Distributed Bit-Tech Folding@Home Team (CLOSED: now superseded by joint CPC/bit-tech team)

Ok so i tried to enter you guys number to my Folding Program and it says its and invalid team, has the team quit or I just have the wrong number

 

i think you might have entered the wrong team number.

the bit-tech team number is: 33346

try it again, if it kicks up a fuss, gimme a shout and i'll check on the stats servers, make sure they are still up. the f@h forums have been hit with a ddos over christmas (why would someone ddos them? your guess is as good as mine), so their server might just be a lil confused atm, but any work done for team 33346 will be credited to that team, even if it takes a little longer than usual

 

I haven't looked at this thread for a while, nice to see things like this happening!

Lots more new people on board too, which is always good to see.

 

caution, very low quality webcammage in the dark.

ok, ok, ok. before you all tell me how to improve the piccies, i know they are crap, but right now its 05:58, and my fingers are sore as hell from snipping/stripping/soldering/bending/twisting and all sorts of funky stuff with 180 seperate cables. (and thats just the power leads ffs!)

and yes, i know this is a little off topic.

just figured i would let you all have a little peek at my latest little project cause its sole purpose is to crunch WU's for the bit-tech f@h team.

this is the cause of my finger troubles (who knew fingers could be numb *and* hurt at the same time!)


a shiny powercable, so 5 mobo's can run off one psu (i know, crappy wuality, dont speak, im venting )

and what it plugs into



frontage


sideage


sketchuppage

and just before some observent smart-arse notices theres only 4 mobo's on there, thats because the 5th is on the desk, crunching WU's, because ive been building the OS on it, so was letting it compile instead of using it for a test-fit

and yes, i know, i dont really need all five hard-drives, just one and netboot, this is just a test design, and i want to make sure theres lots of room for improvement, including some chunky hard drives to be able to turn it into a network storage device, as well as a room heater

oh, and if you cant tell from the piccies (yes, i know, dont say it), its a stack of 5 shiny mobo's, that are currently all running a sexy custom Linux distro (built from scratch from source, just cause i can), and all 5 are due to be powered up on tuesday and start chewing at fah whilst i get to work on building a box to put them all in, lol. then i just have to put together the other two sets..... 15 mobo's in all, i had them lying aroudn so figured they may as well crunch (no, im not kidding, yes i really did have them lying around, dont ask..... btw, anyone want to buy 15 monitors?)

anyways, im off to bed, just figured i'd peek in and let you all see the fruit of my days labour (that £*$%*)($£ing cable!!!!)


happy folding and a happy new year all



muahahahaha.... and they thought i was insane when i said i would never be knocked off the number four spot!

 

wow looking good (evan though the pics are crap lol ). Your using a custom version of linux that you compiled yourself? Would there be any other one out there that could be used instead? also are you going to use the combined CPU power to work on one WU or all five doing there own thing with 5 clients?
many many questions cos i realy love the idea

 

after nine hours of sleep, lol

yeah, a fully custome compiled linux, everything hand built and lots of ./configure, make, make install's lol

and yeah, im sure there are plenty of distro's out there that would work just fine, i used redhat 9.0 to get the machines started initially, so i could use them to rebuild my own os. the problem with using other distro's is that the large majority (i.e. redhat, knoppix, suse etc) all have far too much stuff on them for what i will actually need. each motherboard only has 3 sticks of 32megs, so thats 96 megs in total, to fit the os and the client into. not easy if your using redhat, but very easy (22~40 megs to spare, depending on the size of the WU from my test runs) if your using a hand-built linux with *only* that which you need. hehe, i didnt really want to spend any money on the machines (you try upgrading 15 pc's at once, and see if your wallet melts, lol), so i just bunged in what ram i had, and cranked them all up.... and of course, linux is free, so it only cost me my time to get the OS just the way i need it.

hmm, thats a toughie i was toying with the idea of a processing cluster, but to be honest, i dont think its possible to have all of them work on one WU combined, without re-writing some of the f@h code, and they wont let me have the source code

they will all be "working together" as it were, none of them will have hard disks, they will all be loading the same drive images from the server, and all running r@h, but each mobo will be working on its own WU, they wont be sharing WU's, only their operating systems and drives. atm it looks like 5 clients, cause i cant edit f@h to make it workable on a single multiprocessor machine

hehe, happy folding, and hey, if you have any questions, ask away, i'll answer, its better on these forums than sitting soldring power cables, lol

happy folding



errrrrrr

darn, did you see protien p313! it folded like an origami teacher
(i have to put some folding talk here, cause if JetSetJimbo see's me going off topic, he will make me crunch a WU *by hand* )

hehe, just kidding JSJ

 

very cool idea, I like it

You could do a project log when its all done for all of Bit to see!

Being a comparitive linux noob, I would be very interested to see how the whole shared OS thing works too.

I'm sure your own OS was very fun to do, but for anyone who doesn't feel up to that and wants to do something similar, I know that Slax will boot on 30MB ram.

 

D4VID

i will be making a work log, but not until after i move (at the end of the month if all goes well). right now its all just a dry-fit and making sure its actually possible (and yes, all five boards are running from the one power supply YAY!

and yes, there are distros that will run in very small amounts of ram, and i even note on the EMIII site theres a very small linux distro pre-built for running f@h that will fit on a usb pen drive. i built the OS mainly for fun, but also because i wanted a particular setup, with specific options compiled in as the cluster will be used for other things too (namely, my own arcane coding projects ). for the large majority of the time, however, it will be sat idle, and can crunch WU's all day long.

as for how it all works, you can be sure i'll include it all in a worklog. the software side on this mod is possibly more important than the hardware side

but for now, i have all five boards whirring away happily, so its off to bed for me

happy folding peeps

 

I've had a wierd problem with my f@h. I was nearly at the end of a comleted WU (2000 frames) when for some reason it restarted the entire WU again, any idea why that happened?

