Getting my act together...

DRZ

DRZ

DRZ

Soldato
Joined
2 Jun 2003
Posts
7,746
Location
In the top 1%
Since SETI, my idle cpus have been gathering dust! I plan to rectify this by starting to crunch for F@H!

I have approximately 15GHz to play with at the moment and if all goes to plan, I could be crunching on more like 30GHz.

Firstly, couple of questions:

Is the SMP client the best way to go for multi-core windows systems? How about on HT?

Secondly, the big question - I could potentially harness a fair amount of computing power in a MOSIX cluster - if I can work out how to get it to run. The linux client didnt really seem to work that well with it, and coupled with a few more errors I ran into I just gave up.

Is anyone out there running F@H on MOSIX?
 
Ubuntu on VMware or native gets the best ppd at the moment, closely followed by the WinSMP if you can get it to work! It won't work with HT though, it's designed for 4 cores but runs OK on two real cores if they are fast enough ( I don't remember the cut off point before you run out of time)
No ideas on MOSIX, I don't even know what it is :o
 
Hmm, got a dual-core 2.8GHz machine - fast enough for the SMP client?

MOSIX is basically a cluster - If I run openMOSIX here I basically jump up to about 30GHz of processing power, excluding GPUs.
 
My 2.6GHz 4400+ managed the SMP Work Units just fine. 2.8GHz should be plenty assuming it is an AMD chip. Probably ok if it is a P4.

The WinSMP client is really, really touchy and probably isn't the best choice if you aren't prepared to babysit the damn thing.

At the moment the best choice is 64bit Linux [VERY important that it is a 64bit distro]. Most of us here use Ubuntu. The latest version is Feisty Fawn which was released last week or so. I do have a guide [SMP Guide thread] which should mostly work in Feisty Fawn but was written with the previous version Edgy Eft in mind. Edgy Eft is probably the better choice if you don't plan to use it often or you use it in VMWare. The guide needs work but most if not all the bugs/errors have been found and commented on in the thread :)

As mentioned you can install Linux either natively or within Windows using VMWare. There is very little overhead in using VMWare so if you like Windows too much then there is no real penalty for not having a native install.

The SMP client was designed for multi-core multi-cpu systems running 64 bit linux so you may be out of luck on using it on your cluster. Not sure if the same is true for any of the other clients.

Any more questions, ask away and welcome to the fold!
 
SiriusB said:
My 2.6GHz 4400+ managed the SMP Work Units just fine. 2.8GHz should be plenty assuming it is an AMD chip. Probably ok if it is a P4.

The WinSMP client is really, really touchy and probably isn't the best choice if you aren't prepared to babysit the damn thing.

At the moment the best choice is 64bit Linux [VERY important that it is a 64bit distro]. Most of us here use Ubuntu. The latest version is Feisty Fawn which was released last week or so. I do have a guide [SMP Guide thread] which should mostly work in Feisty Fawn but was written with the previous version Edgy Eft in mind. Edgy Eft is probably the better choice if you don't plan to use it often or you use it in VMWare. The guide needs work but most if not all the bugs/errors have been found and commented on in the thread :)

As mentioned you can install Linux either natively or within Windows using VMWare. There is very little overhead in using VMWare so if you like Windows too much then there is no real penalty for not having a native install.

The SMP client was designed for multi-core multi-cpu systems running 64 bit linux so you may be out of luck on using it on your cluster. Not sure if the same is true for any of the other clients.

Any more questions, ask away and welcome to the fold!
Click to expand...

Been using ubuntu for years now :)

At the moment I am shifting towards Gentoo a bit, and I dont have any 64 bit CPUs (although no doubt VMware can emulate them).

Problem with VMWare is that the free stuff is incredibly sluggish compared to the "proper" paid for VMware installations like ESX / Infrastructure. I suppose I just prefer to run stuff natively (although I do use virtualisation in many ways across my network).

As I am not prepared to sit here and baby this along (if its going to become a thorn in my side it can FO!) I might consider moving back to the old-style way but for now I appear to be fine running the SMP client.

As for my cluster, its very much multi-cpu, obviously :) Does the SMP client support more than 4 CPUs? I would need at least 16-way support at a process level rather than a thread level (making multi-threaded processing no good as I am not running a Beowulf) but with the possibility of having it scale to 20 or more CPUs. I/O is not a problem either when you have fibrechannel ;)

Basically, I can go through as much hassle as I can bear getting it all to work but once its set up I want it to just work - were talking netbooting dumb/diskless clients (which is already taken care of thanks to TFTP, PXE and my DHCP server) that just get handed something to crunch :)
 
The WinSMP client for me and others is a pig and randomly decides to have a strop and not work, for other people it is fine. So nowt stopping you trying and see how things go. It is all down to luck :p

The SMP client is designed for 4-cores but you can install multiple clients [each client has a unique machine ID so all the clients and their threads are kept separate]. The standard clients support up to 16 unique clients, if the same is true for the SMP client that suggests it could support up to 64 cores :eek:

I would check all the FAQs over at folding.stanford.edu to find a definite answer though as I am sure I read that the SMP client only supports 8 machine IDs. [32 cores aint bad though!]. Also I don't know the specifics of how the clients dish out the workload and threading and such. If it isn't in the FAQs I suggest you try the community forum - LOTS of help there. There should be a link to it from the stanford site.

VMWare isn't that bad. I am sure if you search around this forum you will find plenty of comparisons between native and vmware installs and there is not much difference. This could be due to the fact that the Linux SMP client never uses 100% of the CPU. [Currently my SMP client is averaging around 90% usage]. So as you can see there is an extra ~10% going spare :)
 
SiriusB said:
VMWare isn't that bad. I am sure if you search around this forum you will find plenty of comparisons between native and vmware installs and there is not much difference. This could be due to the fact that the Linux SMP client never uses 100% of the CPU. [Currently my SMP client is averaging around 90% usage]. So as you can see there is an extra ~10% going spare :)
Click to expand...

Paid-for VMware is great - almost like using it natively (been using VMware for, ooh, must be 5 or 6 years now!) but the current free versions feel slow in comparison...

Have a play with VMware ESX if you ever get the chance - runs straight on the copper as a hypervisor (ie doesnt need a base OS as such). Utterly ridiculous virtualisation speeds :)

EDIT: Read up on MOSIX - cant be done, or so it would seem :(
 
Last edited:
Aww that's a shame. 30GHz boost would have been great. You know we have the 4th highest average PPD per person out of the whole project. 30GHz more could have made us #1 :eek: :p
 
That tech speak was a little over my head :o but whether you've 1 pc or 30 your most welcome here :D

I know it's the lowest demoninator but could you just run a single client of ever CPU in the cluster - simular to my duel cpu server here running four clients over the weekend - just on steriods. Or as above but on each client machine and just monitor them on mass via fahmon (see sticky)
 
shadowscotland said:
But billy or was it stan have a handy hack that increases that to 16+ :D
Click to expand...
Nope it's definately only 8 on the v5.04 client - I just downloaded a fresh copy and checked

The GPU and SMP clients support 16 different IDs though so maybe that's where the confusion is, well actually I'm not sure if they support 16 or not - I'm sure I tried setting my SMP to 12 and it still came out as 1 :confused: :p

I would think that the v6 client will support at least 16 IDs when it arrives - soon :D
 
rich99million said:
Nope it's definately only 8 on the v5.04 client - I just downloaded a fresh copy and checked
Click to expand...
There's a way to break the machine ID system under Linux to allow for infinite (IIRC) concurrent instances. I could dig it up if necessary. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom