Folding Forum

I have the V7.4.4 client installed on a Windows 7 PC. The machine has Core-i7 CPU capable of 16 threads and two EVGA GPUs in an SLI configuration. I currently have three slots configured - one for the CPU and one each for the two GPUs in the SLI. I'd like to create a custom folding profile which uses all of the CPU threads and both GPUs to fold when my machine is idle and one of the two GPUs and about 1/2 my available threads when I am using the PC. I suspect that using the advanced options to configure my three folding slots might be able to accomplish this. Can some point me to how to do it?

Thanks,

- Fred (HHComputers)

Setting up either profile is not difficult, but there are (at least) two further problems:
1) I'm not aware of a built-in way to switch between two profiles. You can use the power slider to reduce CPU usage (they will back off anyway with the normal OS task scheduler if you run interactive user tasks), but I don't think moving the slider can pause one of two GPU slots.
2) You may well not want to use all the threads on CPU while GPUs are running. Core_17 (and I assume _18) needs a thread to feed the GPU. The feed runs a polling loop to look for GPU completion, so maximum GPU performance requires a dedicated thread PER GPU. In practice it might be possible to leave one thread for two GPUs, but the GPUs will certainly slow down if all threads are allocated to CPU folding. Experimentation is required to find the best config for given hardware, and a change in projects might alter the optimum setting.

The current client options only allow you to get only halfway. My suggestion would be to set one GPU slot to fold while idle. Let the second GPU full full-time. And let the CPU fold full-time. And then see if reducing the CPU load is actually necessary. The CPU slot does a better job of load-balancing with other applications. And the GPU that goes idol will also free up another CPU court to use as needed.

It is possible to send profile setting changes via batchfile or other scripting but that becomes more complicated.

Thanks for the help with this! A couple of follow-on questions -
1. How can set one GPU slot to always fold and the other to only fold on idle?
2. Is there a way to get a GPU slot to fold when the Folding power slider is set to "Light"

Thanks again for the help!

One more thing - can someone point me towards a summary of the advanced options for the folding slots and also for the command line options to manage the Windows client from a batch file?

Thanks again!

Fred (HHComputers)

You can get a list of the command line options by opening a command line prompt and entering:

FAHClient --help

(I think that will work on Windows, I run Macs so can't be sure of the syntax)

There's more information on options here:

https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... tUserGuide

but I'm unsure how up to date it is.

1. Right-click the slot to set it to run when idle. The other slots will follow the power slider.
2. The light setting on slider is the same as using # 1 but for all slots. On idle folding engages when monitor goes in to standby. https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... anceLevels
3. Was covered already with the --help switch. Read the windows install guide in the fah site if not already.

Thank you both for the help. Let me experiment a bit and I'll post back to this forum on what I came up with so that other may benefit.

- Fred (HHComputers)