Folding Forum

I'm a folding newbie, running the smp client on my quad-opteron linux box now. I've been told I need to have a "time per frame" of ~40 minutes at the absolute most, and preferably much shorter than 40 minutes.

How do I know what my average time per frame is? How big is a frame and how do I determine how long it takes to complete one?

Thank you

Open the file fahlog.txt with notepad or some similar text editor and read it. You can run a monitoring application like HFM and it will provide you with all the info about the work in process and history that you could ask for.

HFM-NET: http://code.google.com/p/hfm-net/

Look at the FAHLog.txt file. Every WU time stamps each frame and one frame is 1% of the work. You don't really need any of the numbers on the line other than the time stamp and different cores put out different numbers anyway.

For a good average find the start of a WU, and then find the end of the WU. The timestamps will tell you when it started and when it ended. If the WU took more than a day then you have to take that time into consideration too, for the time stamps only list hour:minute:second. Convert the elapsed time to minutes and then divide by 100 to get an average frame time.

Another simple way is to install a monitoring program like HFM.net or FAHMON (found in the tools link above) and they will tell you explicitly rather than having to calculate from your logs.

Ah, ok, so each line of output corresponds with one frame? And one frame is equivalent to 1/100 of a work unit? I guess that makes sense. Sort of. In that case, my time per frame is about 10 minutes.

thank you

ChasR wrote:Open the file fahlog.txt with notepad or some similar text editor and read it. You can run a monitoring application like HFM and it will provide you with all the info about the work in process and history that you could ask for.

HFM-NET:

This hfm tool looks like Microsoft stuff? I don't have any microsoft windows machines. All are either Linux (Fedora 14 AMD64) or Mac OSX. But thanks anyhow.

You can use one of the 3rd party tools like FahMon or HFM. They show you the TPF for the current WU and client and also the estimated time for finishing the active WU. You can find a list of the tools by clicking on Tools in the header section of this forum. The TPF itself varies, a bit within the same WU but much more between different projects. TPF also depends on your hardware, e.g. my computer needs about 28-30 minutes for a frame of a 6701 WU but only ~ 12:30 min for a 6070 WU.
I use HFM, but as it works on Windows only so I can't hardly recommend it for your Linux box I'm sure there are Linux tools in the list which do the same.

HFM runs under mono in Linux.

torsionbar wrote:Ah, ok, so each line of output corresponds with one frame? And one frame is equivalent to 1/100 of a work unit? I guess that makes sense. Sort of. In that case, my time per frame is about 10 minutes.

thank you

10 minutes tpf - just what is in your quad opty box?? I'm guessing at 6176SE or similar?

10 TPF????

What WU?

If that's a bigadv (not a SMP) you be FLYIN! A 15 TPF is over 100k PPD.

no do not get too excited. this is not bigadv units, this is regular old smp units. it's an older machine. dual socket 940 with a pair of dual-core opteron 285's. total of four cores @ 2.6 ghz each and 8 GB of memory. nothing to write home about, but i have it laying around so might as well do some folding with it. thanks all