I was just wondering if James had any updates on the folding feature that's going to be in the mag soon? I only ask because I have been watching the stats very closely for the past week or so and am increasingly concerned about the OCN team threat. 1.9 months is the current overtake time and falling fast. Barnettworks' 24hr average at present is over 1,945,000 which is more points on average from a single user than their other 19 top producers including nitteo with his very impressive folding farm. I'd love to know more about who barnettworks is... as in where he is located and what exactly he is folding on (I know he's using dell blade racks with several blade servers in each but I don't think anyone knows exactly what he has). Also, does he own all that or is he ninja folding on his employers servers? I am truly delighted that such a producer exists for the project but at the same time I will be very disappointed if we lose out on our world rank. I hope the feature in the mag will drum up enough support to keep them from overtaking us a while longer.
All they can get out of him at the OCN forums is "I work for a large organization". The fact that he didn't say company or firm has them all thinking he works for the US/ Canadian government. Frankly I'd tend to think the same.
All right Detective Uni has been ninja snooping around the OCN forums and found out the following things: (How sad is it that I had to do this to answer my own questions out of impatience :S) "clamatowas" (Both folding username and OCN forum username) and barnettworks work for the same organization. They are, by barnettworks' own admission, co-workers. It seems that he works for an organization that just has tens of thousands of $ worth of Dell blade servers sitting around for months at a time unused... and seeminlgy has their permission to use them for folding whilst they are not being put to their intended use. It also seems he doesn't have to pay this mystery organization a penny for using their hardware or electricity... LOUD sigh. Now why can't we find someone like that? And just by the way... how horrible does their forum look with their f**k off sized sigs and a MILLION stats under their avatars . Totally ruins the look and readability of a forum.
We did, for a while. Inpharm, no.1 on our scores list used his company's server farm to fold for us whilst it was idle. Unfortunately he had to stop folding once they went into production and had to start doing "real" work instead. At one point he was the highest producing individual folder in the world, although that was a while ago and pre-GPU2. He maxed out at around 200,000PPD.
I did some quick and dirty calculations. Would it be possible to squeeze 2million PPD out of 6 Supermicro blade units in a 42U rack? Assuming Beckton Xeons with 224 cores per blade unit. That's 672 SMP clients per rack.
I have no idea, maybe Saspro or someone else could shed some light on that? Might I ask why? You thinking of making an investment? Bump btw; Any news on the feature?
He has changed teams, it seems, for the offer of them making it worth his while. Bit of a cheek. <grin>
If only we could convince the NHS It people to put f@H on all there machines and fold under our name... that would be at least 100,000 Pcs not including servers. Perhaps we should start a petition lol...
Shed some light on what? On average you can fit 32 quad cores in a blade centre (2 quads per half height blase). I've fitted 4 blade centres in a rack before (almost killed me). Thats 128 quads (allows for 256 SMP clients). That should get you almost half a million points per rack. The feature as far as I know will be out this issue depending if JG got the final touches to it in time (it was busy around the deadline). The NHS would be no good to us as most of the machines are dumb terminals and the servers are generally overloaded as it is.
Looks like he stopped folding for them today. 3 WU's in the past 9 hours, down from 400-ish on average. Little **** was on his way to a billion by June. Crazy.
Weapons...... In which case we'll need tanks and attack helicopters! They'll have finished (and won) in a week if he's in their team for the challenge!
Apparently I can't count zeros. 100 million by June, still absurd. If he was his own team, he'd be in 60th overall. I have a feeling that he's made the move to their Chimp Challenge team. They just turned in a million points in the last 3 hours.
Oh dear. This is going to be an epic fail! Anyone else feeling that 'corporate' hardware should not be allowed for the challenge. ie. end users only, not back-to-back cabs of blade racks.
I am of the feeling that if you're pumping out that many points on your own, you should make your own team. No matter how many points someone else is making, it's a drop in the bucket comparatively, and they'll just be riding your coattails to the top. Obviously this is all about science in the long run, but it's still a competition to some extent.