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Hmm, I see some chap who's running up the leaderboard is on pace to overtake me in 5.4 days... I might have to see if I can keep that 17th-place ranking.

I am now running a CPU unit worth an estimated 3540 points, and a GPU unit worth an estimated 70,000 points. The latter seems like a ton, but IIRC the last time I fired up the folding client, which was probably early in the May administration, the GPU units were only giving me about 1/10th of their estimated points. I think they weren't finishing in time; I see they have 2-day timeouts and are estimated to take two days, which looks familiar. Edit: Well, now it thinks it will only take 11 hours. But CPU is quiet enough that I can leave it on in the background; GPU not as much.

I did run World Community Grid for most of the May and Johnson administrations, until they moved hosts last spring; I didn't resume once they came back since it was summer. So this will be a good test of F@H for me after a few years. I could also organize a CFC WCG team; I've been on my university team for years but it isn't really active per se.

Edit: Now it estimates 8324 points for that CPU unit (12,272 per day), and 199,027 for the GPU unit (429,898). Considering I have 781,000 points overall, I'm skeptical... I'm on the same CPU I was using 10 years ago, and my GPU is six years old, although it's possible I last tried it with my old GPU back when Cameron was PM. So most likely either there's been inflation in points over the years, or I won't get anywhere near 200K points-per-unit on the GPU. Though if I do, I ought to be able to stay in 17th place.

Edit2: New estimate of 9446 for CPU unit, and 150,180 for GPU. Looks like it's still settling in. I'll be gobsmacked if I get 150K for a GPU unit, but chuffed if my CPU's power level really does wind up being over 9000. Task Manager is doing its best to help by reporting my CPU frequency as 5.68 GHz, which is wildly inaccurate (it's actually 3.3 GHz, for some reason Task Manager rarely gets that right).
 
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Finished a GPU unit, got 70,000 points, which is the base amount. Still way more than I was expecting, that's nearly 1/11th of all the points I had in years previous, from one unit. The previous ones were probably several months' worth of points from my CPU.
 
It's wild how different this era is to a decade ago, but I suppose it makes sense. The computing power is vastly different.
 
If you are into this tech, you may like this about some of the AI stuff going on. Here is a gif of kind of the reverse operation, AI working out the sequence that will result in a stable structure:


Four examples of protein ‘hallucination’. In each case, AlphaFold is presented with a random amino-acid sequence, predicts the structure, and changes the sequence until the software confidently predicts that it will fold into a protein with a well-defined 3D shape. Colours show prediction confidence (from red for very low confidence, through yellow and light blue to dark blue for very high confidence). Initial frames have been slowed down for clarity. Credit: Sergey Ovchinnikov
 
So, unfortunately, my GPU does not want to cure cancer. The next unit it got was for curing cancer, and after reaching the 30% mark it started reliably crashing. I restarted after the first time, tried again, 20 minutes later it crashed. Rebooted again, it made it an hour, crash.

It hasn't always been the most reliable GPU in the world, and if I try to tweak the fan curve it likes to crash too. Probably buggy drivers, though they're less buggy than the old ones I had. They're kind of a pain to upgrade since AMD dropped support for Windows 8 several years ago, and I've had to repurpose the Windows 7 drivers ever since. I think they dropped Windows 7 last year too, although I might be able to upgrade one more time. But I'll probably be moving to Windows 10 by the end of the year, and a new computer in general, so we'll see if I can be bothered to upgrade the drivers before then. The current ones (early 2020) have been pretty decent, way better than the previous early 2019 drivers, which were far worse than the 2017 drivers I had before that, and the newer ones could be worse. In particular I read that the 2021 - mid 2022 drivers caused newer Radeons to fold quite poorly, and while I don't know if that would be the case for my older card, it could be.

I'll probably let it keep running on the CPU, and I've configured the GPU to prefer curing Alzheimer's, which worked quite reliably on for the first unit. Unfortunately I don't see an option to exclude projects 100%, as World Community Grid offers, so it could still pick up a cancer-curing unit and crash, it's just less likely. I also have to figure out how to terminate the current crash-prone unit; maybe I just have to let it expire?

I wonder who else might join? schmiddi is doing great but is still close to 95% of the team's recent points. A few more participants would help diversify our point base and make us less dependent on one person for keeping our top-350 team ranking.
 
This weekend I'm going to see if I can fire something up.
 
I got it running on my laptop... its hex-core CPU got ambitious and pulled a 58,000-base-point unit which will take it more than 24 hours, and its GPU (a GTX 1050 Mobile) is running a unit too. Dunno if I'll leave it running frequently, in parts because its smaller fans are noisier, but I folded and community gridded quite a bit on my old laptop around 2009 - 2010 and it was never worse for the wear.

I'm kind of curious how many points per day the Raspberry Pi Zero W I have would crank out... probably about 23? Only problem is its such a small computer that I couldn't find it last time I looked for it, so I'd have to find it first!
 
We have reached an era we can lose PCs! 😂 Pretty impressive really.
 
So I dug up my old superfan PC, it still boots on Win7 Pro, i7 @ 2.67GHz and 12GB RAM and a 500GB HD. :dance:

I plugged an nVidia 9800GX2 into it to start off, I've also got a GTx650 Ti which may or may not be fully functional but let's see if it'll fold anything before I complicate things with that, I'm going to have enough challenge getting it fired up in the basement, on wifi, getting VNC going, then actually getting Folding@Home running.
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9800GX2... now that's a GPU I haven't heard about in a while. I'm curious if it'll be new enough to run units? It has CUDA, but it's 14 years old by now. The GTX 650 sounds more likely unless it's known to have issues.

