Help a newbie please!

[MrZinc25]

Hello everyone,

I have been folding for about 2 years now, however I just came to realize that you can increase your PPD, and all. I am using a Intel i3 processor on my laptop right now. I've seen some people's TPF at 1 minute or so, with a good size project.

I'm not sure what I should be using such as SMP or GPU, don't know anything in regards to that. I also use both of my PS3's to fold as well.

Can someone please give me some pointers in how to increase the rate of folding proteins, and how to increase your processor speed.

[Jesse_V]

Welcome to the forum MrZinc25!
We'd be glad to help. First off, its good to hear that you've been with this project for that long, everyone sure appreciates your contributions. Truly.

Folding@home is capable of running on both single-core processors, as well as multi-core processors and graphics cards. One of my first recommendations would be to get the V7 client from the main Folding@home website, folding.stanford.edu. It's right there on the front page. There are a few bugs and whatnot here and there, but I think overall its a pretty good piece of software and you shouldn't have any real issues with it. It will automatically detect your hardware and try to setup a near-optimal configuration that makes the most out of what you have. It's not perfect at this, but it does a fairly good job I think. Runs fairly flawlessly under Windows, which I presume you have. It's also incredibly straightforward to control, so it makes folding much simpler.

There is a large amount of information on the Wikipedia article on Folding@home. I'd recommend that you read through that if you're interested in learning more about this project and how it all works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F@H

To address your final questions, GPUs and PS3s are each faster at folding proteins than regular CPUs, but they are a bit more limited in the types of processing that they can do. So in that sense, you're already folding pretty fast. To increase you're processor speed, do you want to pursue overclocking? Some of here, including myself, could help you out there, but since it pushes your hardware's performance further than factory settings, I'm not sure if you want to do that unless you're sure of what you're doing.

[MrZinc25]

Hello Jesse, thank you so much for the fast reply .

Sorry for the confusion, I am currently running at 157 PPD, however it does rise to 3,700 at times. Not sure why such a big decrease sometimes.

Since I'm new I can't post a image of my System Info!


I'm currently running project 7200 ( 68, 9, 45) which is only pulling in 157 PPD right now.

What would I need to do in order to increase my PPD to the 3,700 or higher on a daily basis without it going back to such a low PPD at times?

Thank you in advance for all you've helped me with so far!

[Jesse_V]

Hmm.
How are you determining your PPD?
If you press Control+Shift+Escape, you'll open Task Manager. Under the "View" menu and the "CPU History" section, choose the "One graph per CPU" option. How many graphs does that display? I'm trying to determine how many processing cores your CPU has.

[MrZinc25]

I'm running Windows 7 right now, under my Performance tab I have 4 graphs with a CPU Usage of 100%. Not sure if this is the information that you need or not.

[Jesse_V]

I'm running Windows 7 right now, under my Performance tab I have 4 graphs with a CPU Usage of 100%. Not sure if this is the information that you need or not.

That's helpful. I'd still like your system specs, you can probably just copy/paste or somehow retype the information in. I'm surprised that it's at 100% if you were wondering if you could run SMP. What client are you running? What's your setup? I'm just a bit puzzled since you seemed confused about SMP folding, so I'm assuming that you're running the Main v6 uniprocessor client.

[MrZinc25]

Sure, I can give you my system specs here for you.

CPU: Intel (R) Core(TM) i3 CPU M380 @ 2.53 GHz
CPU ID GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5
CPUs 4
Memory 3.80 GiB
Free Memory 2.48 GiB
Threads Windows_Threads
On Battery false
UTC offset -4
PID 4812
OS Windows 6 Home Premium
OS Arch AMD64
GPUs 0
CUDA Not Detected
Win32 Service false


I hope that this is all of the information that you need!

[Jesse_V]

Sure, I can give you my system specs here for you.
...
I hope that this is all of the information that you need!

Yes, I think so. I see you got that off of V7's System tab. It's also available at the top of the log (you can uncheck the "Follow" checkbox so it doesn't keep jumping down to the bottom of the log every time it updates) In any case, it appears that your GPU is not supported by V7, so you can't fold on it.

It looks like your processor has two CPU cores, but it looks like 4 due to a technology called hyperthreading. V7 most likely set up an SMP slot for you, which is probably the best configuration for your hardware. My only concern would that you might not be able to meet the Work Unit deadlines in time. How often do you run Folding@home on average?

[MrZinc25]

I actually have folding at home on anytime my laptop is on, almost all day. The 4 previous WU's I did for SMP I was able to complete without any issues, with TPF around 4 minutes, and estimated 6 or so hours per WU. That was with smaller 250,000 atom's. This 7200 is 750,000 could that be an issue here?

[Jesse_V]

I actually have folding at home on anytime my laptop is on, almost all day. The 4 previous WU's I did for SMP I was able to complete without any issues, with TPF around 4 minutes, and estimated 6 or so hours per WU. That was with smaller 250,000 atom's. This 7200 is 750,000 could that be an issue here?

How did you determine the atom count again? It's not in the list of active projects: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html
Are you using a passkey? If you aren't, you'll need one to get more PPD. See http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-passkey

[MrZinc25]

I'm sorry, I needed to fold 750,000 proteins.

Yes, I have gotten a passkey the other day, and have been using it to qualify for the bonus.

I have another issue now, I have began another project, and everything on my client states unknown. PPD, Est tme, and Estimated PPD. It has been running for a few minutes, and no results have been showing even in the progress bar. My friend who has set this client up last night has the same issue I'm having now.

[Ripper36]

I find this happens for some projects, but it is not a problem - for example I am currently folding a series of 5772 and it shows unknown. Which project are you folding at present?

[bruce]

Depending mostly on the type of hardware you have and to a lesser degree the project you are assigned, it can take between a few hours to almost a month to fold a single protein. Both the project deadlines and the points are shown on http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html

Project 5772 has a preferred deadline of 2 days and a final deadline of 3 days, so if it takes just less than about half an hour to get to 1% you're just about matching the preferred deadline. When completed, you will earn 353 points.

[MrZinc25]

Thanks everyone, I believe I have figured it out and the client is running smooth now! I even returned my 10 qualifying SMP WU's to be eligible for the bonus points now as well!

Just one more question however, once completed the 10 SMP WU to qualify for the bonus, can you then begin doing uniprocessor WU's and still receive the bonus points? Or are they only for the SMP WU's only?

[bruce]

You can do uniprocessor WUs whenever you want to.

Some uniprocessor WUs get bonuses (FahCore_a4) and some don't (FahCore_78). The former would have counted toward your 10 bonus WUs and conceivably will count as part of the >80% factor just like the other bonus projects.

You really don't have any control over which you'll be assigned, so it's not something you should waste your time worrying about.