Folding@Home Weekly Team News - 27th January 2006

BlackAqua · 29 Jan 2006 at 00:42

Be great if you could thanks!

BillytheImpaler · 29 Jan 2006 at 01:08

Bruce from the Official Forum said:
The WU was uploaded but the server had no record of it being issued. I think this happens if a WU expires and perhaps under other conditions. Can you post the FAHlog showing when it was downloaded / started and when it was finished / uploaded?

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 10:27

Our production seems to have dropped right down .
C'mon slackers! Lets get moving...
My 175 ships on monday, so i've nowhere to go but up.

Whitestar · 29 Jan 2006 at 11:22

Ok, I thought that if I told the clients to get woos with deadlines I'd start getting woos worth more points, but that seems not to be the case. Ever since I set the clients to get deadlined work units all I get are 56 and 63 point gromacs.

Is it me or is there a general shortage of high point work units.

Steevo38 · 29 Jan 2006 at 12:09

This is getting ridiculous!
36 point gromac on my opty @ 2.9

70ppd :mad:

Hardly seems worth it!

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 12:27

I've just got a 36 point wu aswell.
These small wu's are Pointless

I'll still be a few points behind #174 when its done.
I had a wu finish at 75% yesterday, on a perfectly stable machine which has happliy crunched my other 22 wu's with no problems... can this be caused by something other than instability?

Edit: It seems that Sammael's production has dropped completely , which is perhaps the reason for the drop in our team production. I wonder whats going on?

Stan_Lite · 29 Jan 2006 at 12:55

Joe42 said:
I've just got a 36 point wu aswell.
These small wu's are Pointless
I'll still be a few points behind #174 when its done.
I had a wu finish at 75% yesterday, on a perfectly stable machine which has happliy crunched my other 22 wu's with no problems... can this be caused by something other than instability?

Seems to be a bit erratic at the moment, I seem to get a day of piddly little WUs followed by a few days of good uns.

You do get the odd "bad WU" which will just self-destruct, if it is just a one off then that is what it will be, if it happens frequently then you may have stability issues. You should receive partial credit for work done on the WU.

Stan

WJA96 · 29 Jan 2006 at 12:59

All-Intel-All QMD here! Took a box offline completely and I'm still doing 2500ppd.

Thanks for the stats Rich.

Mattus · 29 Jan 2006 at 13:02

Not sure what's going on. Looking at the stats most teams had a small drop in output yesterday, but not as bad as ours which seems to be down nearly 50%.

The loss of Sammael's WUs must be a big part of it... can you shed some light, Sammael?

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 14:32

Sammael is about 5,000 of our 45,000ppd, so if he stops we go down.

On my quest to become a folding beast, is a 1.3ghz p4 socket 42something with 128mb of nasty rambus worth having as a 24/7 folder?
It'll cost me south of £50.

Mattus · 29 Jan 2006 at 16:01

You'll get about 50ppd out of it, most likely - depends if you think it's worth the electricity cost to run it!

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 16:30

Mattus said:
You'll get about 50ppd out of it, most likely - depends if you think it's worth the electricity cost to run it!

Hell, its not my electricity, and they'll never know its on! Saves on central heating anyway.
Looking at £30 without the hdd or cd. I've got an old 2.5gb hdd for it and a cd somewhere. I might go for it.

My folding status.
Current:
-A64 3200, average 6 hours/day (main)
-Sempron 3000+ overclocked to 3300, average 6 hours/day

New:
-Opteron 175, hopefully overclocked to = 2x 4000+ cores, hopefully 24/7 (main).
-A64 3200, hopefully overclocked to 3500, average 6 hours/day
-Sempron 3000+ overclocked to 3300, average 6 hours/day
-P4 1.3ghz 24/7
-P3 733mhz, average 6 hours/day

Need to build some more machines for people so they can fold for me.

rich99million · 29 Jan 2006 at 16:31

Berserker has all the nice WUs - bleedin' stasher that he is :eek:

if all you can get is 30-50 pointers then you may even be better off selecting deadlineless WUs since those are mostly 240ish points these days (there's even rumours of some Gromacs cored deadlineless WUs)

may be worth a try if you're on a really unlucky streak

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 16:37

Isn't the stanford points system supposed to ensure that we get the same ppd regardless of the size or nature of the wu?
Perhaps they should have points for cpu time rather than wu time.

rich99million · 29 Jan 2006 at 16:45

Joe42 said:
Isn't the stanford points system supposed to ensure that we get the same ppd regardless of the size or nature of the wu?
Perhaps they should have points for cpu time rather than wu time.

yes it is meant to balance out since the points are based on how quickly a benchmark machine completes the WU - however quite often the later generations of a WU get faster or slower than the generations that were used for the benchmark so it all gets a bit confused

plus of course you have the bonus points for the larger WUs - that's when it all gets really complicated and people getting the wrong sort of work start to get angry

even with a system based on CPU-time such as many Boinc projects use you will still get peculiar results between varying systems and someone will end up losing out

it's just a fundemental problem with most DC projects i'm afraid - you can't please all of the people all of the time

BlackAqua · 29 Jan 2006 at 17:06

BillytheImpaler said:
Done.

Thanks

I can only find a fragment of the log in F@H_prev.log or similar. (However it is the server assigning the work unit)

http://blackaqua.com/fahlog.txt

It was worth 600 exactly

MajorPart · 29 Jan 2006 at 18:17

Seems were down nearly down 14000 from trend in the last week.. not looking good.

Joe42 · 29 Jan 2006 at 18:54

MajorPart said:
Seems were down nearly down 14000 from trend in the last week.. not looking good.

Which is strange, because sammel's contribution is only about 7,000 max, so wheres the other half gone?
And whats even more strange is our active user number has gone up, so the last thing we should be doing is going down.

Either some of the big crunchers are seriously slacking, or stanford has forgotten how to add up. Or perhaps its these confounded piddly wu's.

sagaboy2 · 29 Jan 2006 at 19:07

It would be the piddly Wu's

But i got my self a 780pointer

takes 2 days the crunch on an X2 :eek:

Berserker · 29 Jan 2006 at 20:16

I'm getting as much evil stuff as everyone else, though I did find a few constipated big-pointers when I got ome tonight, so I've fixed those.

Folding@Home Weekly Team News - 27th January 2006

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