Hello and Uploading Question

[Tamari]

Hey folks, I'm new here. Hope I can help fend off the bovine followers!

And the question:

Is it better to have the client (running as a service) upload as it's setup by default, or should I have it cache generations somewhere? I really don't know how long it takes for the boxen to connect to the DF server to upload results, so I don't know how much cpu time Is wasted. Does it only take a minute or often hours? I have a very fast connection, and (on weekends) over 140 GHz going, but It seems that other people with less GHz power get more points. I have about 90 of those GHz running with the useram=1, and the rest default.:help:

Tamari

[Paratima]

Hello and welcome!

With the current protein, very small and very fast, we've ALL had problems uploading. Indeed, under the conditions right now, you would possibly be better off to cache and then dump. However, and it's a biggie, the problem is, will you be able to dump all your gens before the changeover deadline?

It's a tradeoff. Under normal circumstances, which we expect to prevail again after the changeover, just let 'em rip. The connection time is insignificant. It appears that there is a very small time advantage to caching and dumping, but probably not worth the hassle.

We can probably talk about the rest of your setup and make helpful suggestions. Mostly though, with useram=1, you're good to go. :p

PS. With a farm like that, you're gonna make some waves around here!

[guru]

Tamari, welcome aboard. Can you tell us a little more about your systems setup?

guru :cheers:

[magnav0x]

There will be a protien change tomorrow any how so I wouldn't worry about it ;)

[Anteraan]

I agree with Paratima -- that farm will get results (/me makes mental note re: future roadkillage). In addition to running with extra ram, the next step to help boost production is to go with quiet mode (-qt). That will help a fair bit as well. Anyway, I'm glad that you're here to help with the "Free-DC Electric Fence". :p The Cows are many in number, but so are your boxen. :thumbs:

Oh, and I almost forgot. Welcome, and :hiya:

[Dyyryath]

Welcome to Free-DC, Tamari, I think you'll like it here. :thumbs:

I'd wait and see what the next protein is going to look like before I made any decisions about caching. Protein speed can really have a big impact on these things.

Again, welcome to the team, if there's anything we can do to make your new home here more pleasant, feel free to let me or one of the other admins know. :cheers:

[rofn]

Originally posted by Dyyryath
if there's anything we can do to make your new home here more pleasant, feel free to let me or one of the other admins know. :cheers:

i'll take a big mac menu large with coke one quarter pounder with cheese and if you got a tyan thunder k8qs 4 opteron cpus and some ram for it for free i'll take that too :D ;)

[ronbo54]

Welcome Tamari :thumbs:
How many clients do you run on each box at once? I have 5 going now on my P4 HT, but I've heard someone else (Fozzie?) say they have seven. Just unzip into a different named folder.

[Dyyryath]

Originally posted by rofn
i'll take a big mac menu large with coke one quarter pounder with cheese and if you got a tyan thunder k8qs 4 opteron cpus and some ram for it for free i'll take that too :D ;)

I'll get to work on the system right away, but your burger & fries are ready now. Feel free to drop by (the weather's great here in NC, BTW) and pick them up. ;)

[PCZ]

Tamari

Welcome to Free-DC :cheers:

As you have a good connection to the net there is no need for you to work offline.
Set up DF as a service, 1 client per CPU / virtual CPU.
Make sure the service.cfg contains the line:
useram=1

You can install up to eight clients per computer using the following command
foldtrajlite /install
foldtrajlite /install2
foldtrajlite /install3
etc
All in seperate directories though.

The protein we are currently on has been exceptionally fast and folks have been
having trouble uploading.
This causes the client to stop working and waste time trying to talk to the server, so to take up the slack time some people have been running multiple clients per CPU.

Normally you wouldn't do this, stick to the one client per CPU rule.

I guess you are a corporate so you have Intel CPU's, you wont get quite as much output per ghz as the Athlons if that is what you are comparing yourself against.
You can make up a lot of the difference by taking advantage of Hyperthreading
though.

With 90 - 140 ghz you should have an output similar to that of Condor and Fobot.

[Tamari]

Thanks for the warm welcomes!

About the setup:

I only have around 15 GHz running 24/7, mostly P4s. Some boxes have the useram=1 switch, and some do not. I always run the client as a service in quiet mode. During weekends, with the cats away I can muster about 120 GHz in addition. The "muscle" is a set of 40+ P4 2.2+ GHz machines running largely with the ram switch on. Then there are a variety of P3s with the ram switch off. I manage these weekend machines with a network directory service. I think this Friday I will set the DF service to "manual" so as the machines get used over the weekend, and during the next week if people have trouble with them, they can simply reboot the machine to disable the service.

Those are the easy machines.

Then there are the G4s...

I could add about 10 GHz of G4 24/7 muscle to the mix if I could only find a way to run DF while loged off. I can run it in the background while the terminal app is open, but once you close out of terminal, or log off, these machines stop crunching.::help:

Thank you all for your advise on uploading. I suppose I can feel confident in how me boxen be setup now. I don't feel too confident that I can crunch as much as Fobot, but we all need someone to look up to. ;)

Thanks everyone!

[PCZ]

Are those macs running os9 or osx ?

[MerePeer]

Welcome Tamari!!

I would say run online because this new ticketing client is supposed to address those upload delays we've seen the last month. However that does not mean it will, and we may see initial delays while everyone gets updated. So just keep an eye out for any buffered results and timeouts in error.log.

:thumbs:

[Welnic]

Here is the line that matters at the end of the foldit file:

nohup ./foldtrajlite -f protein -n native -rt -it -qt &

I don't actually think that you need the nohup, I keep it in there so it is consistent with my linux boxen.

If you set up a cron job it will start folding whenever the machine boots up. To set up your cron list type:

crontab -e

Once you do that you are editing your crontab using vi. You could open up another terminal window and type man vi for instructions on how to use that. Basically you should type "i", then type in the line that you need. Then hit esc, and then "Z" "Z". It should then say:

crontab: installing new crontab

The crontab should end up like this:

@reboot cd ~/distribfold;rm foldtrajlite.lock;./foldit &
@reboot cd ~/distribfold0;rm foldtrajlite.lock;./foldit &

The "~" means your home directory. It really is the best place to keep things like this. Where ever it ends up you need to have the whole path. If the machines are duals then you need to run a process for each processor.

[Tamari]

PCZ, they are OS X 10.2 (soon 10.3)

Welnic, thanks for the advice, I will have to buckle down and learn some cron!

Thanks again for all the help folks.