F@H parps

Stan_Lite

Stan_Lite

Stan_Lite

Man of Honour
Man of Honour
Joined
27 Apr 2004
Posts
107,330
Location
In bed with your sister
Time to start with a few parps as I will be on page two soon. The following people will be stomped in the next week or so - prepare to vacate your cells and move aside :D
(I have only listed those members with a 24 hour average over 1,000 as they are the most likely to actually check - there will be several other stomps in between these).

iancampbell4
miniyazz
TheTross
AuriconXS
 
One down, three to go. iancampbell4 fell under my size 11 stomping boots last night. EOC stats say the other three will all fall in 7 days.
 
Another two gone. miniyazz & TheTross fell today, AuriconXS should fall tomorrow.

Might give the -bigadv thing a try when I get back on Wednesday to speed things along. Maybe set up VMWare on the i7 rig to run it while I'm away (I'm off to work on the 4th).
 
AuriconXS has fallen.

Not much on the horizon for the next week. Only one member with 1000+ ppd and that's Labatyd - consider yourself parped :p

Stanford show me as only having 6 active clients over the last 7 days (been showing that for some time) - should be 8 so I can only assume that one of my rigs went down as soon as my back was turned - some things never change :rolleyes: Will get that seen to when I get back home tomorrow. Will also have a look at this bigadv thing and hopefully get that set up before I head back to work on Monday.

As a result of all this, output should be up soon. Will see how it all goes.
 
Snapshot said:
I used the guide here and it was easy. The trick is that, once you've got your passkey, A2 core WUs on any PC count towards the ten you need before you start getting bonuses.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've got that guide bookmarked already. I'm considering installing it on a dedicated Ubuntu partition instead. It's my main gaming rig and will be Folding 90% of the time.
Is there much advantage PPD-wise running it on a native linux install? Also, if I run it in VMWare, will I need to switch of the VM before gaming or can I set priorities so I don't have to faff about switching it on and off?

When I get home this afternoon, I'll be bunging the passkey I got yesterday into all my clients - should get the ten A2 units within a couple of days :cool:
 
I've just discovered a flaw in my plan. All but 2 of my clients are Windows SMP and they use the A1 core. The only two clients running the A2 core are the two on my Ubuntu box. I'll need to make some changes but I CBA this afternoon so will get onto it tomorrow (if I can be bothered).
 
Made a few changes this afternoon and ppd seems to be up according to FahMon. Before the changes, fahMon was estimating ppd of a little over 19,000. last time I checked, it was estimating ppd of over 23,000 :cool:

Changes made were to put the 8800GTX back into the old gaming rig which is now my photo editing rig - it's now running 1 GPU2 client and one SMP client in a VM on a Q6600 @ 3.4GHz with the 8800GTX. The new gaming rig is running native Ubuntu with one SMP client on an i7 920 @ 3.8GHz. The two HD4890s are, of course, idle inside the gaming rig, ready for gaming as and when required. I'm just running one SMP client on the i7 for now until I get my 10 A2 WUs in, then it will be switched to bigadv WUs and we'll see what happens then :D

Edit: Just checked FahMon again and it's estimating over 26,000 :eek:
 
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I understand what you mean - and for the most part I agree. The i7 rig will be Folding 99.9% of the time. I game very rarely and most of the games I play (Painkiller, HL2 etc.) can be played on my old rig. The i7 rig will only be needed for high spec games and for very short bursts (less than 2 hours for the most part) which, in the long term, will not impact it's Folding activities by a huge amount.

If the bigadv thing works well, I may consider flogging off the three lower spec rigs to build another two cheap(ish) i7 rigs - we'll have to wait and see :p

I'm not noticing too much lag on the old rig running the VM and GPU2 but it's only running one SMP client with 2GB RAM allocated to the VM. As mentioned above, the new gaming rig is used for so little gaming, it'll be running bigadv on native Ubuntu for the foreseeable future - with only the odd 1 hour break for a bit of Crysis.

From what I've read, deadlines shouldn't be too much of a problem. Apparently the bigadv WUs have 4 day deadlines and rigs with similar spec to mine have been doing them in less than 3 days so the odd hour of gaming shouldn't hurt too much. Obviously, If I'm close to the deadlines, I'll keep away from the gaming until I get it under water when I get back home in February. I'm hoping to get it to 4.2GHz+ when it's got some proper cooling :D
 
Finally got it on one of the bigadv WUs at the back of 2 this morning - fuelled by large amounts of alcohol :p

Ended up putting it on a VM. For some reason, when I tried to add the bigadv flag on the native Ubuntu install, the client refused to work - completely :confused: After much swearing I decided to give up on Ubuntu and install the VM. I must say, the guide was excellent and it was a breeze setting it up.

