Posts by Sky King

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 73034) Posted 9 May 2012 by Sky King Post: Might I suggest that those of you experiencing this problem consider donating your computing resources to folding@home at Stanford Medical School. Their software is self-contained, stable, doesn't run under BOINC middleware, computes on your choice of CPU and/or GPU, has an excellent working simulation of the protein molecule that can be manipulated with the mouse to view/rotate/enlarge/etc, lots of interesting information that's easily accessible about each protein you're folding and why it is important, and is the world's largest computing network. If people want some help/advice on F@H, thee are probably some here who can provide a lot of insight and help in getting started. I myself am a 10 million point F@H contributor, and have been at the very bleeding edge of beta'ing the newest Windows SMP, Windows GPU, and linux VM appliance clients. I don't want to use up a lot of R@H's forum space touting a "competitor" but here's my observations about F@H. Running a basic F@H client as a service in the background of your PC is very straightforward and involves very little interaction from you, the user. Install it, fire it up, let it run, and check on your stats every week or so, and you're good to go, and maybe churn out 2,000 PPD. However, as you move up the performance curve to optimized SMP or GPU configs and you're trying to squeeze out every last bonus point, the workload increases quite a bit. That was kind of the downside of F@H for me, I was squeezing every last point out of my i7 and getting big bonuses. (Under an initiative called "-bigadv", users of higher end i7s and up can opt in to a bonus program where you get time-sensitive bonus points for returning very large, complex units quickly--like 3 day deadlines.) In fact, I couldn't run the GPU client because the i7 needs every spare cycle in order to make the deadlines and thus be bonus eligible... and the bonuses for this scientifically urgent work were way more points than my ATI 4850 could churn. After over a year of being deeply involved in profiling the performance optimization of the i7 using both Windows native SMP clients and VMware linux appliances, suddenly I got hammered by Stanford about 3 months ago... 8 core i7's are no longer bonus eligible, you have to be running at least 16 cores on the same WU or you can't make the deadlines and you lose all your points. Not even a high overclock can get you home on 8 cores. Suddenly I was going from 20,000 PPD on my i7 alone to a max of about 3 or 4,000 PPD. Feeling somewhat abandoned, but committed to protein folding, I decided to bail out of the huge workload of super-optimized F@H and opted into the simple life of BOINC-managed folding at R@H. What could be easier, this will be great! Of course, I got 8 WUs a day and couldn't figure out why my CPU was never busy, and when I investigated, I found the client error issue, hence my bump of this thread a few months ago. So I am right back where I started... Big ass CPU, big ass GPU, and feeling like no one is all that jazzed about my willingness to contribute it all to optimized folding. R@H doesn't want my cycles because I don't want to have to downgrade back to my ATI 4850 card and abandon my brand new NV 560. So, I can pull my new nvidia 560 out and run R@H... or I can leave it in and run pretty "stock" F@H clients easily for about 2K PPD, or I can put in a lot of work and run a carefully managed, optimized F@H config and maybe get 6K PPD in return for the huge fan noise, heat, and power cost associated with running the CPU and both GPU cores at 100%. I haven't decided what to do. For now, I have the i7 on BOINC with all my cycles going to the World Community Grid. I was staying on BOINC in the hopes that R@H would be fixed, but I wuill probably wait for a long weekend with some down time and switch my iron back to F@H. But my point is, if people here need help with F@H, there are some pretty experienced folders here.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72890) Posted 26 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: I have a client error too. May I post here? Does your machine have a CD/DVD drive installed? One sort of odd thing with my problem machine is that I do not have one built in. I use a USB DVD drive I plug in when necessary. I have a stock SATA DVD reader/burner in my rig.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72795) Posted 16 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: Just an FYI... I bumped my NVIDIA drivers up to the 295.73 (or more completely, 8.17.12.9573) from the previous 285.62. Had BOINC grab a few Rosetta WUs, just in case this fixed something... BOINC updated me with Rosetta 3.26, but no joy, still the same "client error" result under the new drivers/client combination.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72744) Posted 13 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: [quote]Is this the same problem they were having at Einstein@home? It's only been observed on machines which are also running GPU applications from other projects, using a NVidia graphics card. I do want to clarify one thing... a previous post said that the error only occurs when GPU processing is enabled, and the quoted post implies that it only happens if you are using your GPU for other projects. I don't believe either of those are true. Like most that are having this problem, I have an i7, 64 bit Windows 7, and an EVGA-branded NVIDIA 560... However, both the 560, and the new instance of Windows 7 on my machine have not been used for any projects, not even F@H or other non-BOINC, since installation. I believe the determinant is simply whether or not you have the NVIDIA driver installed... Whether you are using it for anything more than just a display adapter appears to be immaterial.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72663) Posted 4 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: Rocco Moretti from Rosetta requested some sets of data from my machine collected both while running properly and while running with the client error condition. I am wondering if it is possible that Rosetta can "manually" issue us work packets to be completed... The "gold standard" for analysis purposes would be for us to run several work packets with nvidia driver, and then run the IDENTICAL work packets WITHOUT the nvidia driver and then diff the resulting work product.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72656) Posted 4 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: Let me know how I can help... I currently have both the EVGA NVIDIA 560 and an AT 4850 in my rig... I am not too jazzed about too much tampering, but, I can run off the 4850 and submit some before/after work as well.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72647) Posted 3 Apr 2012 by Sky King Post: Please keep in mind that I am an at-home volunteer, and not a Rosetta developer. I was thinking the same thing when I read the earlier post... Most community discussion groups are moderated by volunteers that have no official connection to the underlying developers.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72627) Posted 29 Mar 2012 by Sky King Post: Well, for now, I have decided to just suspend Rosetta folding until this gets resolved. As a 10 million F@H point contributor, I really wanted all my computing horsepower to go specifically to Rosetta, but I'm going to do World Community Grid for a while. I am curious--when F@H -bigadv units came out, they ran much faster using the linux cores than windows cores--so much so that running a linux virtual machine appliance was still faster with VM overhead than running native windows. Are there canned BOINC VM appliances available that could run under VMWare VMplayer, that would bypass this problem?
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72609) Posted 26 Mar 2012 by Sky King Post: It would be useful to hear from William Blakemore, Alpha Laser, Sky King, and Digital Savior if they are running EVGA's, how many, what model, and if they have been running Folding@Home. Interestingly, I do have an EVGA GTX 560 in my rig. I used to do GPU folding on other GPUs, but not on this GPU and this particular Windows 7 instance. On this machine I was doing only SMP folding, and I stopped all folding activities prior to switching over to BOINC. The EVGA driver package is 8.17.12.8562 and the NVIDIA control panel is 3.9.731.0
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Client Errors (Message 72422) Posted 1 Mar 2012 by Sky King Post: Is there any update to this? I too just recently switched my stock Win7 i7 over to Rosetta after years of being an F@H contributor, and without exception, every unit results in "client error." If I'm just generating heat and not contributing to science, I need to switch to another project, so I am hoping to hear an update on this.