Folding Forum

Hello everyone!
I have a couple of questions, so here we go lol

Current installed program: Windows XP/2003/Vista System tray client installer with viewer: 6.23
1) When the system tray client is installed, on any computer I run, if I click on display on the system tray icon, the display window comes up and nearly locks up my whole computer. I have a pc that performs well on games, so not sure why I cannot process this too?

2) Why do I get way less points on my main desktop that seems to process these folds with steps of 2,500,000, where as my crappy desktop only does 30,000 step folds and I get nearly the same point values? I remember reading in the points section about this, but I still don't think it is fair that if you spend lots of money on your computer and process loads of more data, you get a less reward

3) Lets say your machine found a significant breakthrough. Would you get any recognition for that?

4) As a future request, could you make an option to start this up when the computer starts up instead of manually having to set this up?

5) I was wondering with all the work that everyone has done, how much time do you think we have saved if you to run this on a supercomputer? (If a supercomputer were to compute what everyone else has done, how much time would it take a supercomputer to do the equivalent I mean)

Thanks for your help everyone and hope to help continue folding
-Noop

Hello noop and welcome to the forum!

1) The display that comes with the systray is buggy and works for some people and not for others. It also takes up a considerable amount of CPU cycles. If you want to monitor your client's progress, try something from the monitoring section of the Tools List, like FahMon.

2) I forget what the step numbers mean, but some work units are inherently smaller than others. This doesn't mean you'll get fewer points; usually, there are more iterations in smaller work units. Secondly, the number of points you receive is based on the performance of the benchmark PC, not how many steps there are.

3) See this thread: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4468#p93872

4) In case you haven't done so yet, for right now, to start the systray client at Windows startup, find the Start Menu folder where the Folding@Home shortcut is located and copy it to the Start Menu's Startup folder.

5) If you were to ask this question about probably 5 years ago, a supercomputer might have saved time. However, FAH has grown considerably over the past 5 years, especially with the addition of the GPU clients, which produce results much faster. To have an idea of how much faster FAH now is, currently, according to the client stats section in the stats page (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... pe=osstats), FAH performs at the 4.7 petaFLOPS (FLOPS = FLoating point Operations Per Second; petaFLOPS = quadrillion FLOPS) or 8.5 petaFLOPS level depending on how you calculate it. To compare, the fastest supercomputer right now, which I believe is the Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, runs only at around 1.7 petaFLOPS at its peak.

Good luck folding!

noop wrote:Hello everyone!
I have a couple of questions, so here we go lol

Current installed program: Windows XP/2003/Vista System tray client installer with viewer: 6.23
1) When the system tray client is installed, on any computer I run, if I click on display on the system tray icon, the display window comes up and nearly locks up my whole computer. I have a pc that performs well on games, so not sure why I cannot process this too?

The visualizer has never functioned properly and uses up a lot of resources that would otherwise be used for folding. Don't use the viewer at this time. If you want to know your Points Per Day, use a third-party monitoring client like FahMon, which can be found in the 3rd Party contributed software board.

2) Why do I get way less points on my main desktop that seems to process these folds with steps of 2,500,000, where as my crappy desktop only does 30,000 step folds and I get nearly the same point values? I remember reading in the points section about this, but I still don't think it is fair that if you spend lots of money on your computer and process loads of more data, you get a less reward

Hardware specs on your different computers would help. If your main desktop has more than one physical core, you can either run multiple copies of the uniprocessor client (as many copies as you have physical cores) or run one instance of the SMP client (not highly recommended for beginners due to it being beta and being more difficult to set up and maintain). Point are an rough indication of science completed, and are not strictly based on steps. A small protein could be simulated over a larger number of steps in the same amount of processor time as a large protein over a smaller number of steps. Both could be equally valuable and would therefore have similar point values.

In addition, the main indication of your systems' performance is Points Per Day, not necessarily the point value of a specific Work Unit. Ideally if you have two work units WU 1 and WU 2, and WU 1 takes twice as long to complete as WU 2, it should net you twice as many points. But the PPD should be the same, since points are based on time to completion. Note that this comparison does not always hold up, especially not between WUs that run on different clients.

3) Lets say your machine found a significant breakthrough. Would you get any recognition for that?

While some Distributed Computing projects do that, the timescales on each WU for Folding@home are too short for any one donor to be able to claim a breakthrough.

4) As a future request, could you make an option to start this up when the computer starts up instead of manually having to set this up?

I'm fairly certain that installing the client as a service will do this. It's pretty easy to do on the Console client (under Advanced Options), and possible, although more difficult to set up, with the Systray client. If the wiki doesn't help enough (http://fahwiki.net/index.php/How_do_I_r ... Service%3F), someone else here could explain it.

5) I was wondering with all the work that everyone has done, how much time do you think we have saved if you to run this on a supercomputer? (If a supercomputer were to compute what everyone else has done, how much time would it take a supercomputer to do the equivalent I mean)

Thanks for your help everyone and hope to help continue folding
-Noop

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Afraid I don't have any hard data to make an estimate.

Hi welcome to the forum

1)the viewer in the new clients is broken don't use it.

2)If you have a dual or quad core processor you can either run the SMP or mutli uni-processors to get more ppd also if you have a newer video card you can run the GPU client and get really good ppd.

3) short answer no

4)console client installed as a service

5)From the FAQ

Why not just use a supercomputer?

Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer computing cycles than we do with the Folding@home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.

Awesome! Thanks for the great replies!

1 last off the topic question for everyone. When I run this my cpu usually hangs around 50C. (39-41C is idle)

Do you think this would be bad to run continuously?

Only 50 C??
50 C is normal because FAH pushes your CPU very hard with its assembly optimizations. You shouldn't need to worry too much unless your temperature begins to exceed your CPU's temperature limit, which varies with CPU model (use Google to find your CPU's limit).

Edit: for reference, my AMD Phenom has a limit of 61 C.

Cool, thanks for the replies.

I am giving the GPU version a go now as ATI Catalyst Control Center + Overclocking = Awesomeness

Thanks again everyone!
-Noop