Incoming horsepower

Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
edited September 2007 in Folding@Home
Taking advantage on the latest price cuts, I will be adding a couple of Q6600´s to fold for the team.

They should add up quite a few more points to my little folding farm consisting of 3 AMD X2s and one Solo notebook. :)

I just hope they dont suck up too much electricity! I´d like to stay as green as possible. :bigggrin:

Comments

  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    Ultra Nexus wrote:
    Taking advantage on the latest price cuts, I will be adding a couple of Q6600´s to fold for the team.
    WHAT.. a couple of them!!! :wow2:

    Look everyone, someone is gonna be flying up the standings soon!!!! :D
  • QeldromaQeldroma Arid ZoneAh Member
    edited August 2007
    Ultra Nexus wrote:
    Taking advantage on the latest price cuts, I will be adding a couple of Q6600´s to fold for the team.

    They should add up quite a few more points to my little folding farm consisting of 3 AMD X2s and one Solo notebook. :)

    Indeed they shall- likely double or more the production of your current farm. While I don't find that a Kentsfield doubles the production of an equivalently clocked Conroe on SMPs, it's pretty close.
    Ultra Nexus wrote:
    I just hope they dont suck up too much electricity! I´d like to stay as green as possible. :bigggrin:

    No such luck. Even the G0's- though a bit more efficient- will suck down lotsa watts- especially if overclocking. Fortunately it won't be like having twice as many Conroe rigs :D . Next gen. quads should fare better.

    Still- they'll make great contributors for the project :thumbsup:
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited August 2007
    I hope so!

    Anyway, I bought a couple of Gigabyte´s GA-G33M-S2 that has the power efficient VRM circuitry... I´ll test the rigs with the kill-a-watt and see how much they take and compare it with the X2 (which I will now set at default speeds and undervolt as much as possible) and then compare each other for Watt/PPD values. :)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    Good deal. The two Q6600s should more than double (way more than double) your current production. Probably just one Q6600 would approximate the production of all your current rigs. Wouldn't surprise me if your production climbs to three times its current level.
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    Just to give you an idea on the production, depending on the WU, my Q6600 (currently @ 2.81 and slowly going up from there) is putting out ~2500 PPD.
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited August 2007
    So far so good! The first quad has arrived and its folding @ 3Ghz (333x9, DDR2 800 4-4-4-12, 2T) for about 9min/frame on those 1760 pointers. Thats about 2800PPD if I am not mistaken.
    Just like Leonardo said, thats about the same output the other 3 X2s (@ 2.75Ghz/2.5/2.5) did, and all for 200w (measured at the outlet, 230v). Not bad! :)
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited August 2007
    Sweet keep them folding :)

    Are you running SMP?
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited August 2007
    Sledgehammer70 wrote:
    Sweet keep them folding :)

    Are you running SMP?

    All of them :bigggrin:
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited September 2007
    My E6600@~3.1GHz does 1800-1900 PPD according to FahMon with the 1760 point WUs. Doubling the cores doesnt double the PPD? I was thinking about getting a cheap mobo to slap my E6600 in and getting a Q6600 for my desktop but I will rethink it if I cant double the PPD at the same speed.
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    mmonnin wrote:
    My E6600@~3.1GHz does 1800-1900 PPD according to FahMon with the 1760 point WUs. Doubling the cores doesnt double the PPD? I was thinking about getting a cheap mobo to slap my E6600 in and getting a Q6600 for my desktop but I will rethink it if I cant double the PPD at the same speed.

    Thats correct... I found this thread where somebody states the same.

    A possible solution would be to install 2 VMwares with 2 cores assigned to each other and check if they fold just like 2 independant E6600s.
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited September 2007
    Hmm seems to be too much overhead for it to double the PPD. Sucks as I was hoping to go from 1800+ to like 3700+ on 1 machine. With a Q6600, E6600, OPty 165 and some random points here and there that would have put me at like top 5 on the team.

    Anyone know how much VMware overhead would take away from the machine's performance?
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    I am experimenting with VMware on the Quad atm... running two virtual machines with 2 cores assigned each... and see if it impruves the productivity for this rig. I´ll post once I gather more details. :)
  • QeldromaQeldroma Arid ZoneAh Member
    edited September 2007
    mmonnin wrote:
    My E6600@~3.1GHz does 1800-1900 PPD according to FahMon with the 1760 point WUs. Doubling the cores doesnt double the PPD?
    No. My math on one sample came up with about 93% of that. As mentioned it doesn't quite scale up with the number of cores because of the IP overhead, etc, and I suspect it's complicated further by the fact that the cores on the Q6600 are not symmetric (basically 2 Conroe cans FSB'd together). So maybe when you VMW it Nex, you might see if you can set the core affinities to align with the Conroe cans as well.

    I'm also not entirely sold yet that the client itself is optimal on a quad- but I can't gather any evidence to bear that out.

    Maybe a more symmetric quad like the Barcelona will fare noteably better- but I don't know yet.

    EDIT ADDED: Still, I think the Q6600 fares better performance/cost-efficiency-wise than a pair of equivalent Conroe rigs- but it's not as good as I hoped and I am a little dissappointed.

    Also, my 93% was based on the Q6600 compared to my T7200- so it's more apples to oranges. I'd round it off and go with 90.
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    OK, so far both instances running on diverent VMs (Suse 10.1 x64) over Windows 2003 Server (32bit) with VMware Workstation 5.5 are performing better than just one stand alone SMP client.

