Folding Forum

My home lab has a server I use to host various VM's. At the moment I have some unused capacity to dedicate to FAH. The server is a SuperMicro rack server with dual Xeon X5650 (12 cores) and 72GB of RAM. I know this isn't a very powerful box but every little bit helps.

I started with one VM with one core and 1 GB of RAM. Once I got it running I cloned it and started another VM with 2 cores and 8GB of RAM. Both systems only used a peak of 50% CPU until I added a second CPU slot to each. Now they both run at 100% CPU. Neither system is using much of the RAM provided. The single-core 1GB VM reports just over 2000 PPD while the dual-core 8GB VM is doing around 7000 PPD.

I'm trying to find information about how to configure a given VM for the best return. Do I add cores to these VM's or spin up more VM's. Memory doesn't seem to be a factor but there must be a minimum.

I'm hoping to find the sweet spot for a few small systems instead of one big one. Then I can scale capacity as needed. I have a Docker Swarm. Has anyone tried working with containers?

Thanks,
AustinPowered
Team: Linux For Everyone

Use one VM with as many cores as you are willing to spare and then make sure the client running on that VM is using all of them. I would suggest a Linux VM for this, but Windows will work as well. The VM should be fine with 4GB of RAM. I believe there are Docker containers for the FAHClient as well -- or you can pretty non-invasively run it directly on the host a well and adjust the amount of CPU cores it gets as needed.

Welcome to the F@H Forum AustinPowered,

Just note that if you cloned a VM after it started processing a WU, the CLientID would be cloned which would cause issues for you. As extide mentioned, the best VM is a Linux one with as much CPUs as you can spare with 4 GBs or 8 GBs of RAM. Do keep in mind that heat generation and power usage will increase as CPU folding is rather intensive.

And do a quick search for large primes on these forums the are certain core counts to avoid