Sqopt

Totally offtopic, but your comment about hot glass reminded me about the following kinda-sorta related thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_drop Thx for the input on thermals!

As of just now, nvidia-smi shows an indicated temperature of 74 Celsius for my GTX-1650. CPU cores are all reporting 58-61 Celsius. I'm not concerned about the CPU affecting the GPU temperature because the CPU is not physically adjacent to my GPUs; what's more my machine is out in the open air on my desk and not enclosed in a case. Nights are chilly here so my office is down to about 15C at night. Nice! So far I am letting the GPU command fan speed itself. Fan speed is an indicated 72%. In human terms 74C sounds scary but my GPU is obviously more intrepid than I am. 261,000+ ppd on the CPU and 466,000+ ppd on the GTX-1650 by the way, albeit using a passkey. This is the time of morning when I am happy to have a little extra warmth. :-)

Hi all, I am back to folding after a many years long hiatus, and it's still as fun as ever. Whee! Anyhow, I am folding on CPU and GPU and I have noticed that the GPU in particular experiences temperature swings from about 45C at idle to about 85C while folding. It only takes a couple minutes to cool from under load, and when going from idle to load the temperature stabilizes in, oh, on the order of a minute. Is there any known detrimental effect of rapid temperature change on a GPU? I wouldn't be surprised if it's safer to ramp temperatures up and down slowly, but that's 100% conjecture by me. Sqopt

I'm baaaaaack.

If you need 8 cores to receive a -bigadv WU, and if you nevertheless think you have a fast enough 4-core box to complete a -bigadv on time, then I reckon you could just set up a virtual 8-core box on your 4-core box. In effect you'd fake out f@h into assigning you a big WU, and then you'd just take your chances on whether it would timely complete. Or you could just cut down all the hassle and rent a herd of VMs from some outfit like Rackspace or Amazon EC2 and not worry. Sqopt

I haven't spoken to Peligro lately, so I'm only guessing when I say that his boxen must simply have lots of other work to do. ;-) sqopt

Nope, it's nowhere near 2200 systems. I'm not sure where that number comes from. Stanford's site says he's running like 14 or so. As far as the institutional OK goes, hehe, yeah, you could say he has the OK. He's the IT poobah. Sqopt

If you want to do battle with a research institution, be my guest. hehe.

It's mostly high-end Mac hardware, with the odd Xeon or FX-55 tossed in for good measure. Sqopt

He's a close friend of mine, but I have said that I won't de-cloak him. No telling if/when he will out himself. Sqopt

He made 6,100 points yesterday. What a maniac! It's humbling to watch his graphs.

Don't worry, it is deliberate.

The 1.895 GHz Pentium M is a Dell laptop with 1/2 GiB of RAM. Totally bone stock, hardware-wise. I don't have access to it right now, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that I've set it up with big wu and advmethods enabled. Of all the WUs I've watched so far, the most productive has been p1481. I have seen over 460 ppd with it on my A64 @2.4GHz. That's over 190 ppd/GHz! It's a large-bonus WU so that is of course a somewhat inflated figure. I suppose the bonus is justified, because that WU takes up close to 100 MiB of memory when running. Of the non-bonus WUs, the double-precision gromacs (dgromacs) like p2020 give the next best performance. I've routinely seen 360+ ppd on the A64 with these. p2075 was just shy of 400ppd. Just my $0.02. Sqopt

Just another data point: I saw one of these 1200+ point WUs on a 1.895GHz Pentium M making, if I am remembering right, somewhere in the mid-200s ppd. Sqopt

Yep, for sure Linux is the way here. I'd say that, absent any clear and convincing reason to use Windows, you're better off with the penguin. If you already have a bevy of windows boxen in your folding flotilla, and if you don't want to go to the hassle of actually installing Linux on them, just give the live-CD method a try. I've used Ubuntu, Knoppix, and Gentoo live CDs. They're good. Knoppix, furthermore, makes it almost totally brainless to set up a network boot/nfs/dhcp server. I'm online for about one more hour, until ~4PM Eastern Time. If you want to IM me, you can reach me at this username on AIM. Sqopt