GTX 260

[Crazy-Logic]

Hi all,

someone has offered me a couple of GTX 260 - are these still usable by FAH?
If they are I will add them into my systems, otherwise i'll tell them to eBay them.

Thanks

[bollix47]

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/guide/ ... ide/#ntoc4

It would appear that GTX 4xx is the nvidia minimum for completing today's projects, so no, a 260 would not be able to complete WUs before the deadlines.

[JimboPalmer]

More, a GTX 260 would never get WUs to work on.

[Joe_H]

The last GPU folding core that could be run on a GTX 260 or other pre-Fermi GPU was officially retired last year - https://folding.stanford.edu/home/retir ... ay-to-fah/. For all practical reasons, even though some of the 400 and 500 series GPU's can still fold, I would suggest looking for at least a GT 640 or its equivalent as a minimum. For GPU chipset, Kepler or newer is more likely to stay usable longer than the Fermi based cards. The lower end Fermi cards may need to run 24 hours a day to meet deadlines, or may not meet them at all.

[Crazy-Logic]

Thanks guys - that really useful information.

[Kittyhawk]

The last GPU folding core that could be run on a GTX 260 or other pre-Fermi GPU was officially retired last year - https://folding.stanford.edu/home/retir ... ay-to-fah/. For all practical reasons, even though some of the 400 and 500 series GPU's can still fold, I would suggest looking for at least a GT 640 or its equivalent as a minimum. For GPU chipset, Kepler or newer is more likely to stay usable longer than the Fermi based cards. The lower end Fermi cards may need to run 24 hours a day to meet deadlines, or may not meet them at all.

That link does not work.

Fermi GPU was mentioned.
I'm just curious whether Core15 WUs are still being offered. Or are they deprecated for good?

I have a lower end nVidia 400 series card in my cupboard.
It's good for folding only Core15 and earlier. Core17 folding takes just too long and the underlined sentence is very true.

[JimboPalmer]

It looks as if Core_15 WUs dried up almost a year ago.

viewtopic.php?f=74&t=28826#p286083

is from late May 2016.

[Joe_H]

It appears not every post to the blog on the old folding site was mirrored to the current site that was in development. But the gist of the post I had linked to was that Core_15 was no longer being used and was retired. All WU's and projects that used it had reached completion. The rest of the post was an announcement that development was being done on a folding core that would incorporate OpenMM 7 computations into the code used.

As for GPU's being usable, all pre-Fermi cards have been deprecated and marked as unsupported in the GPUs.txt file. They are trying to figure out a way to determine based on performance which low end Fermi and later GPU's might also be marked as unsupported. Some work is being done on designating which projects are more suitable for lower performance GPU's as compared to high end ones like the nVidia 1080.

P.S. Core_17 folding is pretty close to finished if not already done. The work that is available is mostly for Core_21 and some is left that uses Core_18.

[Kittyhawk]

Thanks for the replies.

I thought Core15 made a temporary come back.

[JimboPalmer]

As a researcher starts a new project, he/she typically chooses the latest core available to do the best science on available hardware.
However, due to the serial nature of analyzing folding, it may take years for all projects for a given core to finish. No one wants to start over with a new core.
So we often see WUs available for cores that have been announced as End of Life. And some times a researcher needs to run additional data through a core that is otherwise defunct.

So it is wildly unlikely any more Core_15 WUs will appear, it is not impossible if good science requires it.

(We are seeing this on CPUs right now. Core_a4 has been running since the Pentium 4, so no current PC cannot run Core_a4. The newly announced Core_a7 works better on Haswell or newer Intel CPUs and Zen or better AMD CPUs, both of which support new SIMD math instructions called AVX2. These new CPUs may be twice as fast at F@H, so I suspect no new Projects will use Core_a4. However it may take years before Core_a4 is retired. Fortunately Core _a7 also runs on most older CPUs, just slower. It drops back to SSE2 instructions)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_( ... chitecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(microarchitecture)

There is some chance Core_a7 will not run on Pentium 4 CPUs, before 2006.