Switching from F@H?

[JustinFields]

Hey Folks.

I was wondering what you all thought about the distributed folding project. It seems like most everyone has switched over to it from other projects. Folding@Home is like a ghost town. That leaves me climbing the standings :D, but without anyone to chat with about the project. What is the challenge in overtaking a bunch of computing corpses?

What are your opinions on switching? My home machine is easy to change over, but I have most of my (puny) computing power at work, where I loaded up F@H with FireDaemon to run it as a service. It is kind of a pain to keep switching projects. I don't have the patience to do it very often, so I want to make sure a new project is really running smoothly and everything before I start switching. I can't tolerate any lockups or blue screens caused by a distributed computing project.

Thoughts on Distributed Folding? What is the difference in underlying science from F@H? Since I can't manually deal with the clients very often, are there any tools like FoldMonitor that work on this project? How are people's borged machines and farms holding up in distributed folding?

Thanks.

Justin

[Scoofy12]

Here is a thread in the DF forum that will answer some of the questions about what DF does and why people like it: http://bane.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php3?threadid=520

I originally got back into DC when i heard about DF project... where? slashdot maybe? i dont remember. I thought the whole protein folding thing was really interesting. I tried DF right about the time they were having server problems and figured it wasnt worth the effort, but after checking out Free-DC's website and finding F@H i crunched a few WUs only to find, as you did, that it seems like a ghost town. DF has come a long way on the sofware side too, and after a few client fixes, I have a farm of 25 linux boxes that run unattended, as well as 2 roommates who run the 2K and XP system service, and none of these experienced no troubles during the last update. (YMVM i guess but no troubles for me). This is still a young project, but I like the community both in FreeDC and DF, especially that those who run the project interact so much with the crunchers. Hopefully this will continue even after the project ramps up for more users.

[FoBoT]

first, if you choose to do this, wait until next week after we switch to a "long/large" protein, that way you will miss the "change-over" from one protein to another, some people are still having troubles with that process

DF will install as a service all by itself, no need to use firedameon, although there could be some benefit to doing so that i don't know about, since i haven't used it

i haven't heard of it BSOD anybody on W2K or XP since the very early versions

there were some problems with it hogging the cycles, but howard has tweaked it down to the lowest of low priorities, so i think that is better, although i don't really run it on "production" pc's , so again, i don't know really

i like the tiny work units, no need to wait hours for a boxen to finish a WU if you need to re-image it, or take it off line or what not

i also like the fact that the people that do the most work, aren't necessarily the "heros"
since the real goal is the structure with the lowest RMS, ANYBODY can "hit the jackpot" in this project, not just the big producers, to me , this makes it more "little guy" friendly , which should help it grow in popularity

it can cache WU's like g@h , they don't expire like f@H (well, as long as we aren't chaning proteins), there aren't really server problems (there were a few , but the beefed the servers up) like SETI

no stats problems like RC5

i think you should give it a try and see if you can catch xj10bt
i know i can't :cry:

come join the fun! :jester:

[xj10bt]

Running the text client on Win2K and XP, I've never had a lockup or blue screen. It doesn't interfere with normal usage. I believe the auto-updating problems are fixed, but as FoBot said, I'd wait until the next changeover to install on a bunch of machines.

The client is nice in that it installs itself as a service (only 1 per computer though). I copy the install directory over (don't forget handle.txt) using the admin share, install it as a service using psExec, and start it with psService (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml).

There are remote monitoring tool(s?) available, but I don't use any. There were some kinks at first, but I think it's stable enough for farm deployment now.

Catch me if you can! :haddock:

[JustinFields]

Thanks for the feedback, folks.

On a regular install, does the Dist. Folding application take advantage of dual processors. I know I have to run two instances per machine with F@H.

Justin

[xj10bt]

The only thing you can do is run two copies of the command line client from different directories. No need for -local switch or anything like that.

[CSMan]

So on a dually machine, could you run one as a service and one command line client?

I don't have a dually (yet :D ), otherwise I would try it....

[xj10bt]

Yes, you could do that too.