It's currently chugging away on a P2681 worth 25,403 points. ETA is 08.40 on Sunday morning. TPF is 32m 34s giving me a ppd of 11,226 according to FahMon. The bonus calculator tells me the total time for the WU will be 2.26 days and the bonus factor will 2.3 - giving me a total of 58,515 points for the WU and an estimated ppd of 25,873 :eek: :D

FahMon currently estimates my total ppd at around 30,000 but with the bonus points, that should come up to around 44,600 :cool: That's assuming I didn't **** up entering my passkey manually with about 20 units of alcohol inside me :o Also, that total ppd is while running those annoying 548 point GPU WUs - if I get some 353 pointers, that total ppd could be over 45,000.
 
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One thing. I forgot to change the default memory usage of the VM from 3,600MB before I started it running and I couldn't change it while it was running so I bit the bullet just now and switched it off to change it to the recommended 5,000MB and restarted it. Seems to have caused no damage - thankfully. Will see if the extra memory makes any difference.

At least I know now that I can switch it off briefly if required :cool:
 
Snapshot said:
Well done. In your worse-for-wear state, did you remember the -smp 7 or -smp 8 flag as well as -bigadv when starting the Ubuntu client?

I lost one WU at around 40% by crashing out of the VM but it should be okay if you shut it down properly. My i7 obviously isn't as overclocked as yours and my bonus factor is about 2.1 (observation rather than the calculator).
Click to expand...

Lol. Yeah, I remembered the -smp 8 flag (using 8 cores as there's nothing else running on there). If the GPU3 client works well enough with ATI, I might knock it down to 7 cores and run two GPU3 clients - depends on CPU load with GPU3 and ATI.

Mine's a 920 running @ 3.8GHz at the moment. Once I get the watercooling in February, I'm hoping to get to 4.2GHz or more (I've had it at 4.2GHz but not stable).
 
Mr. Brightside said:
I'm running the Linux64_FAH image on my 920 D0 i7 machine. I've given the VM 6GB of memory.

Stan, I had a similar problem when I tried setting up a -bigadv SMP client on Ubuntu - I already had an Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox that I use fairly regularly for bits of work, so wanted to get it working in that but everytime I launched it the whole VM would freeze up, so I just ended up using the Linux64_FAH image.

I'm posting because after reading this thread I thought I'd try out some gaming with the -bigadv VM running and see how things did. I have 12GB of memory in this machine which really helps and the 920 is overclocked to 3.6Ghz (had it 24 hour Prime stable at 4.0GHz but the whole machine seemed to die after about 48 hours so had to relax it a little) . I tested out Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament 3 and Colin McRae: Dirt 2. Provided the virtual machine is set to low priority, I couldn't tell the difference between gaming with or without it running.

http://www.piggott.me.uk/blog/wp-content/gallery/i7-machine/heavy-load.png

The above linked screenshot is interesting. Ignoring the fairly knackered car (I don't play on it much - was a free copy), the VMware player's usage shows up as kernel time, so assuming the bulk of the utilisation caused by Dirt 2 does not, it appears that even when gaming the Folding client is getting a fair amount of work done.

To be sure of this I should probably play Dirt 2 for long enough that the client does a whole % and see how long it takes, but I don't really have the time right now/don't want to play Dirt 2 for that long.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Might have to give it a try to see how it affects things. I only have 6GB RAM in the 920 rig but will give it a try anyway and see how it affects gaming and Folding. Not keen on adding more RAM as I've got Corsair Dominator GT RAM in there and it's not cheap :o
 
Just played a half hour of HL2 Ep1 with the VM still running and it was very stuttery - looks like I'll need more RAM if I want to play it with the VM still running. Either that or I'll have to stop it when I want to play. Having said that, I can play the likes of the above on the old rig so it's only high-end games I'll need to mess with the new rig with.

CPU temp also nipped up to 84-87C during play :p Folding performance dropped by about 7 mins per frame as well.
 
First bigadv WU just sent - be interesting to see how many points it gives me.

