Folding Forum

You're folding on solar power? That's pretty cool. That by choice or is that your only means of power?

Walter wrote:I've been Folding At Home since 2011. My ranking this year varied between 2352 and 2360 until April. Now it is 2491. I had been folding on two desktops using the GPU only, but added the CPUs two weeks ago when WU's became scarce.. Both desktops have Intel I7 processors, one 4 cores the other 6. My ranking still declined. Both GPU are Radeon RX 560s. Are AMD GPUs more prone to not get WUs than Nvidea GPUs? If not what has changed? I have installed version 7.6.9


Date of last Work Unit 2020-05-04 00:45:28
Total score 272,602,868
Total WUs 29,893
Overall rank (if points are combined) 2,491 of 2,671,446
Active clients (within 50 days) 4
Active clients (within 7 days) 4

Just for some perspective on rankings......

I'm folding on modest hardware, and for a fairly short time (weeks not years) since I've got a passkey.

I've got a total score of 1,288,698 and am currently ranked 164,565. You have over 200 times my total points. But you probably generated many of those points using more power, more financial resources, and more system time. You had the disadvantage of being in the community when it took more resources. But yet if you stopped today it would take me years and years to catch up with what you've already done, even if I let my system run 24/7 for those years.

My point here being that when you look at how quickly I've climbed the rankings, you see that at some point, very few long term folders such as yourself have really pulled a huge amount of weight. Though the total rankings down to numbers between us would probably be hard to figure out, I suspect that a very small percentage of folders has shouldered the majority of the science contribution over the years. Being in the top few thousand is an amazing contribution IMHO, and something you should be quite happy with even if your ranking slips.


So for you, all the other long term folders, as well as the new folders throwing more financial and higher tech resources at this research.... Thank you all for your dedication and resolve to stay in this as long as you have.

This is a project where you should hope to become irrelevant. I have known from the beginning that newer cards would come along and I would stop upgrading at some point.
It is OK with me. The newer cards are more efficient, and will save energy. I am ultimately limited by heat dissipation, and can turn my attention to CPU work when that time comes.
(I never had any notion of getting so far anyway, but I am now #5 on Team 0, as "Jim1348").

BobWilliams757 wrote:
Just for some perspective on rankings......

I'm folding on modest hardware, and for a fairly short time (weeks not years) since I've got a passkey.

I've got a total score of 1,288,698 and am currently ranked 164,565. You have over 200 times my total points. But you probably generated many of those points using more power, more financial resources, and more system time. You had the disadvantage of being in the community when it took more resources. But yet if you stopped today it would take me years and years to catch up with what you've already done, even if I let my system run 24/7 for those years.

My point here being that when you look at how quickly I've climbed the rankings, you see that at some point, very few long term folders such as yourself have really pulled a huge amount of weight. Though the total rankings down to numbers between us would probably be hard to figure out, I suspect that a very small percentage of folders has shouldered the majority of the science contribution over the years. Being in the top few thousand is an amazing contribution IMHO, and something you should be quite happy with even if your ranking slips.


So for you, all the other long term folders, as well as the new folders throwing more financial and higher tech resources at this research.... Thank you all for your dedication and resolve to stay in this as long as you have.

My personal opinion,
Once RTX 3000 series get released, most people's records will be easily overtaken.
Even if you had 1 Billion Points, owning 2 or 3x 3000 series GPUs, it would take you only a few months (probably half a year or less).
There aren't many numbers out yet, but it wouldn't be surprising if the budget 3000 series will pull 2-3Mil PPD (at 130Watts of 170W), the mid-range 3000 series GPUs 4 to 5M PPD (at 150W of 225W), and the top end might get close to 6 to 7M PPD (at 220W of 300W) on one GPU!

Congrats Walter and iceman1992 on folding for so long.

If you are looking at nvidia, there are some options in the 120W range that will produce much more PPD then the RX560. This is the stats I'm currently seeing on my hardware, all project 16443 I guess the 65W version of the RX560 is the RX560 OC, which I never managed to get working on F@H, so its not been folding.
Btw, kudos for folding on solar power, that's very cool!

Don't know how much advice I can give on upgrading, especially in a shaky economy. I've been folding since on a number of teams, since 2010 to 2012. Joined the Pande Team the latter half of last year. My principle PC is a single desktop with an I-4770 processor, now ~5 years old on a GigaByte motherboard with Windows 10 ("upgraded" from 7). It's obviously slower than the newer processors out there, but still is holding its own. Started at 8GB, upgraded it to 32GB a couple of years ago. The system was putting out 25,000-30,000 points per day CPU only, usually kept the FAH speed at low to medium. Worked up to around 100th place or so by early March on the team --- then COVID-19 became a big issue.

The motherboard has it's own video card, much too slow to participate in FAH work. What was amazing was the number of new GPU folders blowing by me like I was standing still. In late March, I decided to try adding a GPU and contribute to the virus research. Chose a GigaByte GEFORCE GTX 1660 card. The old board and CPU accepted it with no problems (was sort of expecting a CPU/MB update to further enable the GPU). I am not an active gamer, but do like a fast and reliable platform. So had to do a little research work and deal with the sticker shock of a new GPU. This one was around $240. See some GPU's sell at well over $1000. One of them plus a newer CPU could produce some insane performance. Maybe some out there could suggest other cards that could help others reinvigorate an older system.

