Congrats to the [H]ardOCP
team current holders of the Relic Trophy 31/12/05
The Relic Trophy
celebrates the struggle to be the No1 Folding Team between the
Overclockers Australia and the [H]ardOCP Folding teams.
Thursday
25/12/2008
Merry Christmas:
and happy new year...
I wish you all a merry Christmas
and I hope everyone will be enjoying themselves over the next few
days catching up with family and friends.
Sunday
29/06/2008
Top 1000:
exceptional numbers this week...
119 members changed Folding
Clubs.
600 active members in the top
1000.
Increased output from 433
members: 2,619,134 million points.
Reduced output from 151
members: 501,284 point
59 members increased
production by over 10,000 PPW
Biggest base jump: VelvetElvis
2140 places
Largest points ramp:
blair.bethwaite 119,469 points
Biggest points dive:
Rubberband 40,250 points
Highest Folding Club attained:
GrumpyOldMen 225,000
A fantastic effort on behalf of
everyone this week as the charts below show.
Tuesday
24/06/2008
GPU Folding:
on Nvidia
GeForce 8xxx, 9xxx and 260/280 cards...
Now that the GPU2 client has been
released,
read all about how to setup up your video card with this
excellent guide written by synmnky. Check out the various
cards performance in
this thread and have a say
here.
...and when
you've done all that check out
this thread, because that is what has to happen if we want to
bring the "Duck" back home.
Sunday 04/05/2008
Chimp Challenge:
Monkey_Bollocks starting to swell...
Team
OCAU has been challenged to a Folding@Home race of 5 Million
points in the shortest possible time.
The 'Chimp Challenge' started in 2006 against
Overclockers.com (OC.com, 3rd highest F@H team) and Maximum
Power Computing (MPC, 4th highest F@H team) when both teams
realised they had 'Monkey themed' sub-teams, and thus a
challenge was issued. Right now, it stands a 1-all, MPC won the
2006 event, while OC.com won last year.
This year, OCAU (2nd highest F@H team) has been invited to take
part, as have [H]ardOCP (Currently number 1 F@H team in the
world). This year it will be a four way tussle.
What do you need us OCAU faithful to
do??
Pretty simple, run the F@H client. You need the username
'Monkey_Bollocks' (without the quotes) and the team number is
24.
Which client should I run??
Depends on your setup. Most of us have dual-core or better
machines. The best idea is the SMP client on these machines.
Otherwise run the standard client.
Won't this slow my PC down??
Running F@H should not decrease your computer's performance.
While it does use some RAM, the actual CPU power it uses are
what is shown as 'System Idle Process'. It just takes those CPU
cycles and does something useful with them. Gaming may suffer a
bit, just stop the client and restart it after you finish! Alot
of people never notice any performance loss.
Will it make my PC hot / overheat??
Maybe, since it is doing more work. But it's cooling down, not
like it is a 40 degree heatwave in the middle of January.
Any more questions, please check the client setup guides in this
forum section, or post a thread if you cannot find what you are
looking for.
FOLDING STARTS 6TH MAY @
5.00AM AEST -
IF WORK UNITS ARE RETURNED PRIOR, THEY WILL NOT
BE COUNTED.....ONLY POINTS FROM THAT TIME ON ARE COUNTED!!!
Go Team 24!!!
Here
are the official rules for chimp challenge '08:
1. First team to accumulate 5,000,000 points from the start
time wins.
2. Start time for the contest
is May 5th at 12pm noon, (US) Pacific Daylight Time - This
is 6th May @ 5.00am AEST
3. The victor gets to claim the lucky jaded monkey as the
prize. Tales have been told of untold wealth and fame that
comes with this. The victorious team is allowed to display in
any honorary fashion the jaded monkey, the losing team is
forbidden to display it. The losing team is bestowed the
dreaded monkey's paw, which is said to be cursed. People have
been known for have very bad luck with this paw
4. Team captains are as follows: sno.lcn from overclockers,
KingFish from MaxPC, Xilikon from [H]ardOCP, and mitsimonsta
from OCAU.
5. In the event of a close race, the Stanford site will be
considered the official source for points information.
6. Only with a consensus of the team captains are changes
allowed to be made of the rules.
7. The official folding names are "T32monkeys" from OC, "maximum_monkey"
from MPC, "[H]ardApe from [H]ardOCP, and "Monkey_Bollocks"
from OCAU.
8. Have fun, keep it positive, and enjoy the contest.
We've been
experiencing a great deal of stats instability, due to the new
advmethods projects announced recently. The problem is that these
WU's are just too short for the stats system to handle, flooding
the system with 10x more WU's than it's used to handling. That
means that instead of completing an update in 1 hour, it now takes
10 hours, which is a disaster.
We're working
to correct this, but it will likely take a little time to get
through the backlog that's been generated.
New rules for advanced methods
(-adv flag)
In the
near future, we will be releasing some new projects which
require a very rapid turn-around time. These are peptide
fragment simulations which we are interested in simulating for a
time-sensitive collaborative project involving protein structure
prediction.
These WUs
will go directly to the classic clients running with -advmethods.
Non-classic clients (eg SMP, GPU, PS3) will not be affected, as
all of these calculations will be run via the AMBER core and
only the classic client supports the AMBER core.
To
reward users for participating in this exciting project, we will
be giving a x1.5 bonus in the points awarded. What's the
catch? These projects will be less rigorously beta tested, so
there will be an increased risk of Early_Unit_End errors. We
believe the risk of this is minor (there will likely be a higher
rate of early unit ends, especially very early in the WU, but we
do not expect client machines to become significantly less
stable). However, if you do not wish to participate in this
project, just remove the -advmethods setting from your client.
This
will not last forever and will likely go back to normal -advmethods
usage in a few months. With that said, we do plan other uses
for -adv in the future.
