My cpu seems to be useless folding

[Oni]

I suspect it's some kind of setting or something, I started a few months ago and I left every setting at default. I was doing 6-7k PPD and I didn't know how good that was relatively. I guess it's pretty bad considering my hardware.

For the last month I've been running

FX 6100 and a 6850 AMD.

I just installed a FX 8350 so naturally I expected my score to improve somewhat. I turned it on and it sat between 6-7k for an hour while I tested my new cpu temps. Now, I'm not a fool, I have checked in the past that the cpu core were being 100% utilized but I never thought those cores would be doing barely any work. So I paused the GPU and my score shot down to 800 PDD and then improved to about 1400 PDD but even so the vast majority of my score is obviously from my GPU.

I'm at a loss, I would like to help this project out more than I am. Does any one know why my FX chips are performing so badly?

[PinHead]

Probably config. Can you post your config between

Code: Select all

 config here [/ code] tags ( without the space between the / and code on the trailing tag)?  It takes a lot of the guess work out!

[P5-133XL]

The first thing to do will be to run your SMP slot with two less cores than maximum i.e. SMP:6. The AMD GPU will occupy one full core all on its own. You want SMP:6 rather than SMP:7 because there are some WU's that choke if the number of cores is a prime number. You won't lose that much from your peak folding capability because the FX8350 only has four floating point units anyway.

The problem is that you are currently over-subscribing your CPU. The SMP client gives each core its own thread but if anything outside of the SMP process uses any CPU then a folding thread will be suspended to allow that outside process access. However the SMP core is highly synchronized so if one thread is suspended then the rest of the threads sit there in a waiting loop till the suspended thread is reactivated. Since the AMD GPU uses a CPU core all on its own, it means that there is always at least one SMP thread being suspended which will kill its productivity.

Put the v7 FAHControl into advanced mode (upper right). Enter the config and go to the slots tab. Dbl-Click on the SMP slot and change the number of CPU's from using -1 (which is auto select the number of cores) to 6. Click OK and save. Quit FAHControl (Use the quit button) and restart folding.

[P5-133XL]

Also, do not expect the new FX-8350 to be a better folder than your old FX-6100. The FX-8350 has only 4 floating point units while the FX-6100 had 6.

[Oni]

I set the CPU to use 6 cores and didn't change anything. It's running at between 800 and 1500 at the moment with just the cpu running. I haven't actually run anything intensive besides the windows performance index because I installed it a few hours ago but windows gave it a 7.8 which if I remember correctly is out of 7.9 so that's not bad.

I only see one config file, I have to doubt this is what you are looking for. Where is the more detailed one located?

Code: Select all

<config>
  <!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
  <gpu v='true'/>

  <!-- Network -->
  <proxy v=':8080'/>

  <!-- User Information -->
  <team v='167809'/>
  <user v='Oni'/>

  <!-- Folding Slots -->
  <slot id='0' type='GPU'/>
  <slot id='1' type='SMP'>
    <cpus v='6'/>
  </slot>
</config>

[P5-133XL]

Folding is a very specific task and the Windows experience index is not a good measure of how well it will fold.

I didn't expect that the SMP would do much better at SMP:6 than with the GPU paused but now the GPU running should not interfere with SMP.

While a full log would be better, the config you supplied does indicate a problem: You do not have a passkey configured. Most of the PPD that comes from SMP is from bonus points that requires a passkey.

You want to use your old passkey if that is availible. If not apply to get a passkey using the same Email address and you will get your old passkey. If you get a brand new passkey, then it will have to qualify before it starts getting bonus points. Specifically, it needs to successfully complete 10 SMP WU's and maintain at least 80% successful returns.

[Oni]

So does that mean with no passkey the work has still be getting done as fast but I'm just not getting credit for it? I'm cool with that actually, I figured since it was taking days 2-3 days of time on the work unit associated with the cpu and I was barely getting any points that something was wrong with the speed I was processing it at. I'm guessing it just must give major WU to cpus and that's why it takes so long.

[P5-133XL]

Correct, the missing passkey does not affect the work being done, merely how many points you get for that work. However, most people use PPD (points per day) as a benchmark and without the bonus points it will be hard to compare if you are doing well or poorly compared to others with similar HW. PG has said that they designed the point system so that PPD accurately reflects the amount of science being done. It really doesn't harm anything to get and use passkey. I encourage you to get one.

All I can say at this point is that it takes as long as it takes. HW capability is highly variable and the amount of computations for a specific WU is also highly variable. There are different classes major WU's. Bigadv's are probably the biggest in that they have a minimum core requirement of 16 and are designed multi-socketed server's. However, high-end GPU's can do far more floating point operations than any CPU. There is currently in beta test a new benchmark for GPU's that also include bonus points and those WU's are benchmarked against the standard SMP machine. The result is that a high-end GPU is getting similar points (~225K PPD for a GTX 580) to the biggest servers.