Hello all,
I have been folding for a little while and recently joined the forum to ask some questions and confirm other things. First off, I am running a slightly overclocked i7-3930K with 32GB of ram and two GTX680's in sli. Until I run out of vram it will give the 980 a good challenge. It's mainly used for gaming but was built with the intention of running Siemens NX on a regular basis bu so far I just do NX beta testing and investigate NX options we might purchase as work. Back to folding...currently I fold only with my cpu because I was finding that gpu projects (I know that's not the correct term...???) were very large and I simply cannot run any other software when folding is crunching on my gpu's. However I did not see an elegant method to terminate a project. I am aware this is super undesirable so currently I allow only my cpu to fold. I suppose I could use pause or finish but I have questions. After playing around with client settings I have found some useful things. I have read the docs and faq's but a simple quick start guide would have been helpful. More of tips and trick sort of doc, not the docs.
Since gpu folding disables sli, I suspect pausing will not allow sli to be active until the FAH client is terminated. I haven't had a chance to verify this but I do not want to initiate more gpu projects if there is no elegant way to terminate it. I know project termination is bad so perhaps I should refrain from any gpu folding at all. By the way, gpu folding does not seem to be as flexible as cpu folding. When I use my computer the folding client seems to nicely back off the load so I may do other things but gpu folding is no such friend. Sli is disabled and I cannot use Siemens NX at all while folding (*cough* nor play World of Tanks *cough, cough*). Here is the gpu folding part I have a question about: If had terminated gpu folding in the middle of a project should I notify anyone? I have no idea how deeply folding is managed nor how flexible it is.
Does F@H run faster on xeon processors than consumer processors such as my 3930K? Floating point intensive I's imagine. I might be able to scrounge up an old Dell Precision with two quad core xeons. If xeons fold well then I'd be willing to set it up as a dedicated folding computer.
Will F@H complete more work with hyperthreading turned on? I usually leave it on until I run NX which runs better without it.
I seem to recall reading on the F@H site monetary donations to Standford were tax deductible. If this is the case then we should be able to write off the electricity used for crunching. (I can measure usage) Hardware is another matter and if it's even a fraction as complicated as office computing write offs then I won't bother but I would like to write off electricity. Are there any folders out there who have done this?
Other thoughts...
So it sounds like Pi's, beagles, arduinos and such are horrible for folding. It would be interesting if Pi device could be made with a processor that does better at FP crunching but I suppose that cost and power consumption would be prohibitive.
