Ideas for Team Production Boost
the_technocrat
IC-MotY1Indy Icrontian
Note: this thread was moved here, so some of the comments below may not be in context... ;-) Feel free to post up your ideas on how to chunk out a few more cogs for T93!
My ideas:
get more org's
I've offered free IT support in the form of cleaning up organizations' Active Directory, scripts, etc. to a few places in return for no $, but that they run F@H. No-one took advantage of it, probably because they don't want an outsider in their AD. The rest of the org's I've approached think I'm taking some lame approach to installing spyware...
Turn on BigWU's, if you can!
I took another look at my machines, and have 2 30-machine labs that have good machines, but run crappy programs originally designed for Win98, etc. I set them to get the BigWU's (bigpackets=yes in the client.cfg) and have seen about a 4000 point-per-day increase for each lab I switched over to BigWU's. I just switched over the second lab on Friday, so we should see about an extra 4K/day from that one... But everyone take another look at your client.cfg and make sure there's an entry for bigpackets, if your rig can handle it, and if it won't affect the user...!
How to offset the purchase and operating cost of a 24/7 folding rig
Check out these two articles. You can get a thermostat for $35, which will put you well on your way towards the end goal of an extra $70/month or so to offset the cost of electricity. Just save up for the first three months, if you need to, to buy the rig. Kids, even if you don't pay the bills at your house, see if your parents will buy you a gaming/folding rig if you can find a way to save them $840/year or so on electric!
Programmable Thermostat
CF lights
Multiple video cards
Please note that Stanford has released a multi-GPU client. If you've got multiple cards, try it out, let us know if it works
PS3
If anyone on T93 is debating getting a PlayStation 3, you should already plan on getting F@H running on that thing. Please consider leaving it on whenever you're not playing. For the amount of crunching that beast can do, it uses a lot less power than a comparable PC. This is pretty much a no-brainer, so have that F@H client ready
GPU folding for SMx machines
Maybe we should have a bake sale, etc. to get video cards out to the SMx machines. I got a x1600 PRO AGP for my brother's machine from newegg. Adding that kind of processing power to machines that have an open slot seems to be a no-brainer. Especially since I just bought my brother an x1600PRO AGP from newegg for $108.
Group buy for GPU folding boxes
If S-M has an sway with an ATi-based video card company, I'd be interested to see if we could get cheap vid cards for folding in a group buy. I'm guessing we have lots of private folding boxes out there with an open AGP slot, and I think the manufacurer would be happy to move that much AGP stock...
Time on a big 'ol machine
I know we have people around here that have access to enterprise- or governmental-level supercomputing clusters. What does it cost to get time on one? What if you buy the maintenance staff lunch/drinks? I'm not talking about competing with research grants, etc. I'm just thinking floating a bribe to get them to crunch for an hour or two (or maybe overnight!) when no-ones using it, in return for a supply of Friday booze/pizza...?
Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head on how to boost production for T93. Competition is fun, but sledge is right, the research is very important. If we want to see ourselves doing as much as possible for the project, I think the points system can loosely translate to how well we're doing. In addition, for a crew of such small size, we can really show everyone how it's done out there, and maybe have them follow suit in our progress.
Anyone else have any ideas?
My ideas:
get more org's
I've offered free IT support in the form of cleaning up organizations' Active Directory, scripts, etc. to a few places in return for no $, but that they run F@H. No-one took advantage of it, probably because they don't want an outsider in their AD. The rest of the org's I've approached think I'm taking some lame approach to installing spyware...
Turn on BigWU's, if you can!
I took another look at my machines, and have 2 30-machine labs that have good machines, but run crappy programs originally designed for Win98, etc. I set them to get the BigWU's (bigpackets=yes in the client.cfg) and have seen about a 4000 point-per-day increase for each lab I switched over to BigWU's. I just switched over the second lab on Friday, so we should see about an extra 4K/day from that one... But everyone take another look at your client.cfg and make sure there's an entry for bigpackets, if your rig can handle it, and if it won't affect the user...!
How to offset the purchase and operating cost of a 24/7 folding rig
Check out these two articles. You can get a thermostat for $35, which will put you well on your way towards the end goal of an extra $70/month or so to offset the cost of electricity. Just save up for the first three months, if you need to, to buy the rig. Kids, even if you don't pay the bills at your house, see if your parents will buy you a gaming/folding rig if you can find a way to save them $840/year or so on electric!
Programmable Thermostat
CF lights
Multiple video cards
Please note that Stanford has released a multi-GPU client. If you've got multiple cards, try it out, let us know if it works
PS3
If anyone on T93 is debating getting a PlayStation 3, you should already plan on getting F@H running on that thing. Please consider leaving it on whenever you're not playing. For the amount of crunching that beast can do, it uses a lot less power than a comparable PC. This is pretty much a no-brainer, so have that F@H client ready
GPU folding for SMx machines
Maybe we should have a bake sale, etc. to get video cards out to the SMx machines. I got a x1600 PRO AGP for my brother's machine from newegg. Adding that kind of processing power to machines that have an open slot seems to be a no-brainer. Especially since I just bought my brother an x1600PRO AGP from newegg for $108.