    I´ve set the affinity as you mentioned for cores 1, 2 for VM1 and 3, 4 for VM2 and they are performing VERY similar to a stand alone E6600. I believe I am now producing near 3500PPD for this quad @ 3Ghz

    I wonder if a 64bit host would improve it further... too bad I could not install VMware ESX since the damn Jmicro IDE chip is not supported. :(
  • QeldromaQeldroma Arid ZoneAh Member
    edited September 2007
    Ultra Nexus wrote:
    I believe I am now producing near 3500PPD for this quad @ 3Ghz

    Haha! :vimp::thumbsup::smokin:

    If you fold two of those now with the rest of your farm, it looks like you're in the +50,000ppw club :thumbsup:

    Sounds like it might be a PITA for those not familiar with it- you could probably publish a guide here with all the Q6600s coming along.
    Ultra Nexus wrote:
    I wonder if a 64bit host would improve it further... too bad I could not install VMware ESX since the damn Jmicro IDE chip is not supported. :(

    Actually, unless I'm missing something, I think your rigs should do the dp math just fine since the CPU supports it- and that's where most of FAH is done. It's when you start bussing I/O and needing more memory space that 64 bit becomes both beneficial and problematic. Another thing is how the client is written- but I can't give you details there.

    All I can say is SWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEETTT!!!
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    I believe I am now producing near 3500PPD for this quad @ 3Ghz
    After I picked myself up off the floor, I felt very insecure. That feeling then changed to blind envy and rage.

    Your output on one computer is 75% of what I'm doing with four, highly overclocked, stable, dual core computers all running Windows SMP!

    What's even more amazing, is that you are accomplishing that remarkable production at one-quarter the power consumption that I am.

    I feel positively ill! I'm going to go have a drink. Oh, can't do that - still at work and need to drive home. OK, I'll go have a smoke. Oh wait, can't do that either. I quit.

    It's really time to tell my Presler dual cores goodbye, but the upgrading...my wife is the accountant. My money laundering skills are just not up to the task.

    Or...I could just re-read the post.
    I believe I am now producing near 3500PPD for this quad @ 3Ghz
    The operative word is "believe." ha ha Let's see some hard facts, brother! :mad:

    :cool:
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    Qeldroma wrote:
    Sounds like it might be a PITA for those not familiar with it- you could probably publish a guide here with all the Q6600s coming along.


    If that makes us accomplish the 200kppd goal by year´s end, its worth it!! :D
    Leonardo wrote:

    What's even more amazing, is that you are accomplishing that remarkable production at one-quarter the power consumption that I am.

    I am amased as well, I can tell you that! Even compared to my farm of X2s, its WAY over efficient, both in term of PPD and watts consumed. I know Preslers are heavy watt eaters and unfortunatelly do not produce much PPD, even compared to a X2. If you could somehow sell them and get one single quad for 24/7 folding, that would be like a real winner!! :)


    EDIT: I have finally addressed a couple of issues with this configuration.

    One is that for whatever reason it is, the clock on the VMs was running too fast, so that for each local Host hour, the VM would run 2 hours more, completely desincronized from the Host. So it was impossible to see a clear time per frame accuratelly. I fixed this by installing VMware Tools which has an option to sincronize with the host. I can see the time per frames correctly now!

    The other thing is that I have now upgraded the VMware Workstation to the latest version 6. Among some cool features, it has a VNC server so I can monitor the VMs from a client (I use TinyVNC) from my main rig. Awesome!

    Now the good stuff, both VMs are working on a p2653 (1760 points) WU with an average of 13minutes 25 seconds! :eek3:

    If my math is correct thats 3750PPD for both VMs!! :wow:

    Anyway, I´ve attached a pic of my current Quad folder rig. :D
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    I know Preslers are heavy watt eaters and unfortunatelly do not produce much PPD, even compared to a X2.
    Oh oh...watch it, mister! :mad: The Preslers are indeed Netburst technology, but at least they are the final, crowning achievement (a tin crown) of Netburst. They are 65nm (18 months before AMD) and overclock like crazy. The power consumption is not good, but it's not crazy bad like with the first Intel dual cores - stone age Smithfield core, 90nm. Additionally, the D9xx series (Presler) have 2MB L2 cache per core (4MB total) and are not outproduced by X2. X2s have 1MB/per core. Manchester has 512Kb? But yes, no doubt about it, Core 2 Duo and Intel quad core decisively humble Preslers...and AMD dual core.

    These are the WinSMP PPD averages for my old, but dignified Preslers:

    2610: 1115-1200
    2651: 1120-1215
    2652: 885-965
    2653: 1080-1260

    OK, I have now defended my old tech computers and feel better.


    Next comment please.

    :cool:
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited September 2007
    Wow thats pretty nice! A quick guide or a link on how to setup something like that would be awesome!
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    I´ll be posting a guide soon about doing this, for those who´d like to get the most out of their dedicated quad setups. :)
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    I'm looking forward to the guide :)
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    Here´s my setup in full production. :)

    The VMs are doing much better than what I expected. Only those p2652s are less productive...
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    No doubt about it - I'm gonna have to migrate to quad. I need to wait for quality overclocking boards to start appearing in online trading posts. My budget just won't allow right now to be upgrading with new components. My present systems were mostly built from parts sourced from trading forums and eBay. Upgraded systems will need to be so also.

    Nexus - that's excellent production. I'm admiring and jealous all at the same time.

    :mean::cheers::clap:
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