Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Scotttheking · Apr 26, 2004, 04:01 AM

Last week the folks at Stanford changed how the scoring system works. The short version is, Tinkers no longer massively suck.

If you have an Athlon machine other then an Athlon 64, you might want to remove the -advmethods flag. I'd recommend testing this more, as I've not had the time to do any real testing, but it has been stated by more then a few people that Athlons are now better at Tinkers then Gromacs.
The details:
There are now 3 types of WU.
<ol>
____<li type="disc">Tinkers
____<li type="disc">Gromacs
____<li type="disc">Double Gromacs
</ol>

Tinkers have no optimizations, Gromacs use SSE, and Double Gromacs use SSE2.
All are now benchmarked on a P4 2.8Ghz. The benchmark has SSE on, but SSE2 off.

As a result, Tinkers no longer are at a disadvantage to Gromacs. Double Gromacs require SSE2, which is found on P4 and AMD64 based machines. Double Gromacs are now the sweet units to run, if your machine has SSE2.
On Pentium based machines it's still good to use the -advmethods flag to get mainly gromacs WUs.
For Athlons, however, it's best to go for Tinkers. The Athlon has a strong FPU, and it shines on the unoptimized tinker WUs. To do this, remove the -advmethods flag from Athlon machines.

SciFrog · Apr 26, 2004, 09:12 AM

That is great, we might not have to throw away tinker units anymore.

But how does it affect the G4/G5? Afterall this is a Mac Team...

Scotttheking · Apr 26, 2004, 12:29 PM

Originally posted by SciFrog:
That is great, we might not have to throw away tinker units anymore.

But how does it affect the G4/G5? Afterall this is a Mac Team...

You should not be deleting WU. Period. If you don't like the WU, don't run the project.

As for Tinkers on the Mac, it's still the same core. The WU are just worth more points.

tazwegion · May 4, 2004, 09:18 PM

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
You should not be deleting WU. Period. If you don't like the WU, don't run the project.

As for Tinkers on the Mac, it's still the same core. The WU are just worth more points.

Yeah like 249 points for p1110_L939_K12M_nat_min1...Nice!

BTW nice job fending of the F@H Malaysian hoardes

Lateralus · May 4, 2004, 09:58 PM

Somebody explain to me, as a SETI/RC5 guy: Why is Folding@Home so much more competitive than other distributed computing projects? I cannot recall the last time that I saw team-challenges between SETI teams.

And I must admit, the competitive side of Folding@Home appeals to me, even if the goals of the project itself do not.

reader50 · May 5, 2004, 12:01 AM

Active client optimization. F@H uses Altivec, SSE, 3DNow, etc. SETI did have such cross-team challenges once, but they have more people participating than they have work for, so they do not care about the client's quality or optimization.

My guess is that the most competitive people get turned off by that and seek other projects. dFold was really competitive (and the project guy seems to care), but they reset stats and cannot seem to get their client updates to work reliably.

The interteam action seems to happen in Folding and D2OL today - the D2OL client also makes use of Altivec and they seem to have fixed their stats server problems after a long dry spell.

RC5 is optimized, but talking people into competing there is kinda hard.

Zimmerman · May 5, 2004, 11:39 AM

It sounds to me like PowerMacMan needs to move his farm over from that SETI/RC5 nonsense to Folding@Home.

billybob128 · May 5, 2004, 02:31 PM

But how does it affect the G4/G5? Afterall this is a Mac Team...

on a G3 and G5 (i dont have a G4 but maybe soon a 15"pBook

) they still take donkie years but are now just more worth it. i never no how many points im gonna get - i usually get betas oh well as long as i gt points i dont care

and i second the echo of well done fending malaysia off congrats team!!!

Welnic · May 5, 2004, 03:27 PM

I have picked up a couple of Double Gromacs on one of my G4s. They use Core 79. I don't have any real idea of whether they were worth more or less per time than a regular Gromacs.

OneMacGuy · May 5, 2004, 05:27 PM

Originally posted by Welnic:
I have picked up a couple of Double Gromacs on one of my G4s. They use Core 79. I don't have any real idea of whether they were worth more or less per time than a regular Gromacs.

If you have any Windoze machines running in your farm, there is a really good tool for monitoring all of your farms production from the one PeeCee. It is called F@HStats. It can monitor as many computers as you have on your network, all you have to do is share the directory where your folding clients run. It will tell how many points any one protien is worth and will also give you an estimate of your average time per frame, time until completion, points per day per CPU and points per day/week for your entire farm. Very usefu1 to monitor production!!!

Lateralus · May 5, 2004, 05:30 PM

Originally posted by Zimmerman:
It sounds to me like PowerMacMan needs to move his farm over from that SETI/RC5 nonsense to Folding@Home.

But with RC5, there is always the hope of winning prize money if you find the key.

I'll admit though, I am becoming more open to the thought of running Folding.

Quick question: How much of an advantage to AltiVec Macs have over PCs in Folding? I know that in RC5, the G4 is 6.4x faster than the Pentium 4 and around 3.5x faster than the Athlon.

Zimmerman · May 5, 2004, 08:36 PM

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
But with RC5, there is always the hope of winning prize money if you find the key.

I'll admit though, I am becoming more open to the thought of running Folding.

Quick question: How much of an advantage to AltiVec Macs have over PCs in Folding? I know that in RC5, the G4 is 6.4x faster than the Pentium 4 and around 3.5x faster than the Athlon.

I can't comment on the optimizations but would reccomend at the very least you get rid of that SETI cockamamey and donate your spare cycles to a real cause. If aliens want to contact us, we won't need SETI to discover the signal.

Lateralus · May 5, 2004, 08:54 PM

BLASPHEMY! BLASPHEMY I TELL YOU!

I still believe in SETI, but I stopped running it a few months ago after I finished about 1,100 WUs. The client isn't as submissive when it comes to processor useage as many would have you think.

reader50 · May 6, 2004, 03:46 AM

I really like the SETI idea, along with SciFi in general. But they have all the power they need already, and the client runs poorly on my SuperComputer, and I'd already crunched 1K+, so ...

If either one of those points changed, I'd be right back on SETI. Optimized client, or more work units then users. BOINC may bring both conditions about, but until then, it's mostly been F@H for me.