The only things I fold are clothes and towels... so I obviously chose the third option.

Would some kind soul explain what this folding is please ?

That's an interesting comparison, but one thing you have to bear in mind is that the performance of the Top 500 is measured rather than theoretical, rather than claimed performance for the GPU.

We're looking forward to the [mostly Fortran] code we run being ported to GPUs / Tesla as the speed increases are potentially huge for some kinds of maths. As KindaWobbly points out the GPUs can go up to 4TF, o put things into perspective the clusters I built take up an entire rack comprising of blades and pizza box servers (each with 2 X quad core CPUs) and those have a theoretical peak capacity of ~2TF.

The performance of the GPU folding client is, I believe, also measured. Certainly the Folding@home client stats claim:



I'm not sure what the methodology is though, so I'm not sure how directly comparable it is to the linpack values quoted in the Top 500 (despite the fact that I've directly compared it ).

Since I got my Mac Pro and the internet, I though I'd better make it do some folding...
What team should I join?

Ben

Well, the CustomPC users here probably still fold for CustomPC & Bit-tech (35947), but whilst I occasionally post on Bit-tech I feel no real allegiance to them now, despite have 80,000 points under them. I still think an x404 team would be a good idea. The CPC team is so big, those of use who don't have entire farms of PC's folding 24/7 can't really make much of an impact.

My media pc folds with Nvidia 9500GT 24/7
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ ... =&u=119311

A question.

I am folding on a C2D system- both cores- and I am considering adding one of my 8800GTS cards to the mix as well. The thing is, I have a crap ADSL service, often less than 1MB and when the folding system is downloading, everything else grinds to a halt. That's only with two cores folding- with three, it will get worse.

I am using two console clients at the moment and they are working fine although I know that there is a multi-core folding platform that I will have to get around to installing.

So, the question is, is it possible with any of the clients to schedule downloads for the early hours of the morning? I know that I will lose folding time, but at least I can have my broadband back.

Well who should be the one to set it up? I'd happily set it up, but I feel others may be better qualified to do that?

Also, will the OS X client be modified any time soon to take advantage of GCD? Or is there no need/already implemented?

Ben

I have the boinc manager installed and have attached my machines to a number of projects which are running in the background.

I don't think there is any need. The SMP client will run 4 or more individual threads and then combine the result at the end. Grand central just schedules CPU usage across cores in order to maximise CPU efficiency. As the client will normally max each core, it can't really help.

The downloads themselves are usually pretty small, and in the case of the CPU clients, quite a time apart. The GPU client has shorter work units so will download more frequently, however the units are still pretty small.

On a slow connection, it will use up traffic, but infrequently and for short periods of time - and most likely at different times.

Thanks, Gav.

I think there are two ways to solve this:
1. In setting there is an option "ask before using network" and I imagine it does what it says it does
2. You can set it to "pause when done". And if you want it to download new work assignment again you just "resume work"

But tbh I am surprised that you notice when client downloads/uploads, I would think that work packets are not bigger than few MBs...

I am not sure how big they are, but I did opt to download larger work units.

All I know is that while no-one is using computers- apart from me in the same room as the router- the ADSL light is flashing away for quite some time and I put it down to Folding work. Perhaps it isn't this.

The only PC on all of the time is the folding rig and that doesn't get used for anything else. Even when my wife is not on the laptop, something is frequently downloading.

It's the [LIFTED] broadband service that is probably the major issue and maybe the downloads aggravate it at busy times.

It could be updates, but I am pretty sure I stopped the folding rig downloading automatically as it reboots into Vista (dual boot) and doesn't fold until I intervene. I'll have to check that.

The SMP2 cores will be out soon and may well use it. If you've got an 8 core mac pro then you can crunch the new bigadv units which if you finish them in 3 days are worth 50,000 points. Fast i7's running Linux can also run them.



Folding units are tiny, I've got 20 clients on one line & even when sending back the bigadv units (350MB or so) it doesn't effect the broadband at all.



I can set up an X404 team but it'd be just for the good of the cause, there's no way we could challenge the big teams for points as there are some big hitters out there. The CPC team is now hitting over 3million points a day.
We could get everyone to fold under a single username (under team 35947), that way we could see how many points we'd produce & quite probably get featured in the magazine which is great advertising for this site.
If you fold using x404.co.uk as the username & 35947 as the team it could be interesting.