Come and Help With Some Folding

AlanH

AlanH

Mac addict, php monkey
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You may not be aware that CFC has a team running in the Folding@Home research exercise. It's one of those highly distributed computing projects, like seti@home, where your spare CPU cycles are put to good use.

Folding@Home is concerned with modelling the processes that go on when protein molecules fold, which is apparently a key process that keeps us all alive. And when it goes wrong we get things like CJD, Alzheimers, cancer ... So this research is a very worthwhile cause to put your spare cycles into.

What does this have to do with the Mac forum?

Well. The latest Intel-native SMP version of the Folding@Home client software runs like a dream on the new dual-core Macs, and my Mac Pro is currently delivering about 20 times its previous rate. There currently isn't anything close to it among the rest of the CFC team, as ... guess what! There isn't a multi-processor (SMP) version of the software for Windows yet.

So if you've been wondering what to do with all that computing power you got for Christmas, run over to the local Folding@Home thread and give TeamCFC some support. You'll be helping with some important research, and you'll be showing CFC what a few Macs can do. Big time. :thumbsup:
 
I used the SMP installer for Intel. The bottom of the list. It's easy and it "just works". You get a System Prefs panel with it for set-up, and there's a Viewer that doesn't do anything yet. This is beta software, but it seems stable on my system
 
Yep, your all very welcome to rub it in our windows :)
 
I may be dealing w/ a bug.
 

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I did say the viewer doesn't do anything yet. Ignore it. It's not a bug, it's a feature :)
 
System Preferences is where you enter your team number and user name. There's a little F@H icon at the bottom when you Show All. Click it. Enter the data, then click the button at the bottom.

Don't open the viewer application. Ignore it. Pretend it doesn't exist. It is a non-program; it has gone to meet its programmer; it is a dead program [pace, Monty Python]
 
There's a text log file on your system that lists the process of grabbing a work unit and starting it, then it's updated as each 1% of the work is done, and you then see the results being sent back.

The log file is at ~/Library/Folding@home/FAHlog.txt

NOTE> Don't interrupt a work unit. This version of the client doesn't checkpoint the work, so if you stop it in midstream it has to go back to the beginning again. Note also that the work units they are giving out to SMP clients are required back in 2 days. So if you interrupt a work unit the deadline will very likely time out.
 
AlanH said:
There's a text log file on your system that lists the process of grabbing a work unit and starting it, then it's updated as each 1% of the work is done, and you then see the results being sent back.

The log file is at ~/Library/Folding@home/FAHlog.txt

NOTE> Don't interrupt a work unit. This version of the client doesn't checkpoint the work, so if you stop it in midstream it has to go back to the beginning again. Note also that the work units they are giving out to SMP clients are required back in 2 days. So if you interrupt a work unit the deadline will very likely time out.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

To interrupt a work unit, I'd have to turn it off or shut down I'm assuming?
 
That's right. As long as the button in Sys Prefs says "Disable ..." it's running. My system doesn't sleep. I imagine that would at least cause the process to suspend. Not sure if it would kill it.
 
This new version has been a big boost for the intel macs. I was running linux in parallels in order to be able to run a decent client. This is a lot easier and also runs faster for more points.

Since I have been on a team for a long time so I am not going to be joining the CFC team, but I do feel that this is the best distributed computing project out there at the moment.
 
Hey, Dojo! How's it going?

What processing rate are you getting? My system does 1% in about 5 - 6 mins unless I run Civ4, when it drops to 7 - 8 mins per percent
 
AlanH said:
Hey, Dojo! How's it going?

What processing rate are you getting? My system does 1% in about 5 - 6 mins unless I run Civ4, when it drops to 7 - 8 mins per percent
Click to expand...

Not that good, it looks like 1% every 10 min.

[18:05:28] Writing local files
[18:05:28] Completed 4500000 out of 5000000 steps (90 percent)
[18:15:21] Writing local files
[18:15:21] Completed 4550000 out of 5000000 steps (91 percent)
[18:25:10] Writing local files
[18:25:13] Completed 4600000 out of 5000000 steps (92 percent)
Click to expand...
 
Only 8 x 10 mins to go, from an hour ago! Should be cooked in another 5-10 minutes :)

[EDIT] 1% every 10 mins sounds right for a single Core 2 Duo CPU. Two cores = 10 minutes, four cores = 5 mins plus a bit for overheads.
 
Not all of the work units run at the same rate. Here is a list of the proteins:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html

The GRO-SMP proteins are near the bottom. The current ones do only have a range of 587 to 716, so comparisons without taking this into account are reasonable. But there can be a wild variation in what the work units are worth, so if you find that it is taking a lot more time to do 1%, it is probably that the unit is worth more also.

You can use the Console app in the Utilities folder to look at FAHlog.txt as it runs, I think that it uses the least resources to do this.
 
The points values of these SMP units don't seem to correlate with the seconds per percent that I see. On an idle system I get 5 mins 30 seconds for some units and 5 min 40 seconds for others, but the faster units may be worth 691 and the slower ones may be worth 587, which is the wrong way around.

Since they are rating work units on the basis of the time taken to process on the single CPU, older generation software, I suspect the points values are a tad approximate. Which is why I treat all the SMP work units as roughly equal CPU loads.

[EDIT] Meanwhile, Dojoboy's work unit is taking its time to appear. Has it finished yet?
 
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