Could it be a return to crunching?

VirtualAdept · 28 Dec 2008 at 03:00

Well, yeah, probably.
I've (finally) got my systems sorted out, and since they're on 24/7 anyway, I may as well do some crunching.
Haven't decided if I'm going back to SETI or FAH yet, but I'm gonna have a think on that and deal with it all tomorrow.

Hope to see some of the old faces and meet the new ones here.

Mads|VA

Nitrojan · 28 Dec 2008 at 03:02

Ive heard this 'crunching' thing before - what exactly is it? Excuse my lack of knowledge

oceaness · 28 Dec 2008 at 08:08

Good to have you back VA.

What minions have you got crunching for you?

Nitrojan.

Yoinked from the Folding@Home Setup Guide sticky (Folding@Home is just one of many distributed computing (crunching) projects, the two main ones here are FAH and SETI with possibly a little Rosetta on the side) :

So what is this Folding thing anyway?

Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding. The project’s goal is to add greater understanding to protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Such diseases include BSE (mad cow), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, among others.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client runs in the background, and makes use of the CPU when it is not busy. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve “work units.” These are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server.

Any other questions?

diogenese · 28 Dec 2008 at 09:53

Welcome back VA

There are a fair few of us oldtimers still about :eek:

I'm folding at the moment but I've been tarting around all over the place this last year

Biffa · 28 Dec 2008 at 10:50

/me waves

theheyes · 28 Dec 2008 at 13:55

Yeah, what are the specs?

In regards to SETI or FAH, I personally think FAH is more relevant but SETI seems to offer a bit more fun for the participants.

A.N.Other · 28 Dec 2008 at 14:10

I think F@H probably has the more scientifically relevant work, but if you can't be bothered with the Stanford clients and want to stick with BOINC, then you can crunch Rosetta instead, which is a similar sort of thing.

I think it's fair to say that most people active here are doing F@H, but there are still quite a few BOINCers around.

theheyes · 28 Dec 2008 at 14:34

Yeah thats another thing - its almost a Rite of Passage trying to understand the FAH clients. At least with Boinc its pretty straightforward.

Pumpkinstew · 28 Dec 2008 at 14:42

With the GPU client and a quad you can do both

VirtualAdept · 28 Dec 2008 at 19:38

diogenese said:
I've been tarting around all over the place this last year

So nowt's changed then?

I was hoping to get something half decent and pc component shaped over xmas, but it seems my family dont love me so I'm stuck with what I've got.

Core2Duo 4400 (so 2 cores at 2ghz each), and 2gb of ram. Unfortunately its on the lamest motherboard I've used in a long time so I cant imagine it being too clever. Got a celeron in a better board, but atm that has no network access due to it deciding it didn't have a wifi card anymore.
Got a couple of other bits of junk that I could employ once I've found my install discs again.

Rojin · 29 Dec 2008 at 09:59

I've rejoined lately, hadn't really done much since Seti classic... Currently crunching Seti at home but with GPU crunching it hardly seems worth running it on my 24/7 machine which is only a dual cpu. The games rig with a quad and GX2 can beat its output in a couple of hours!

theheyes · 29 Dec 2008 at 15:59

It is amazing to see how GPUs have completely dominated, FAH at least. When I joined in Jan 2007 CPUs were king and a few people were running the old Ati GPU client. For a while it was all about clockspeed and then cores (and Linux) when the Quads started rolling out. Then the PS3 client went live and gave the stats a kick in the pants and pushed the project over the 1Petaflop mark which I thought was remarkable at the time.

Fast forward to today and GPU2 client pretty much rules the roost and we're at 4.5PF. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

VirtualAdept · 1 Jan 2009 at 20:12

GPU crunching would be no good for me with my machine being woefully lacking in that department.