what is my computer actually doing?

[charris25]

recently learned about distributed systems and the FAH project in one of my classes and thought id donate my system to its cause. after running the smp client for a couple of days im a bit concerned with what my system is actually doing as its running 10 times as hard as it normally does. and even THAT is difficult for me to achieve. is there a way of getting the client to display the calculations within the console or view the actual simulations on my desktop? if not, is there a more detailed description available for the projects and WU im getting?

[jimerickson]

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

[Jesse_V]

Welcom to the forum charris25!

What do you mean with your statement that your system is running 10x as hard as usual? How did you determine this? F@h relies heavily on floating-point operations and uses your CPU fairly thoroughly, both of which you may not necessarily see with normal applications. Nevertheless, the SMP does an excellent job at backing off for regular applications since it runs at an extremely low priority.

The F@h developers are currently working on the next generation of software, called v7. It attempts to unify all previous v6 clients together and make F@h really easy to run and operate. It's in a beta testing process and not currently listed on the F@h main page, but it's latest release was announced here: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=20459

[gwildperson]

What do you mean with your statement that your system is running 10x as hard as usual? How did you determine this?

That seems like a statement that could reasonably said by most of us. He probably means that like most of us, we have a computer that is a lot more powerful than we really need. We purchased a sports-car that can go 150 MPH but we live in a neighborhood with speed limits of 15 MPH. When F@h is not running on my computer, it is always more than 90% idle and that capability is going to waste. It is just begging me to let F@h use that unused processing capability.

[charris25]

Welcom to the forum charris25!

What do you mean with your statement that your system is running 10x as hard as usual? How did you determine this? F@h relies heavily on floating-point operations and uses your CPU fairly thoroughly, both of which you may not necessarily see with normal applications. Nevertheless, the SMP does an excellent job at backing off for regular applications since it runs at an extremely low priority.

The F@h developers are currently working on the next generation of software, called v7. It attempts to unify all previous v6 clients together and make F@h really easy to run and operate. It's in a beta testing process and not currently listed on the F@h main page, but it's latest release was announced here: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=20459

i use a couple of cpu meters, 1 of which also monitors the over/underclocking automatically done by the OS, and before FAH i would normally hit 10% with difficulty hitting 15-20% (underclocked to 70% total power). the smp client is successfully running all 4 cores at 100% power (3.2 GHz before standard overclocking), even with other applications running at the same time. the performance of my other applications is not affected but im inquireing into what kind of operations could be utilizing this much power.

[bruce]

The type of processing that FAH is doing is customarily assigned to supercomputers. In fact, each client can be considered as a single node in a distributed supercomputer.

There's a lot of useful information on the website and in Wikipedia, but in simple terms, many of the research studies can easily use all of the compute resources of hundreds of computers continuously for many years. The work that you contribute is a small portion of that larger process.

Here's a recent discussion on that very topic: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=20444