Large Work Units

[mmonnin]

Stanford has recently started to release "Large WU." They are upwards of 5mb to download and take up LARGE amounts of RAM.

The core takes up much more memory than the 20 or mb it usually takes up. I have one right now that is using 150mb of memory! Some take upwards of 200mb.

WHY would you or I want to do such a thing?

These new WUs have a large amount of atoms and require more RAM to do the calculations. To compensate for the need of more RAM, Stanford is giving out an extra 15% point bonus for taking up large amounts of RAM.

How do I get them you ask?
1.) Version 5.00 has an option for getting large WUs.
2.) With version 4.0 you can get them with -advmethods some of the time if you have more than 256mb of RAM.

500mb+ is preferred and not more than 1 client if you only have 256 or 512.

I...I...forgot what I was going say damnit.

[KingFish]

Does anyone know how it'll behave with the large wu's/ram footprint with respect to benchmarks (regular benchmarks, not folding frame times) when having only idle priority? I'm only enabling large wu's on my personal farm machines with large amounts of ram but was curious if anyone has data on benchmarks since large amounts of ram are required. Will FAH "get out of the way" as before or have an impact on performance?

KF

[TheGr81]

I was wondering the same thing. I have two consoles going now. One is folding a large gromac wu, 88 megs. If I get a larger one I'm hoping it won't interfere with my gaming.

[mmonnin]

Not sure. Since games use a lot of RAM as well, I am not sure if it will effect the game. If anything about FAH will, this would be it.

[dragonV8]

Well, all i can say is:"Bring it on" hehe. All our puters have a minimum of 512meg ram and are dedicated folding machines. Only Sally's Main puter gets used for normal day to day stuff and it has 4x 512meg. The only other one is my laptop with 512meg. This is my daily machine.

Sure hope it will improve things points wise as we lost some this week due to them self destructing. No reason why. Posted a message at stanford. No reason given as yet. :-/

[muddocktor]

I've been beta testing these for around a month and I haven't noticed too many problems with them since the first few batches, which had a lot of early unit ends. Like I posted in another thread in here:

I believe that Stanford has set a minimum memory requirement of >240 MB ram for the v5 client and I think it's set for >500 MB for a v4 client to draw one of these big wu's. The big wu's have also been set to give 15% more points than a normal wu to compensate for the increased memory usage and bandwdth usage.

So if you are running the v4 client(either gui or console), you won't get one of these large wu's unless you have greater than 500 MB ram. With the v5 client, you can get them with just 256 MB ram though, but you can also specify if you want your machine to process the large wu's too with the new clients. I've been running 2 instances of large wu's on my main rig which has 512 MB ram but haven't had a much of a chance to test it while doing some kind of gaming since I had to go to work early. If you are concerned about performance while gaming, then only specify 1 client to run large wu's on HT P4's and don't use the large wu option on dedicated AMD machines if you are worried about gaming performance unless you have greater than 512 MB ram.

If you have a dedicated AMD folding machine and 256 MB ram, then install the v5 client and run large wu's as the performance with the present large wu's with 1 instance of large wu's is just fine for a dedicated machine and you can even do some light work or browse the net with no problem. On my dedicated folding P4 rig, I run 1 client specified with large wu and the other processing normal work with 256 MB ram with no problems.

[csimon]

I think I got one here at home.
p130_1RYP_AAAA_UM
151,432K Mem Usage
Project: 1301

[EyesOnly]

So is the memory usage the only sign or is there some other that em3 might show. BTW what amount of points can one expect from this kind of wu.

[muddocktor]

The ones I've been getting lately are worth 139 points.

[EyesOnly]

Not more. :(

/me still prefers tinkers. :D :fold:

[TheGr81]

I've got 2 running on a HT P4 system. One is 139 as muddocktor said. The other is for 240 points! :woowoo:

Normal PPW production is just over 1000 for the 240 point one. For normal, smaller WU's it's lucky if it hits 800. Now I want to see what happens when I shut off the other client!
:smokin:

EDIT: Still like tinkers, EO? ;D :D

[mmonnin]

Yeah I have one on my dualie and its either 240 or 244 and kicking some ass.

[EyesOnly]

What are the frame times on those. And i might rethink what i like. :D

[edcentric]

I am not sure if it is realted to the large wus. On dialup I am getting a lot faster send/rev speeds with the new wus. A Tinker transmits at 5-6 k/s, a Gromac at 2-3 k/s and the new units at 8-9 k/s. It must have to do with data structure. I have never looked a finished data file to see what the look like.
I do like what v5 with the large wus have done for my production.

[mmonnin]

Wow I have NEVER got that high of a download speed on dial-up. I wish tho.

Actually thats phyiscally impossible since 8-9kb/s is over 56k. Actually 64-72k. That and dial-up is limited to 53k.

[primesuspect]

hahahah..... large units ..... hahahaha

[IamMrRay]

I dunno if i ever got any but my system can take 2+ GB like nothing being that my swaps goto my spare sata150 drive