Folding with Virtual Machines?

[Improviz]

I'm back into FAH after a long absence. I'm running Win7 64 bit, a Core i7 940, and 12gb of DDR3 Ram, an Asus P6T mobo, with a new eVGA GTX 560 Ti OC card, running the Fermi client.

While my WU production is pretty darn speedy with this setup, typically showing about 1600/ns per day (which I assume is a speed indicator, LOL), I'm wondering if there's not some way to leave my machine running the Fermi client in the background, but run at least one if not more Win XP virtual machines, maybe one for each of 3 CPU cores? Would that just drag down the Fermi numbers to the point of diminishing returns? I've been up and running with the Fermi client for a little over a week and seem to have completed 30 WU's.

Any thoughts on the matter appreciated, thanks.

[k1wi]

You shouldn't need to run a virtual machine in order to increase your folding: you could run the SMP client to utilise your CPU, perhaps 'leaving' one of your 8 threads free for your GPU by selecting -smp 6 or 7.

That way you're folding on your CPU while leaving some spare capacity to 'feed' your GPU.

k1wi

[Improviz]

Hrm. So, I would download a different client then? Sorry, I haven't done this in a couple of years. I would then run 2 clients at the same time, one that uses the GPU, and the other will use the CPU cores, yes? And they won't conflict? I'll give it a try, thanks. The VM thing seemed to make sense on one hand, but on the other, not....

[bruce]

The same three clients that you were considering running in VMs would work if you just install them in Native Win7 without the overhead of the VMs. The only trick to running more than one client is to make sure the data they're working on is stored in different places and that they have unique values of MachineID. (see the installation guides)

Running one SMP client with your GPU client is far superior to running multiple Uniprocessor clients (provided the machine folds 24x7). Same criteria: unique data directories and unique MachineIDs.

Get a passkey and start building up your first 10 bonus-qualified WUs so that you can earn a bonus.

[Improviz]

LOL. Passkey? And how does one obtain a passkey? I'll go back to the FAH site and poke around, thanks.

[P5-133XL]

Passkey FAQ

[7im]

Poke one of the install guides, please.