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[EatMyVolts]

Oh, no gauntlet thrown. If I was making a legitimate challenge, the letters Arr-Tee-Ecks would be involved...

Three letters that strike fear in the wallets of men.

 

[Foxbat]

We'll see if I can catch back up to smasho (a.k.a EatMyVolts) or if I merely keep a fixed distance behind.

Well, it looks like my configuration comes up about 100K PPD shy of smasho. Still slipping behind, but not as drastically as before. Before I know it, ke4est will be passing me by (now it's further into the future, though!)

Speaking of getting passed by, it looks like the ASH Folding team will knock the SatelliteGuys.US Team down a peg in 2-1/2 weeks. We're losing ground at over 4 million PPD to them!

 

[Voyager6]

It is time to welcome ke4est to the BILLION POINTS CLUB.

 

[KE4EST]

It is time to welcome ke4est to the BILLION POINTS CLUB.

Wondered how long it would take someone to notice.

 

[Voyager6]

Congrats to Harshness for reaching 19 Million Points.

 

[harshness]

I hope to get to 21M before I have to shut down the heater.

 

[Foxbat]

Wondered how long it would take someone to notice.

It made a nice early Birthday present, eh?

 

[Foxbat]

High winds in the area are playing havoc with our power. We just blipped again, and so today's output will probably suffer.

Guess I should have bought that Tesla PowerWall… ("Honey, what's this $9,000 charge on the Discover?" "Oh, that's the Battery Pack for the house so I can keep Folding if the power goes out." "I'll be at my Mothers!")

 

[Foxbat]

KE4EST, did something happen to one of your rigs? You were out-Folding me by a couple of hundred-thousand PPD, now you're output has been slashed in half!

My Dell T7400 has been under the weather, so to speak. When the power blipped Sunday morning, the workstation did not reboot like my MacPro did. I spent the last 36 hours or so trying to restore it to operation and found out that the LUbuntu 17.04 I was running was past its support date, even though I had burned the DVD back in October. Well, that inhaled-greatly, so I downloaded a new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and proceeded to re-re-install a Linux bistro for Folding. After many hours of trying to remember the "sudo apt-get" commands for the various packages, and trying to get Python support loaded for the FAHControl, I had a machine that would not recognize the NVIDIA cards in OpenCL or CUDA. Then it came back to me, I had to Blacklist the default Nouveau Graphics Driver included with Ubuntu distros. It appears to be be Folding on all cylinders again. It will probably take a few days to see how successful I was.

For once, I did a minimal install, no email, Office, Media players, nothing that should be needing updates every week, and a bare minimum of the required things to update. That should help. And it's nice to have Gnome back, LiteDM wasn't bad, but things look better for now. And the Dell not coming back? It was hung at the "F1" prompt because the CR3202 coin cell on the MB was bad. Replaced it and now it finishes POST with no issues!

 

[KE4EST]

I shut down two GPU's. Just to see how much impact they are having on the power bill.

 

[Foxbat]

Hmmmm, one of these might be something to consider…

NVIDIA GTX 1660ti​

Checking on stock for this new sub-$300 GPU, there are some available: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti In Stock Tracker - NowInStock.net

 

[Foxbat]

I was checking my links in my Signature and I saw this article referenced on the Folding@Home Home Page:
Computational biology project aims to better understand protein folding | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis

It made me think again about why I'm happy to Fold and help the research efforts of Stanford and Washington Universities (and others) who want to improve Life and find cures to diseases that result from Proteins behaving badly.

 

[EatMyVolts]

Kudos to Foxbat who, will in a matter of hours, run right over me in the total points race.

 

[Foxbat]

Kudos to Foxbat who, will in a matter of hours, run right over me in the total points race.

(I guess we'll call it a Tie!)​

I was wondering when someone was going to notice… This is the result of rebuilding both of my Folding workstations, ending up with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) on both the Dell (it was first since it was powered down) and then on my 2006 Mac Pro. This required loading Ubuntu versions 14.04 LTS, then upgrading to 16.04 LTS, and finally to 18.04 LTS, a process that took several days to achieve.

So I am finally up to date on the Mac Pro which had been running on 7.4.15 for the longest time. Sort of the "it's Folding, I don't want to break anything" mindset. But I think I'm finally getting better at setting up Ubuntu from scratch. so I should write a guide to help everyone else stop using Windows 10 to Fold...

1. Install the 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on your Intel / AMD PC
2. Install the OpenCL Development Kit and its dependencies
3. Download the CUDA 10 Kit from NVIDIA (this includes the GTX/RTX drivers) for 64-bit Linux and install.
4. Disable (blacklist) the Nouveau drivers that Ubuntu uses for NVIDIA cards
5. Reboot (again) and you should have the latest NVIDIA graphics drivers running.
6. Download the FAH 7.5.1 Client and Control .DEB packages for Ubuntu from Stanford (I skip the Viewer)
7. Install the FAH Control and take care of the dependencies (Python 2)
8. Install the FAH Client and configure your Username, Team (55236), and Passkey; set it to autostart and with Full / High priority.
9. If done right, the Client will auto configure your CPU and GPU clients. Set the Expert Configuration to add "next-unit-percentage", set it to "100", and save.

If I were really, really, good, I'd actually put in the Linux commands to do each of those steps, or provide links to the downloads. Not tonight, I'm afraid.

 

[Foxbat]

Oh, yeah, and there's just one more little thing………

GAUNTLET THROWN!!!​

 

[KE4EST]

Dude you gonna make me spend money.

 

[Foxbat]

Dude you gonna make me spend money.

FAH Control shows the RTX 2060 is generating about 1M PPD. Amazon has the EVGA for $350 or so. Of course, I bought it the week before the GTX 1660 was announced, looking back I probably would have gotten one of those and saved $100 or so.

Considering it took a GTX 1080ti to get the same PPD a few years back (and you're talking $800 for one of those,) I consider the RTX 2060 a bargain.

 

[Foxbat]

It looks like the Team is going to be at #48 for a while. "Snakes on a Complex Plane" just got their heads cut off:

I wonder if this was another bogus team like the FTL team a few years back? Either way, the top 7 user names on the team were all strings of 32 random hex digits and haven't logged a Point a a couple of days now. Those that remain active are not enough to challenge SatelliteGuys!

So I am finally up to date on the Mac Pro which had been running on 7.4.15 for the longest time.

I had to go back to the first couple of posts in this thread, but I see I'm coming up on the start of the 12th year of Folding@Home for the SatelliteGuys.US Team! The refurbished Mac Pro I bought in early 2007 has been a tank over all these years. The first WUs I did were the beta SMP client which generated 1,440 points per WU. Twelve years later, the Estimated Credit for the CPU slot (only 2 CPUs) is over 3,800 Points. After the OS and FAH Client update, the same Mac Pro with its GTX 1060 and GTX 750ti GPUs generates ~450K PPD!

After all this time, Voyager6 and I have yet to crack the 100,000 Work Unit milestone. ScorpionSting did before he (she?) went dark. The whole Team has just over 854K WUs, so it may be some time before we can celebrate the 1,000,000 WU Milestone.

And speaking of Team Milestones, SatelliteGuys.US will be passing 8,000,000,000 Points this week! WAY TO FOLD!!!

 

[EatMyVolts]

Oh, yeah, and there's just one more little thing………

View attachment 137573

GAUNTLET THROWN!!!​

 

[Voyager6]

Oh, yeah, and there's just one more little thing………

View attachment 137573

GAUNTLET THROWN!!!​

Damn!