Note:
the text was updated to clarify that this is classic clients
only.
Sunday 06/04/2008
SMP Windows new beta client:
5.92 uses a different MPI...
With version
5.92, we have switched to a different MPI implementation (DeinoMPI
instead of MPICH). In our testing thus far, this new
implementation is *much* more stable for FAH. Performance is
roughly comparable, with perhaps a slight speed increase. But
stability and reliability is what we're going for here.
DeinoMPI is backwards-compatible with MPICH, so your old core
binaries will work. However, most of the benefits come with a new
core binary. One is included in the install package; the client
should also auto-download Deino-specific core binaries. Similarly,
the mpiexec binary for DeinoMPI differs from MPICH.
Look for new Deino-specific features coming in the future.
mitsimonsta has an excellent guide
here for upgrading your old 5.91 beta client.
We've internally dubbed the new GPU
client/core "GPU2". Here's an update. The GPU2 closed beta
testing has been moving along well. There are a few bugs which
have shown up, but nothing we'd call "showstoppers" just yet. The
beta test is outside of Stanford and ATI now. If all looks good,
we plan to next have a completely open beta.
By the sounds of things the primary change
is a longer period before the next expiration date which is now
August.
Saturday
29/09/2007
Version 6 beta
clients available: a nice shiny new toy to play with...
Version 6 beta client is
available for download from
here and
FAQ
The v6 client
replaces the current v5 Linux and OSX SMP clients (which are due
to expire).
Make sure you read the FAQ relating to the new client BEFORE you
use it, there's important info in there.
The v6 Linux client is now universal, meaning a single client
operates in both Uniprocessor and SMP environments (not
automatically though).
The v6 OSX client is SMP only.
The v6 Windows client is Uniprocessor only, since the WinSMP
client still needs more work.
SMP Windows beta clients:
time to update once again...
Windows SMP beta client needs to
be updated before October 1st.
The previous Windows SMP beta client
expires at the beginning of October. I have posted an updated
client at the same location, accessible from the download page.
This one is good until the beginning of February.
There are no major updates in this client. We are working hard on
a new and improved Windows SMP client to fix a number of the
problems with the current one, but we don't have an ETA yet. We'll
announce that one when it's ready.
Thanks to iCit for
reminding us about the expiration date of the current SMP beta
clients.
Just thought I would let you all know that
Stanford have released a "new" SMP client for all clients.
The new clients purely add a new expiration date to the code and
is available at your favourite
download
site.
The current client expires on the 2nd July!
Saturday
24/03/2007
PS3: the Folding
game has just begun...
A big thanks to BSS
for
pointing out this video which explains all about Folding@Home
on the PS3, our team gets a mention in the video.
Since the Folding@home client was
released this week
17770 PS3's have returned work to Stanford. These PS3's have
almost twice the computational power of all the other
Folding clients combined, 435 verses 251 Teraflops. It looks like the Playstation 3
is going to give the project a big boost in many ways. Below is a
news item released by Stanford yesterday...
With the
PS3 launch, we've added a lot of CPU power to Folding@Home, with
the total FLOPS now greatly increased an on its way to a Petaflop.
Also, we've gotten a lot of crossover interest in the other
Folding@Home clients (Win, Lin, OSX; SMP; and GPU), which is also
wonderful.
Finally, due to all the interest, our web pages are getting hit
very severely. We have been working to improve this, especially
with the understanding that more PS3's could be on the way. So
far, the performance is still pretty snappy, but we've made
changes to make the process run more smoothly. First, we now allow
the stats update script exclusive access to the db during updates.
This speeds updates, but limits what donors can do during the
update period to see their stats. We have also done several
changes to improve caching of the stats data to improve overall
performance. We are also working to get additional hardware to
help out.
With these changes, we should be ready for a lot more clients
Tuesday
20/03/2007
30 Day Time Trial:
is all over...
The
30 Day Time Trial is over and we have a clear winner,
congratulations to the Brotherhood. They increased their output by
3786 points a day over their starting rate, nice going. Second was
the GOM and in third place was Teddy.
Sunday
18/03/2007
Windows SMP beta
client released: more Folding goodness...
A beta client for
Windows based machined has been released.
We are pleased to announce the release of
our Folding@Home Windows SMP client to open beta!
Please keep in mind that this is beta software. There will be
bugs. You may lose work. If you are looking for a "safe" way to
complete work (and earn points), we do not recommend using a beta
client. For those who are willing to risk a little more debugging
and the potential of some lost work (and points), this is a
wonderful way to contribute to the science and see the latest
technology coming out of the Folding@Home project.
For installation instructions, please see the
SMP FAQ or
the readme file included with the client.
With the GPU and PS3 ports looking more and more mature, we have
put more efforts into Win SMP and v6 and I am happy to say that we
are begining to testing both with outside alpha testers. It's
still early, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel on both
now that they're in outside alpha testing.
With the release of v6, we have also planned some adjustments to
the point system. It's clear that points are important to
everyone. Points are important to the science, as they encourage
people to do the science. However, this means that the points
scheme has to be aligned such that donors who optimize their
points optimize the science of what we need too.
We have a plan on how to improve the current scheme and will
announce it as v6 rolls out. V6 has some new features which allow
us to make changes to the points scheme that were not possible
before, which hopefully will let us optimize the points for
science, thus allowing us to do our scientific calculations with
even greater efficiency.
I'm generally not a fan of announcements without something more
concrete (eg a download for the new beta clients would be nice),
but I wanted to let people know what was coming, especially
considering concerns that donors have had with the current system.
We've read the threads -- thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
The new system likely won't make *everyone* happy, but I bet it
will resolve the issues raised and it will also be better for the
science. More details to follow.
