Hi there.
Joined [H] a few days ago. The reason for joining was the wealth of information available on all things hardware and the good information being collected and made available for folders. Thanks a lot and very much appreciated by a folding newbie.
A quick intro:
Since 30 years I am a software guy who recently got back into hardware. As part of a private "home lab", I built a system for high speed I/O ( > 20 GB/s) and got a few other components for explorations in the world of multiprocessing and GPUs. Last week, I finshed one of my private projects and started to explore a bit more the world of folding, tinkering with system setups, cost vs. PPD, energy vs. PPD, system balance, stability, etc ...
Reconfigured a few times my components, system and setups to maintain enough flexibility between the different things I do and intend to do going forward.
A week ago, I started with a mio points I collected from 2 weekends of initial trials in April into this 7 day test period. Applying the knowledge I gained throughout this week, the final result would have been higher, but the lessons learned makes it easy up.
Some of the lessons:
At least I achieved to move from position 16.000 to 422 overall, exceeded for the first time 1 mio PPD and was among the top 3 contributers of team 0
Looking forward,
Andy
Joined [H] a few days ago. The reason for joining was the wealth of information available on all things hardware and the good information being collected and made available for folders. Thanks a lot and very much appreciated by a folding newbie.
A quick intro:
Since 30 years I am a software guy who recently got back into hardware. As part of a private "home lab", I built a system for high speed I/O ( > 20 GB/s) and got a few other components for explorations in the world of multiprocessing and GPUs. Last week, I finshed one of my private projects and started to explore a bit more the world of folding, tinkering with system setups, cost vs. PPD, energy vs. PPD, system balance, stability, etc ...
Reconfigured a few times my components, system and setups to maintain enough flexibility between the different things I do and intend to do going forward.
A week ago, I started with a mio points I collected from 2 weekends of initial trials in April into this 7 day test period. Applying the knowledge I gained throughout this week, the final result would have been higher, but the lessons learned makes it easy up.
Some of the lessons:
- Deferred the decision which team to join until the end. Going forward I'll switch from team 0 to 33. Given what I have seen with brilong, Grandpa and others, I will not be a top producer in this team, but want to give back to this community with my production to your team result.
- system stability is more important than the last ounce of performance due to hardware "optimization". System maintenance efforts and overall performance impact seems to grow with the square of frequency gain via OC.
- It took me some time to understand the non-linear model of PPD focecast, results, impact of internet upload connection speed, etc .. The model in itself is clear, but how to optimize multiple available levers simultaneously was a bit more tricky. Especially if acquisition cost , immediate energy cost or 3 year TCO is added to the consideration.
- The relationship between the 4P and GPU based systems. If I would have joined a year ago (or earlier), the "business" case for a 4P rig would have been for me unquestioned. Today and going forward, I am not so sure anymore. Today the 4P systems have better PPD/watt (up to and over 1000) vs the GPUs (650 in my case). Given that we are now entering the new era of explicit solvent simulations possible with FAHCore 17 on GPUs, one of the big gaps is closing. The long term evolution of GPU performance might continue to outspeed the CPU development, which makes this decision not an obvious anymore.
- In addition to the points made in (4). If the unification of the GPU interfaces to OpenCL allows the PG to put more and more emphasis with this codebase to tackle potentially larger problem sizes, the intrinsic computational power of GPUs can "unfold" faster than in the CPU world. The performance of OpenCL drivers will evolve as well. Observing that out of the 3 or 6 GB of GPU memory my cards have, only a fraction is currently used, (bigadv projects need comparatively low GBs on memory), -bigadv on GPUs might not be too far away. As said, no implications for now, but while I tinkered with the idea to build one of those 4P systems, these kind of thoughts came to my mind.
- Expect the unexpected. Just in this test week, the first wide area power outage happened in my district of the city in the last 30 years. I do have a gasoline emergency power generator to feed the house, but not enough juice to run the systems under load. Due to frequent switches between the grid and back to the generators (grid recovery didn't run as planned), it severly impacted PPD scores and increased my admin efforts (not to kill WUs). Daily production on -bigadv were more impacted than shorter x17 cores. Screwing up only one 2 hrs run and than back to normal had less influence on QRB overall.
- With FACcore17 energy efficiency per PPD of a smaller GPU box is quite close to a 2P -bigadv box
- and many more, potentially well known points to the experienced folders, but new experiences for me.
At least I achieved to move from position 16.000 to 422 overall, exceeded for the first time 1 mio PPD and was among the top 3 contributers of team 0
Looking forward,
Andy
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