Made a few changes on the farm and boosted my total ppd considerably.
I was running two SMP clients on my native Ubuntu rig in the bedroom and getting about 2,000 ppd each client. I happened to notice that, when one client had finished and was in the process of sending etc., the other client shot up to over 6,000 ppd. I shut down the second client and I am now getting 6,100 ppd from running a single client on that - that's an increase of 2,000 ppd by switching off a client.

The media machine in the living room was running two Windows SMP clients and performing fairly poorly - it was getting around 2,000 ppd per client on the 1760 pointers and around 1,650 per client on the 1920 pointers. I tried the same with that but it only went up to about 2,500 on a single client so I bunged a VM on there and it's now chucking out 5,400 ppd.

I also had a play with the clocks on the 8800GTX - boosted the GPU clock to 649MHz and the shader clock to 1600MHz and getting a few hundred more out of that.

All in all, the changes I've made have increased my total ppd by around 4000 - FahMon is currently estimating around 32,000-33,000 but, as long as I haven't cocked up the passkey thing, I should get bonus points totalling about 14,000 ppd - taking me up to around 47,000 :D

Labatyd seems to have stopped completely - shame really as he/she seemed to be plodding along nicely. Never mind, if you're around prepare to be stomped today :p

Next on the horizon after that is piggott (Mr. Brightside, I believe) - better hope your bigadv rig keeps you ahead a bit longer - the stomp is inevitable however so prepare to move over for the inexorable onslaught of Stan_Lite's stomping might.

To recap - current hardware and ppd:

Gaming rig - i7 920 @ 3.8GHz running one bigadv client on VM - ppd = approx 25,000.
Old gaming rig - Q6600 @ 3.4GHz + 8800GTX @ 649/1600/1000 running one GPU2 client and 1 SMP client on a VM - ppd = approx 10,000-11,000.
Media rig in living room - Q6600 @ 3.4GHz running one SMP client in a VM - ppd = approx 5,500.
Dedicated Ubuntu Folding rig in bedroom - running one SMP client - ppd = approx 6,100.

The above set up seems to be working fine so will remain as it is for the foreseeable future. I'm off to work tomorrow anyway and will be away for a month so I'm not in a position to tinker with it. Hopefully I'll have better luck than I used to and machines won't start falling over the minute I'm out the door.

One slight concern with running VMs. All my rigs are set to reboot after a power failure but the VMs all need to be manually restarted. If we have a power cut while I'm away, the only things which will come back on automatically will be the Ubuntu rig and the GPU client so ppd would be a paltry 10,000-12,000 :(
 
Snapshot said:
BTW Stan, I see you've now been credited with your first 58k WU. :cool:
Click to expand...

Got the credit on Stanford this morning but it just recently showed up on EOC - gave a nice boost to my 24hr average :cool:

Next one is due to finish on Tuesday night so should get another boost then.
 
shadowscotland said:
So that's why you've just topped my EOC threat list stan :eek::D:cool:
Here hoping your rigs stay online for your month at sea
Click to expand...

It'll only get worse too - fairly soon, I should be top of everybody's threat list :D
And, thanks - I'm hopeful things will be fine while I'm away. The only one I'm really worried about is this one - the old gaming rig. For no apparent reason, the VM client decided to shut itself down twice yesterday, claiming user requested it. I did nothing of the kind - I was in the other room at the time :confused: Been all right since but, if it happens while I'm away, it'll just have to stay not on.

That'll be Mr. Brightside stomped then. I'll do another thread of parps when I work out how things will pan out with my new improved output.
 
Nice restomp - and onto page one too :) Nice timing on that WU.

My next bigadv WU should be in tomorrow afternoon/evening so I should, hopefully, regain the stomp then.

Hopefully, you'll get things running properly. I hardly use the machine for anything else but when I have, I haven't noticed too much of a slowdown with VM (except for gaming - although I suspect that's more to do with RAM allocation than anything else). VM seems to work pretty well so I'll stick with that for now (not that I have much choice since I'm posting from my hotel room in Cairo and won't be home for a month anyway :p). I doff my cap in your direction for having the balls to try something different though :cool:
 
Second bigadv WU went in as planned yesterday so re-restomped overnight. Hopefully I can get enough space between us before you can re-re-restomp me :D
Next bigadv WU will be due in tomorrow evening sometime. That should boost my total ppd according to EOC - currently 2nd top producer, with a bit of luck, I'll have enough to put me top.
 
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