How is it possible to get 40000 Point per WU?

[yetanotherusername]

I've been wondering for some time about this:
One guy in my team is making 41323.86 points per WU!
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... o_Balduzzi

I am fairly sure he is not the only one.

With what kind of hardware can you achieve something like that?
A Cray Supercomputer?

Are there special kinds of WU that yield this many points?

With approx. the same number of WU I get 1.5% of his score, and I've got an i7 950 running for 8-16 hours a day and a rented Virtual Server I am (ab)using running 24/7.

Makes me jealous!

[7im]

Dual CPU systems are not uncommon. With the fastest quad CPU server on the market now, you can do 1,000,000 PPD from one computer, and it's not even a super computer.

[bruce]

Your i7 950 has 4 physical cores and with HyperThreading, it can run 8 threads. The computer 7im is talking about probably has a total of 24 physical cores and can run a total of 48 threads so it's a lot more powerful (and expensive) than your computer -- and of course they run 24 hours every day. It makes me jealous, too.

[Macaholic]

Are there special kinds of WU that yield this many points?

More detailed information about these units, historically speaking, can be found here.

[yetanotherusername]

Your i7 950 has 4 physical cores and with HyperThreading, it can run 8 threads. The computer 7im is talking about probably has a total of 24 physical cores and can run a total of 48 threads so it's a lot more powerful (and expensive) than your computer -- and of course they run 24 hours every day. It makes me jealous, too.

Thanks guys, now I know my proper place in the folding universe again

But then I remember the story about the girl and the starfish.
And it gives me another excuse not to upgrade my electricity plan to renewable energy.

Go, folders, go!

[bruce]

But then I remember the story about the girl and the starfish.

Go, folders, go!

Yep. I throw back a lot of starfish. ...and people ask me why I still run a dual-core laptop (along with a number of other machines).

[7im]

...And it gives me another excuse not to upgrade my electricity plan to renewable energy.

Huh?

[iceman1992]

It might not even be bigadv.. On normal SMP I can get about 17000-19000 with a 7647, so a much faster CPU (maybe a hexacore overclocked?) on a bigger work unit may get near 40000, since the bonus is exponential.

[Xavier Zepherious]

on a 3930k(overclocked) using smp - 12 you should be able to get a WU (full day of folding for around 50k)
if I was still able to do bigadv (which i could be able to do within the preferred deadline and better than some 2p rigs) I would be getting near 140k (dropping up to 400k WU's)

my average PPD (on that rig) is 50-55k right now

[Stonecold]

How does everyone get such high PPD?? I have a $3,000+ gaming laptop and I'm only getting 3k PPD (at max I get about 10k)!

[k1wi]

Ppd or point per work unit?

For both its relatively powerful hardware. I can get easily that ppd off a 570 GPU and i7 920 combined depending on the wus being folded of course.

Harder with laptops as you trade computational power for mobility

[Jonazz]

How does everyone get such high PPD?? I have a $3,000+ gaming laptop and I'm only getting 3k PPD (at max I get about 10k)!

How are you folding? SMP and GPU?

And how old is your PC?

[Stonecold]

How does everyone get such high PPD?? I have a $3,000+ gaming laptop and I'm only getting 3k PPD (at max I get about 10k)!

How are you folding? SMP and GPU?

And how old is your PC?

SMP (I'll use GPU as soon as a client for Linux comes out). And I got my PC last April, it was top of the line for MainGear's gaming laptops at the time.

[csvanefalk]

How does everyone get such high PPD?? I have a $3,000+ gaming laptop and I'm only getting 3k PPD (at max I get about 10k)!

How are you folding? SMP and GPU?

And how old is your PC?

SMP (I'll use GPU as soon as a client for Linux comes out). And I got my PC last April, it was top of the line for MainGear's gaming laptops at the time.

Are you sure your client has your username and passkey properly set? If yes, what are your CPU and memory specs?

[bruce]

The PPD for FAH SMP depends on several factors. The most obvious one is the total amount of processing you do, so for your i7, that will depend on how many cores are devoted to FAH and how many hours they contribute. FAH uses mostly floating point, so allocating the first core which will have access to a FPU to FAH is more important than allocating a second core which will share that same FPU. In other words, changing from 2 cores to 4 cores increases performance more than changing from 6 cores to 8 cores. Since most people run with all cores allocated, this probably isn't useful information.

It does mean that TurboBoost won't really help FAH, though. If any of your power saving features reduce performance, your battery will last longer and FAH will run slower, though, so setting the CPU for maximum performance is a good idea -- but that also means more heat is generated so monitor it and choose the settings wisely.

The biggest contributor to PPD comes from using a passkey and making sure that any WU that's downloaded is returned as quickly as you can so whenever possible, if you have to shut down for a while, allow the current WU to FINISH.

SMP performance generally runs as slow as the slowest thread. Depending on the type of game(s) you play, you may need to Pause/Finish FAH before you start the game -- and even if you accept the performance of your game with FAH running, the FAH performance will suffer quite a bit. There may also be a case for running FAH with a reduced number of cores with your game if you can find the proper balance to maximize performance of both but you'll have to experiment with that.