How To Set Priority and Affinity Permanently

(This small howto may have existed at CPC but I don't know, or who to credit!)

What Is It, and What Does it Do?

As some of you may know, folding with both a CPU and a GPU will throttle the GPU and ruin the potential PPD you could get from it. To get round this you change its priority to high and lock it to a specific core, but as soon as the WU ends and a new one starts, it reverts.

However there's a small nifty program out there that gets round this for you called PriFinitty2



Using It

The programs a stand alone .exe so to get the ball rolling all you need to do is download the program and double click the "PriFinitty2.exe"

Then on the right hand side of the page you want to hit the "Add" button.



A file window should open up, browse your GPU folding folder(s) within your AppData. If your not Multi GPU folding this might sound new to you so their located in C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\Folding@home-gpu

Select the FahCore_xx in there. Repeat this process for every GPU folder and every core



At this point you should have all your GPU cores listed in the right hand window. Now right click each one, pick a core you want it to bind too, set the priority to high and hit apply.



Rinse and repeat this for all your cores and now your most of the way there. All thats left to do is to check "Auto Set" and "Enforce" at the top of the window to finish the whole job off.



All done! Just run this nifty little app whenever you GPU folding for a nice little PPD boost. I personally on my 9800GX2 went from ~8k to just over 10k by doing this so I can vouch for it.

Oh some of you are wondering why I've not set the CPU folding priority, well it defaults to normal, which is below the high of your GPU so that's more than enough

Hope this help's our team move up the table a bit

Again, this has probably been done, but I can't see it here on bit-tech so kudos to whoever did it first over at CPC.

/SwiftDestiny out

 

Or if you're running Linux and GPU folding with wine and the Window$ client, use 'nice' to increase the priority of the GPU client(s). Assuming your CPU client(s) are running at 'idle' (nice'd at 19), starting the gpu client with 'nice -n 15 wine Folding@home-Win32-GPU.exe -verbosity 9 -forcegpu nvidia_g80' will do the job.

 

Don't forget that there is a system environment variable (called NV_FAH_CPU_AFFINITY) built into the GPU2 client to control allocation of the GPUs to specific CPU cores ....

In WinXP, go to Control Panel - Sytem - Advanced - Enviroment Variables, and then at the bottom under System Variables, click New and Enter;

Variable name: NV_FAH_CPU_AFFINITY
Variable value: X

where X is;
1 = CPU core 0
2 = CPU core 1
3 = CPU cores 0 & 1
4 = CPU core 2
8 = CPU core 3
15 = CPUs cores 0-3

So for one GPU set to 0, and for two GPU's set to 3. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy

Note: It's still advisable, if running an SMP concurrently with GPU's, to use one of the tools, such as Set Affinity II or the one mentioned above, to link the SMP to the spare CPU cores.