Folding Forum

Hello everyone guess I'm a new "folder" I'd say?

Recently received a PS3 and discovered it came shipped with F@H, so I decided to check it out. Ended up at the stanford folding site and learned what it was all about. I have a PC running win xp I use once in a while, running an Athlon XP 2800+ (yea old one) so I put F@H client on that. I also have a P3 ~700 MhZ laptop laying around (really really old) running Ubuntu linux, which is now folding as well! I know they are really small contributions, but atleast they are doing something instead of nothing now (the PC and the laptop), and I have 3 machines folding in my own room

However, I also have a couple questions. I have an xbox (original, not 360) sitting around that I pretty much only use for watching movies (I threw a 160gb HDD in it, and I just FTP movies to the hard drive to watch) and also have Gentoox (gentoo for xbox) on it. Xbox has a Celeron 733 MhZ processor in it, with only 64MB of ram. Do you guys think it would be possible to run the linux F@H core?

This then leads to my next question...
Playstation 2 I am also capable of running linux on this machine (probably BlackRhino but gentoo I'll try) and it has a 128-bit ~300MhZ CPU, 32MB RDRAM. Would it be even worth it to use F@H on a PS2 even if possible?
*(Personally don't know about these specs... but found it somewhere: Co-processor: FPU (Floating Point Unit),
Floating point multiply accumulator x1, Floating point divider x1
Vector units: VU0 and VU1, Floating point multiply accumulator x9,
Floating point divider x3
Floating point performance: 6.2 GFLOPS)*

Or does anyone know if there are any optimizations available to make use of Xbox and PS2?

Thanks

heavydB wrote:However, I also have a couple questions. I have an xbox (original, not 360) sitting around that I pretty much only use for watching movies (I threw a 160gb HDD in it, and I just FTP movies to the hard drive to watch) and also have Gentoox (gentoo for xbox) on it. Xbox has a Celeron 733 MhZ processor in it, with only 64MB of ram. Do you guys think it would be possible to run the linux F@H core?

The F@H FAQ says a minimum of 64 MB is required and if it's not there the console client segfaults. The FAQ doesn't say whether that's 64 MB free or 64 MB total.

Your Celeron does have SSE which is a good thing for F@H. It only has 128 KB of L2 cache which isn't so good.

heavydB wrote:This then leads to my next question... Playstation 2 I am also capable of running linux on this machine

The linux core is set up for x86, not Emotion Engine. So, it won't run.

Ah thanks for the info! Guess the xbox is a go then, ill use the ps2 for other purposes
If needed I could probably get the xbox to 128mb ram, but it should run F@H no problem as it is right?

heavydB wrote:If needed I could probably get the xbox to 128mb ram, but it should run F@H no problem as it is right?

Welcome to the folding forum, heavydB, and to the FAH project.

I think you might be the first person to try this, but I don't see any obvious reasons why it won't work. Many projects require more than 64MB. See the "memory" column of the Server Status page.

Nevertheless, even small contributions add up to bigger ones when there are lots of people donating.

Hmm I noticed that all the projects either have a 64MB requirement, or 200+ which is beyond the max 128MB I can get from the xbox, meaning even if I did acquire more ram it wouldn't amount to much for use by F@H. Besides, I don't feel like trying to solder RAM chips on the xbox mobo

Since all the xbox controller ports are USB ports anyways, I just have to build a converter USB female -> controller port so i can atleast use a keyboard. Already got gentoo loaded up on it, but unable to type anything... unless I can telnet in commands or something, will be a few days at most til I attempt to fold on it.

Also gonna build a new system soon, mine is a bit outdated. So looks like I'm gonna have 5 machines in my room folding

According to the gurus at Team 32's forums (3rd place team), the Xbox folding isn't really worth it. I never checked how many PPD my Xbox was doing when I ran it half-a-year ago, but one of the guys had a 700mhz pentium 2 or 3 processor (I forget) with 256 RAM that only pumped out 40-50PPD. Considering the electricity the Xbox uses, it's not really worth it performance/cost wise, but then again, every WU counts.