Haven't found the Pi but I took the Mac Mini (2010) that I use for cross-platform software testing out of its storage cubby, and it is now putting its 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo to use, estimating it'll earn 865 points per day. Its GeForce 320M integrated graphics have opted out. The good news is it's pretty quiet. The bad news is that's not very many points, even compared to my 2011 desktop's quad-core CPU which earns somewhere in the 6000-9000 points per day range depending on which units it gets assigned. I'm curious how many points per watt it's earning; it has a mobile CPU so it probably isn't too horrible but it's definitely nothing compared to a modern chip.

The GTX 1050 completed a unit and got awarded 49,000 points for its effort. I did notice that it failed to use CUDA, and opted for OpenGL, but it doesn't seem to have hurt anything. It could probably earn about 100K per day.

The bad side is the Core i7 mobile CPU got enthusiastic again overnight and went nearly full turbo, 4 GHz in a laptop, and brought its temps up to 98ºC. It seems to hover around 80-82 when it stays to a more reasonable 3.2 GHz. It's claiming that it'll earn about 40,000 base points per day which seems a bit optimistic if you ask me. And even when only the CPU is running on the laptop, it's noisy. Maybe GPU-only would be better? Between travel and fan noise I'm probably not going to leave the laptop running all the time, even though its points are decent. I don't have a basement where I can stash noisy fans.

I also tested whether I could fold on my old Core 2 Duo laptop, which is better at keeping fan noise moderate, but its Windows version is too old for folding and its Linux version is too new for its 2007 graphics card and thus has issues. So... it can probably continue to enjoy its retirement. It's the one that ran World Community Grid, and some folding, back around 2010. It could technically GPU fold in its prime, but its 32 CUDA cores were low enough that it resulted in stutter in the UI while running F@H or other CUDA applications, so that experiment didn't last long.
 
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Someone said something about if a work unit takes more than 24hrs its credit is seriously reduced?
(Yes this is CPU only, before I sort out the GPUs I want to make sure the software is functioning correctly.)
 
Someone said something about if a work unit takes more than 24hrs its credit is seriously reduced?
(Yes this is CPU only, before I sort out the GPUs I want to make sure the software is functioning correctly.)
I believe that you are only eligible for the "Base Credit" rather than the "Estimated Credit", which includes bonuses for finishing early, unless you finish before the "Timeout". If it takes longer than the "Expiration", I don't think you get any credit? You also have to have a certain amount of units completed on time for "Estimated", I believe, I read somewhere 10 but they do a poor job of documenting it. Your Timeout and Expiration are much closer together than what I've been getting.

So I would expect to receive the Base Credit for the first few units. I've just been getting Base Credit as far as I can tell, none of my nodes have done more than five or so units. But the Base Credit is still pretty decent these days, and I can confirm that 24 hours is not a hard cutoff for fewer points, I've had a couple large units that took over a day. That 58K is a big CPU chunk... an octo-core i7? Paired with a 9800 GX2?

I also figured out that "Estimated TPF" means "Estimated time to complete 1% of the work unit."

Looks like you're off to the races though! It got a bit warmer here so I've put most of what I had going on pause.
 
I believe that you are only eligible for the "Base Credit" rather than the "Estimated Credit", which includes bonuses for finishing early, unless you finish before the "Timeout". If it takes longer than the "Expiration", I don't think you get any credit? You also have to have a certain amount of units completed on time for "Estimated", I believe, I read somewhere 10 but they do a poor job of documenting it. Your Timeout and Expiration are much closer together than what I've been getting.

So I would expect to receive the Base Credit for the first few units. I've just been getting Base Credit as far as I can tell, none of my nodes have done more than five or so units. But the Base Credit is still pretty decent these days, and I can confirm that 24 hours is not a hard cutoff for fewer points, I've had a couple large units that took over a day. That 58K is a big CPU chunk... an octo-core i7? Paired with a 9800 GX2?

I also figured out that "Estimated TPF" means "Estimated time to complete 1% of the work unit."

Looks like you're off to the races though! It got a bit warmer here so I've put most of what I had going on pause.

The video card I once had in that box is in use elsewhere (I assume, anyway - I'm the computer geek equivalent of the redneck with the multiple cars junked out in the front lawn), but I'm loathe to swap out CPUs.

Once this first unit is turned in and receipt reported correctly I'll crack the box open and add the GTX650. I might change the user to Radioactive_Monkey, too. Pretty funny that one 50K unit would on its own vault me to the top quarter of the CFC team members for overall contributions. :coffee:
 
Radioactive_Monkey! How does Team CFC not have someone with that username? I guess you have to join CFC to know about the radioactive monkeys, but that's a great idea for a Team CFC folding name!

Oh wait, there is a Radioactive_Monkey... in 77th place. Is that you?

The 2010 Mac Mini, sure enough, is cranking out 865-point units. It would take it close to a month to get 50,000. But if I do the math on the average points-per-units for a lot of the inactive users, it comes out considerably lower than 865. Times really have changed with regards to computing power...
 
Radioactive_Monkey! How does Team CFC not have someone with that username? I guess you have to join CFC to know about the radioactive monkeys, but that's a great idea for a Team CFC folding name!

Oh wait, there is a Radioactive_Monkey... in 77th place. Is that you?

The 2010 Mac Mini, sure enough, is cranking out 865-point units. It would take it close to a month to get 50,000. But if I do the math on the average points-per-units for a lot of the inactive users, it comes out considerably lower than 865. Times really have changed with regards to computing power...

Yep, that's me. IIRC I created it to represent the "Celeron herd" of low-end surplus workstations I set up at work. Though I'm sure I don't have the passkey for it anymore, so I'd be creating a twin of it.
 
Okay, one unit done and correctly sent and recorded. Time to get the GPUs going.
 
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