What shall I crunch/fold?

CaptainUnlikely

CaptainUnlikely

CaptainUnlikely

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Well, I downsized my PC recently and I'm now running with a Celeron G530 - yeah, I can feel your jealousy :D
It ain't going to fold all that well, but I was considering maybe running two classic clients to get some of that work done, but then I got to wondering if there's a better use for my somewhat limited resources.
So, is there anything we're currently struggling on? I know it's not a source of major firepower but every little helps and it'll run 24/7.
Open to any suggestions really :) I've never done anything but F@H so bear with me if I struggle getting anything else set up heh.
 
Yeah, Rossetta is good for two reasons.

1) The scientific team behind the project are really using the work done by the project well and have released a lot of papers on various research done off the back of it.

2) Our team is in close competition with the teams around us in the points league table. Circlestorm the team below us is right on our tail and has pretty much identical production.
 
Sounds great. If the deadlines aren't too short I can also get three cores of my family's Athlon quad on it, it's not on for more than a few hours a day but if it'll make deadlines it can crunch on that.
 
CaptainUnlikely said:
Sounds great. If the deadlines aren't too short I can also get three cores of my family's Athlon quad on it, it's not on for more than a few hours a day but if it'll make deadlines it can crunch on that.
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Another addict in the making. Welcome to the madhouse :D
 
Sweet, all downloaded and running. My internet is horrifically slow at the minute so it's just taken me half an hour to download the inital 60MB of work...sigh. I can see the deadlines are quite relaxed though so I'll give it a whirl on my family's PC too when I've settled in with it on mine.
 
You can also specify the run time of Rosetta tasks, from a minimum of one hour to a maximum of 24. The default is three hours, so if you leave the preferences as is you should expect all tasks to be completed in roughly three hours, after which the Rosetta client stops processing the task and credit is awarded for the amount of work done in that task during its run time.
 
I've seen that preference but wasn't clear on exactly what it did, thanks for clearing that up. It's set to default right now which I guess is 5 hours? As both tasks that are running say elapsed: 35 minutes, remaining: 4 hours 14 minutes.
It shouldn't make any difference what I set that interval to though, unless I'm thinking of it the wrong way, if it's crunching 24/7 - right?
I've set BOINC to get a minimum of 0.5 days work and max of 2 days, just in case of any network problems.
 
It'll make no difference at all as to what the run time is set at, as credit is awarded purely for the amount of work done - no bonuses are given for longer run times :)

Ignore the time remaining for the moment as it's misleading until you've done a few tasks. The default run time is 3 hours, after which the client will stop processing the task and move on to the next one. Once you've done a few tasks you should see the value for time remaining become more in line with the run time specified in your preferences.
 
Ah, ok, that does make sense, thanks. One question - does Rosetta use a checkpoint system like F@H? If so, how long is the interval, and can it be changed? OK, three questions, so sue me :)
 
Oh, and Rosetta does use a lot of RAM, assuming that's normal? I'm used to F@H which doesn't use all that much so seeing one Rosetta process using 360MB and the other on 440MB is quite unusual heh, nothing to worry about as I have plenty to spare but just checking that's normal.
 
CaptainUnlikely said:
...OK, three questions, so sue me :)
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"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Yep, Rosetta uses a checkpoint system, although I can't remember what the period is now, not sure if that's a BOINC-wide preference you can change or not.

And yes, that RAM usage is perfectly normal :)


EDIT: I think you can alter the checkpoint interval by changing the Write to disk at most every option under Computing Preferences. Default is 60 seconds.
 
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Cool, just wanted to check about the RAM.
I did see that setting, if that's the checkpoint interval then that's fine with me, I won't need to change it. Hopefully that's most of my n00b questions out of the way!
 
One more question!
Is it worth getting my GPU crunching too? It's only a 6450 but I heard that ATI cards do really well in some BOINC projects, thought it might be worth throwing it in there as it uses so little power. I know it can't do Rosetta, but maybe there's something else worth doing?
 
Pumpkinstew said:
I think Milkyway is the one that suits ATI cards?

Someone else might correct me on that. (I'm an Nvidia owner).
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This is my first ATI card since a Mobility X1600 so I'm pretty out of touch heh. I've seen a list of projects that can use an ATI card, just not sure which it'll be any good at, being a pretty low end model, but I'll give Milkyway a shot tonight, see how it runs. I can always swap it to something else if it's no good :)
 
Unfortunately your 6450 won't run Milkyway@home as it's not capable of performing double precision arithmetic, which Milkyway needs. Collatz Conjecture would be suitable, but I'm not sure if that project is of any interest to you.
 
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