Windows SMP Client, general troubleshooting

[Strongwolf]

Enjoy and Relax TR. Best wishes.

[Samuknow]

Originally Posted by dsio

3 Days of no thunder will mean a little bit of a dent in the score lol

True....but he deserves it. He's been at it for a few months and has blown by people that have been at it for years....

[dsio]

He outfolds most /teams/.

Speaking of one man teams, check this out: jallen - User Summary - EXTREME Overclocking Folding @ Home Stats

Only one user creating that many points :\ team has gone up 600 places recently with one guy.

[Strongwolf]

What is "Code download error #6" and/or #4 and #7?

[Samuknow]

I will take a look when I get home. I went bask to dual clients at home. I must overclock and it is not even remotely stable at 2.7. Plus I reboot several times and it is a B**** to get back up and running. I may play with it some more later.

[Strongwolf]

Perhaps you can understand better the frequent crashes of my rigs. Ain't that a lot of fun????

PM received.

[ThunderRd]

Thanks guys for the good wishes. Am gonna enjoy a bit of sailing down in the islands for a few days.

@dsio:
Do you have any idea who that guy is? That guy, whoever he is, is in control of one of the country's largest supercomputers. It's at the DOE's Fermi Particle Accelerator Lab in Illinois. I reckon he can outdo 'lil ole me and prolly all the rest of F@H combined, if he wanted to...

"Fermilab's Tevatron is a landmark particle accelerator; in fact, at 6.28 kilometers (4 miles) in circumference, it is the world's highest energy particle accelerator. In 1995, both the CDF and D0 (detectors which utilize the Tevatron) experiments announced the discovery of the top quark. In addition to high energy collider physics, Fermilab is also host to a number of smaller fixed target experiments and neutrino experiments, such as MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment), SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment) and MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). The MiniBooNE detector is a 40-foot (12-meter) diameter sphere which contains 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1520 individual phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events are recorded each year. SciBooNE is the newest neutrino experiment at Fermilab; it sits in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but has fine-grained tracking capabilities. The MINOS experiment uses Fermilab's NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 735km through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota."

Hehe. I think that he has a couple of dual-cores workin' out there. Or sumtin'.

EDIT:
Here he is;
Jason Allen, IT Manager, U.S. Department of Energy: Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois
Wanna ask him? jallen@fnal.gov

EDIT2:
Here's what's most likely happening:

[/quote]
440 New PC's Conducting a Burn-In
Fermilab runs "Burn-in" Tests on it's Grid Computing Center every time it purchases large numbers of rack nodes, which is between two and four times a year. [with Folding@Home.]

11 racks of 40 nodes each..... Each of them are at least 3 GHz each. 1.320 THz of Folding power!
[/quote]

[Daniel ~]

And you want to take time off!!??

Enjoy your World.":O}

[ThunderRd]

Have had a great week. Am now officially back - and of course, have a multitude of hiccups getting the farm up and running. Mostly network instability. Should have it ironed out over the next couple days; am not up to speed yet but uploaded 21k today.

Let's see how much damage we can do to these other teams before New Year.

[Samuknow]

Great To Have You Back.....give It To Them My Friend.

[Strongwolf]

How can I run SMP on WinVista 64bits. .NET Framework 2.0 wont work.

[ThunderRd]

No need to install v3. Vista comes integrated with v3, so it's not necessary to install the old version.

There are some issues, though, so read this carefully:
How do I install the SMP Console client in Windows Vista? - FaHWiki

[Strongwolf]

Forget about Vista, I'm up-grading to XP!

[ThunderRd]

G. I.

Did Chris approve?

[Strongwolf]

Haven't tell yet.
Wolf3 is back on line with a flawless installation of SMP. Cruising @ 2.5. Vista is back on it's case.

[Samuknow]

Sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do.....

[Daniel ~]

Alas, Chris can only be with us when his vista is up and running...we all miss him.":O}

[Strongwolf]

LOL!!!! That's why I quit.

[ThunderRd]

Vista users may find this thread interesting:

Folding Forum • View topic - Vista install problems...

[ThunderRd]

I have, as a test, replaced one of my 925 dual cores with a Q6600 a few days ago. Just a straight drop-in, no muss/no fuss, no overclocking as yet. It's in one of my home machines, folding 24/7 on XP.

With no special attention it ran 10-11 minute step times on the SMP client. That's about 2100 PPD out of the box.

But here's the good news: are you aware that you can run 2 SMP clients on your quads? Now, there are several ways to do this. You can simply install another instance of the client and run it, XP setting both clients to use all cores. This works, but it isn't the fastest way. The next way is to manually set the affinity of the first client to 2 cores, and the second client to the other two. This is faster, but it's difficult to know how Windows detected the cores on boot and which two cores currently share cache. There are various combinations that windows uses, and it can change on rebooting so it's not always the same. Also, you'd have to babysit the clients and manually set the affinity each time a new WU is started; windows has no ability to pass the affinity assignment from parent to child processes in the FAH setup. So this isn't the most efficient way to run 2 clients, either.

Then there is the big news; let software set the affinities automatically. There is a Ukrainian folder/developer who has written a small windows service that does exactly that. Here is a link to the website, it's in version 1.0.4:

Fah Smp Affinity Changer [english]

You can read it yourself but essentially it changes the affinity dynamically and adjusts it according to load changes while running. It installs easily as a service and sets itself to start automatically with windows. There are no user configurable settings, so it's painless. It's also open-source, and here's the code:

fah-smp-affinity-changer - Google Code

And an in-depth discussion on the community forum, including a few comments on Linux and VMWare application:

Folding Forum; View topic - SMP Affinity Changer

Now, I know what you all are waiting to hear. How does it work? Well, I am pleased to say that for me it works, and works well. From the above-mentioned step times of 10-11 minutes, step times have increased to about 16 minutes, but there are 2 clients so I'm producing effectively 1% in 8 minutes. That's a difference of 1000 PPD!

So, from 2100 PPD with one client, production for 1 Q6600 at stock speeds increases to 3100 PPD [on a non-O/C friendly MB]. I believe that is a remarkable advantage for quad users. Next step for me is to try to get this *POS* MB to overclock; I don't expect much so a new one is probably in the near future.

Ask your questions here, I'll try to answer.