Group buy for GPU folding boxes
If S-M has an sway with an ATi-based video card company, I'd be interested to see if we could get cheap vid cards for folding in a group buy. I'm guessing we have lots of private folding boxes out there with an open AGP slot, and I think the manufacurer would be happy to move that much AGP stock...
Time on a big 'ol machine
I know we have people around here that have access to enterprise- or governmental-level supercomputing clusters. What does it cost to get time on one? What if you buy the maintenance staff lunch/drinks? I'm not talking about competing with research grants, etc. I'm just thinking floating a bribe to get them to crunch for an hour or two (or maybe overnight!) when no-ones using it, in return for a supply of Friday booze/pizza...?
Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head on how to boost production for T93. Competition is fun, but sledge is right, the research is very important. If we want to see ourselves doing as much as possible for the project, I think the points system can loosely translate to how well we're doing. In addition, for a crew of such small size, we can really show everyone how it's done out there, and maybe have them follow suit in our progress.
Anyone else have any ideas?
0
Comments
<i>Lightning bolt!</i>
Don't think I can do it here. To my knowledge, all requests for computing time have to be approved by the powers that be. Also, I don't think that Folding would run unless it was expressly coded for the HPC machines (I'm not a computer scientist though, I don't really know how those work).
Perhaps I could drop a suggestion to the Roadrunner team, though. Folding runs on the PS3's Cell, so why not run it on a few of the Roadrunner's 16,560 Cell processors (Petaflop in the hizzouse) during initial set-up and testing?
erm... "we had to run a stress test. overnight."
edit: my vote is for teams that have relatively few members to a high number of machines/ppd. Seems like it would be easier to switch the boxes over when you have 1 person managing 400 machines vs. 400 people managing 400 machines...
also, it seems like most of these teams are made up of 1 or 2 people. It doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to have them change their team name to their user name, and make the team #93...
Hewlett Packard
University of Kentucky Systems Labs
KnoppMyth
BaylorLabs
Team Novell
Tasmanian Dept of Education
Brock University
Folding@WesternWashingtonUniversity
fold4life.com
Reactor
University Of South Florida
WesternNorthCarolina
NCCI Team
Crunchers Inc
Vampire Piggy Hunters
Free-DC
Procooling
Team Tek
LAN Party Association of New England
Fatboy Crunchers
Those are the teams with 15-20 members or less that turn at least 6000 ppd...
getting those teams to switch would be awesome.
Has the GPU client been approved for anything lower than the x19xx?
Congrats Sledge and Prof!
I didn't say it'd be easy...
You're right, of course, but we could probably track down an email, website, something...
I'll see what I can do in my spare time this week. (Now I just need spare time...)
That would be sweet, I'm sure it will be way over-priced for quite a few months...
But it's a lot easier for 100 people to justify the cost of 1 PS3 than 1 person justifying the cost of 100 PS3's... Not to mention the circuit infrastructure...
add-on cards
I've been researching add-on Cell and math co-processor cards and they're still too expensive also. Cheaper to build a C2D system for now... anyone have any other info?
linux clusters?
I've also been looking into single-board computers with embedded linux for a cluster, but they're not powerful enough to justify the cost, even if they are about $40 each. You'd have to get 15 of them to match the output of a C2D, and that's pointless...
technically, no, but I read somewhere (EOC Forums?) that you can have the card list itself as a x1900 by using the incorrect drivers, and get it to run F@H. Not as fast as a x1900, of course, but a lot faster than no GPU....
mac users
there is a new client out there for multi-core boxes. It's only supported on OSX and 64-bit linux right now, but it supposedly makes better use of multiple cores by using all of the cores on a single WU, instead of having 1 WU assigned to each core. Supposedly this is a performance boost.
Stanford also says they prefer this client because they get results back faster, so I would imagine a points boost as well.
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-SMP.html
I'm just thinking about how I would react if the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose another team came along and pointed out that we had been slipping in the standings, then suggested that we merge with them? They could make the same argument that by uniting we would become quite a powerhouse, but I'm not sure if I'd like the idea too much.
Working to make our little team a great place to be involved might pay off more in the long run. We've had quite a few people join us just because they were impressed by the lively goings-on here.
:woowoo:
I agree, I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I didn't look at these teams in terms of historical performance, I was listing teams that don't have many members, have a high % of active members and also have a high amount of points per day. It wasn't a commentary on their performance, it's a matter of logistics - less members mean that it's easier to switch the machines over. Like I said before:
I addition, there wouldn't be any reason to try and get teams that weren't doing well, we want ones that are doing very well, but don't have many members, and might want to come hang out here with us for a while.
Pimping
Who do you think I am?......Huggy bear? :ukflag:
Re the initial suggestion...........I would say it's only worth trying with teams that are slipping, not those that are looking to climb.
One must remember that for some the satisfaction comes from the building of a team, regardless of it's overall standing.