My points production shot up from the 25-30k to 400-500K per day thanks to the addition of this card. With a more stable background at FAH central after they were overwhelmed by the multitude of new folders, my system seems to be working fine and stable. Some benefits, the video quality is a bit higher, and my son loves a better gaming display in comparison to what we had before. With "anti-global warming" going on, have been on "medium" speed since installing the GPU. If real spring warmth ever returns, will probably go to the slow speed considering heat issues. The team (and most other) have a number of smoking machines that'll past me over the next few weeks to months if they stay active. Even so, a faster system will keep me from being totally crushed...

Many thanks for all of your contributions!!
Robby

I have a pretty modest setup. Pleased to invite others, including big-time gamers to fold with their hot GPU's My score is a few million, likely to be overtaken in a few hours. I was really proud when my rank fell below 100,000!

Julian xxx

I have an all-in-one with good cooling and an 8700T which has always been throttled to 3GHz, plus a GTX1050 mobile card, the NV x50 series have always been the 'cooking' cards. Plus a lappy with a Xeon E3-1535M v5 and a Quadro M2000M. To un-throttle the CPU in the laptop I have placed it in a wide-open window, but it barely exceeds 2GHz while the GPU is running. It was missing deadlines when running at 800MHz, though! I hope it will get faster by night. This lot can score about 250,000 points per day, but the numerous small devices will make the difference if enough people can be convinced to do this. Will it run on phones? If everyone gave just a little bit of phone time it would be amazing. You'd expect them to run on low power, to conserve battery, but there are so many out there.

JulianM wrote:...Will it run on phones? If everyone gave just a little bit of phone time it would be amazing. You'd expect them to run on low power, to conserve battery, but there are so many out there.

Welcome to the F@H Forum JulianM,

Few years ago, there was an Android App that was developed by Sony to for F@H. When Sony stopped supporting it, the Android App was taken offline. AFAIK, folding on phones is an a wish-list and weather or not it happens, is unknown at this stage. The last official word was they plan to bring it back after working on the back-end infrastructure.

Right now, it appears that Android limits access to the Big cores of a Big-Little core configuration to just the little cores.
The big cores are there for loading programs, but as soon as the program is loaded, it gets offloaded to the little (slower) cores.
Which means that a Big-Little CPU of 8 cores, only can work on 4 of the 8 cores without frying the battery.
Basically a quadcore ~2Ghz max.
GPUs are still transitioning too fast to be effectively used on phones.
Even Boinc doesn't use them.
True, a modern day phone is faster than a PS3. But PC hardware has evolved since, and is so much more powerful than phones.
A quadcore phone at 2Ghz, roughly equals the performance of a dual core 3Ghz x86 CPU; which isn't particularly fast.

I apologise wholeheartedly for lowering your and any other existing folder's positions in the leader boards and causing such grievance. However, contributions are not something to be competitive about anyway. While your length of time contributing is indeed impressive and has been rightly recognised above already, we are all here to donate computing power regardless of hardware concerned so that makes everyone's efforts of equal worth whether new or long time folders

PS - I don't intend to stop folding when COVID-19 units end, I'm here for the long haul too. I used to use BOINC but that didn't leverage my GPU like F@H can. I have solar power as well so fold during daylight hours only. My machine uses around 380W maximum when both CPU and GPU are folding, that includes everything connected to the UPS though and not just the tower. The panels generate 10x that amount according to the inverter readout so it's not really that much of a hit.

NRT_AntiKytherA wrote:I apologise wholeheartedly for lowering your and any other existing folder's positions in the leader boards and causing such grievance. However, contributions are not something to be competitive about anyway. While your length of time contributing is indeed impressive and has been rightly recognised above already, we are all here to donate computing power regardless of hardware concerned so that makes everyone's efforts of equal worth whether new or long time folders

PS - I don't intend to stop folding when COVID-19 units end, I'm here for the long haul too. I used to use BOINC but that didn't leverage my GPU like F@H can. I have solar power as well so fold during daylight hours only. My machine uses around 380W maximum when both CPU and GPU are folding, that includes everything connected to the UPS though and not just the tower. The panels generate 10x that amount according to the inverter readout so it's not really that much of a hit.

I also have pretty cheap energy, I am going up the ranks fairly quick, I hope I can help, even if it is a small contribution. I also think that your rank is no big deal.

The only reason I look at the stats and use the signature is so I can quickly refer to it and track what my machines are doing. When my linux machine is folding (as and when I am in the office for the day) I don't have either the viewer or fahcontrol installed, webview only shows so much detail.

As weird it may seem I prefer FAHControl over the Web Interface. I have more control and I prefer the way it displays information.

So do I, I use it on my windows machine, I especially like the log view function but I am not able to get it working with Ubuntu 20.04 (there's a modified build but that doesn't work either). I was using Manjaro KDE before and had no problems whatsoever with the arch builds of the client.

EDIT - got it working will share the solution that did the trick.