again and my average looks to be picking up to 250+K or so

 

[PhillyDee]

Oooh, And I just sneak into the top 10 for points and production .

Thanks for the news!

Don't forget to update your clients folks! If you use GPU tracker, download the new client or you will lose BigADV points!

 

[oneilldo]

woohoo in the top 100 (after around a month) and a top 5 cruncher for the last week. not bad for one i2600k.

 

[dekez]

woohoo in the top 100 (after around a month) and a top 5 cruncher for the last week. not bad for one i2600k.

Congrats What is it clocked at?

 

[oneilldo]

had it over 5 but as its constant I have it at 4.5Ghz at the moment, to get >=4.6 I needed to up the voltage a little and it didnt seem to make that much difference. Happy with 4.5Ghz for 24/7 use.

 

[dekez]

had it over 5 but as its constant I have it at 4.5Ghz at the moment, to get >=4.6 I needed to up the voltage a little and it didnt seem to make that much difference. Happy with 4.5Ghz for 24/7 use.

I've got mine at 4.5 as well, seems about the max reasonable I can get without putting too much voltage through it.

 

[oneilldo]

Yeah I was looking at some review on tomshardware and it was also one of the most efficient speeds to run at taking into account how quickly it completed the test and the power used. I assume as F@H is purely CPU based it will probably be the best speed to run at for ppd per watt.

 

[BaBa]

Ok will try and get Hydra up and running for next weekend, if tonight goes well at work i should have the case finished(ish) well enough to have it painted

 

[loudbob]

If I keep quiet, hopefully no one will notice I'm back in the Folding camp

Third in production and my rac is rising - since I sold all my GPU's I don't expect to break 70k.

 

[Biffa]

I see you there loudbob

As I sort my EOC stats by weekly output : http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&a=1&srt=4&t=10

 

[sculptor]

Thanks for the news dekez.
I know that SandyBridge is damm fast with F@H but after trying to find out as much as I can about Bulldozer and especialy looking at the Cinebench results (dont know how accurate they are but they are suppose to be from AMD) it is looking like it will blitz SandyBridge at F@H. Cinebench is seriously accurate at multi-threaded performance I know I use C4D 11.5
Really looking forward to the arrival of Bulldozer, would love to go back to AMD, they have just lacked the speed per watt for DC projects since Core2Duo appeared.
sculptor

 

[Biffa]

Sandybridge isn't that much faster clock for clock than Bloomfield imho, just that you can clock it higher. If you want good results you need more cores as bigadv scales almost linearly with cores.

Not sure if Folding needs floating point or if its all integer though, if its integer should be ok with Bulldozer but if its FP then Bulldozer might be a bit weak

 

[BaBa]

Not sure how Bulldozer stacks up for floating point as its 256 bit FPU is shared between two cores but it can execute two 128 bit floating point operations simultaneously

Seems from some posts i read on other forums that Linux may offer a performance advantage over windows in folding bigadv with the new A5 core.

Nothing definitive yet tho.

 

[sculptor]

Not sure how Bulldozer stacks up for floating point as its 256 bit FPU is shared between two cores but it can execute two 128 bit floating point operations simultaneously

Seems from some posts i read on other forums that Linux may offer a performance advantage over windows in folding bigadv with the new A5 core.

Nothing definitive yet tho.

OK Biffa youve lost me there, however Cinebench does seem to operate in a similar way to folding, both take full advantage of each core. AMD say a 50% improvement over an i7 950, that would put it level with an i7 980 in Cinebench.
As long as Bulldozer clocks to a decent high speed and AMD are good with the pricing, it may just turn out to be the choice CPU for folding.
Ive always used Cinebech as a rough guide for what a CPU performs like in folding and so far its been as near as damm it spot on.
Just think that peeps seeing the high PPDs from Sandybridge may be tempted to go for it now instead of waiting a week or two for Bulldozer to appear.
Its easy to make the wrong choice when you dont know what the choices are.
sculptor

 

[Biffa]

Bulldozer doesn't have equal numbers of floating and integer cores. Yes it has 8 cores, but it only has 8 integer cores, it only has 4 floating point cores which are shared. I don't know how much emphasis Folding puts on floating point vs integer maths or how it will affect performance. Thats what I meant.

 

[Delboy]

Interesting to see the difference now in how much a WU is worth in terms of points than a year or two ago. Looks like I had an old account that I used to fold on:-

(old account)
Username Points Wus
[OcUK]_Delboy 2,060,341 5,767

(new account)
Username Points Wus
[OcUK]Delboy 2,301,158 619

Roughly the same points for only 619 wus compared with 5,767 back then.

 

[Combat squirrel]

I might try and have ago at this later and try and help the OCUK people, just got to get my head around how to run it on my q6600 and Radeon 5770 crossfires, hopefully will figure out

 

[dekez]

I might try and have ago at this later and try and help the OCUK people, just got to get my head around how to run it on my q6600 and Radeon 5770 crossfires, hopefully will figure out

Welcome! The easiest way is to use the FAH tracker program, give us a shout if you have any problems.