Folding Forum

Hello,

I figured it's time to join the forum! I keep getting core_a4 work units and I'm wondering if there's a better fit for my Intel Xeon 1230v3 Haswell CPU. I've tried 8 threads, 6 and now 4 so just using the physical cores (but they are still hyper threaded--so would keeping it at four make the most sense) and that's where I get the best performance and ppd.

Would it be recommended to use a Beta flag for the CPU slot to get more newer work units? I feel core a4 is a bit old for being three years old.

Welcome to the folding support forum.

Core_A4 is the most recent core for CPU folding suitable for your processor. No newer core has been released. Doctor Pande has hinted that work is being done on a later core to using a later version of GROMACS in one of his blog posts - https://folding.stanford.edu/home/multi-core-cpu-jobs/. No information on when that might be released has yet been posted.

As for how many threads to assign to CPU folding with your Quad-core Xeon, that will depend on what else is being done on that system at the same time. The maximum is 8, but the additional threads from HT usually give about 15-20% improvement in processing as compared to an actual physical CPU core.

Other than folding, the system shouldn't be doing too much else. I'll bump up again to 6 and stay there for a day or so and post results but so far TPF is better at 4.

I can't edit this my post on mobile but want to post data for comparison.

9752, TPF 2m 33s
Estimated POD 11532.
I'll bump up to 6 threads very soon.

At 82% O.K.so CPU usage is MUCH higher at about 88% instead of around 60%. How many frames should I let rub before I compare ETPF? It just doesn't strike me as any faster than 4 cores but it's using a lot more CPU!

Another thing I want to add, my ASUS GTX 660 TI tweak software has a "power target" and when I set it to 65% I got better estimated ppd, (I since put it to 85% as core 18 can't seem to use any more than that)
EDIT--got the menu to appear, does the PPD factor in power usage!/efficiency?

CPU ETPF O.K. It did say 3m 16s but now says 1m 55 seconds--yes I'm staying at 6 threads from now on! Thanks for suggesting me to change it!

Oh yeah it just went from .72 to .77%! Now I'm being power efficient!! Feels so good!

You will need to let the client run through at least 3-5 frames (%) to get a good estimate of the TPF. Better is taking it directly from the log file for complete frames, the client does get thrown off estimating based on partial frames such as seen after a restart.

Also you mentioned a GPU, processing for that will take at least one CPU core, leaving you with a max of 7 that you can use for CPU folding.

Welcome to foldingforum.org, GPU timpster.

For comments regarding your specific configuration, see the information requested below.

Last I checked the CPU TPF was 1m 33s!

On a different wu 9752 it's now 1m 56s so it's fairly consistently faster!

The deadlines (and points) for various projects vary and therefore the TPF is not expected to be the same for different projects.

See the data on psummary.