 

Did you exceed the timelimit on returned results?

 

perhaps you returned the unit, and got a similar one back? over the last week or so ive had 3 or 4 p313 WU's that have looked almost identical, i thought that it was doing the same WU until i checked EMIII

 

I've had this WU for about 5 days, the 'puter has been off 'cos I've been away over the new year.

The WU count hasn't increased. I'm realising now that I cleared the computer of temporary files, so I think it may have deleted something to do with F@H, causing it to start the WU again!

What does WU stand for anyway? Work Unit?

 

yeah, WU is Work Unit, one of the folding jobs from F@H

and yes, it is very easy to delete gubbins from the F@H folder and the F@H client is built for robustness, if something goes wrong, and it doesnt know what, it just throws away the results, and tries to start again from scratch. on my cluster ive utilised this to be able to have one "golden master" drive image, to copy to all filesystems, so when the machines are turned on, the f@h client is allready configured, and just starts itself off grabbing the first WU it see's/downloads

i wouldnt worry about it too much. keep an eye on it, and see if it does it again, you might just have a corrupt WU (its not very common, but it does happen sometimes). if it continually restarts the same WU, gimme a shout and i'll put up something on how to clear the WU cache and force it to grab a fresh WU.

 

Thanks for the heads-up on your ideas so far Zidane and ill be following closely to see how things progress. I just remembered that my uni is throwing out lots of old P133 machienes and im thinking of grabbing a few (for no money of course )
Oh and thanks D4VID for showing me to Slax, it looks like it will be perfect for anything i decide to cook up as im no way capable of compiling my own *nix
Edit: Zid. Whats the power rating on the PSU and how did you get all 5 running off it? was it a case of just changing the 5 and 12 volt lines on the molex to fit the ATX power lead?

 

muahahaha! all of them are working

as for the machines, just grab as many as you can, they take up a lot of space, but you can always scarf the mobo's out, chuck the cases, and mount the mobos on some 4mm bar (thats what ive done)

as for the OS, i would *strongly* reccomend something like LFS (Linux From Scratch), here as it is literally step by step on how to make your own linux (literally, every command you need is right there, its how i learnt how to build a linux distro when i knew nothing about how it worked, and following that book taught me more about linux than anything else (you might also like to read "beyond linux from scratch", and "from power up to bash prompt", both follow on from LFS, and are excellent for teaching linux OS essentials). my basic operating system runs in around 10-12 megs of ram total (and thats pretty good for a fairly complete linux OS), the client can push that up to use 60-65 megs, but that largely depends on the WU its crunching. i havent actually tried slax, or used it at all, so i'd be interested to see how it compares if you dont want to build your own OS (it can take a week just waiting for all the compiling, lol).

as for the hardware, basicly, i scarfed 5 power supplies from the empty cases, and just chopped the AT power cables (these boards have AT and ATX power connectors, so using the AT meant i didnt have to worry about the softpoweron/off line causing any problems, just the AC switch on the PSU). once i had a stack of power cables, and one complete psu, i stuck them in a loooong chain, so i have 1 psu with 5 connectors on its AT power leads. the psu is a 250W AT psu, just one i pulled out of the old machines. i did a similar thing to power the hdd's, it now has 5 hdd's running off one molex lead.

gimme a poke if you want more info, i'll make a new thread for it, so we can go through it in detail, rather than hijacking this thread.

happy folding

 

Just added a couple more puters to the mix. I should have 6 cpu's 24x7 now. I am thinking of scrapping the PIII 450 I have as it doesn't seem to do much when it's not 24x7. It's been about 2 weeks and it's still crunching the first 250 WU, what is the average time limit on the WU's?

Still climbing up the ranks, we need to get more people active!

 

Looking at the stats you've amassed more points in the past 7 days than the top 4 ranking team members put together! I don't think it'll be long before you're leaning on us all.

To be honest I don't think my main rig has been folding properly. Have been running 2 instances folding@home. One console version and one graphical, I just don't seem to be returning the work units. The graphical client either seems to just sit at the end of a unit (i.e 250/250) with the time per frame at just a few seconds.

Either that or I get 'preparing for large workunit' in the status with the counter sometimes going up to as many as a couple of thousand, or until I attempt to clear it by reseting the client / machine.

Also the other day I found more than 2 instances of the core running in process manager.

I've just updated to the latest version of the console (just running that) and when starting up it made a reference to unit 2 being past the 1st Jan deadline....

I never seem to get Tinker units either... I'm sure I could answer all this by trawling the F@H forums but I really don't have the time at the moment. If anyone can shed any light on any of this that'd be cool. Otherwise I'll just see how it goes.

@Zidane - That new folding farm you're knocking up looks sweet- i'm sure you'll be matching DaKinds weekly points in no time. I'm not so sure I will though....

A project log'll raise the profile of bit-tech folding nicely (and keep everything tidy here )

 

JetSetJimbo

your running two clients..... have you made sure they both have different machine id's? if both are on one machine, they have to have different id's so the servers can spot which is which. if they both have the same ID, the server might be getting confused if you are trying to return a WU which it thinks hasnt been issued to you.

failing that, check the queue of the console one (use the -help flag for the commands) and try sending them manually, one at once. if one fails, delete it, it will just bork the queue.

as for the better units, i have "allow units over 5 megs" turned on in the config, and the -advmethods switch, and i seem to get some nice units. give them a try

 

oooooh! SPAAAAM!

SPAAAAAM!

lol, last post about the folding farm, i pwomise

LAGMonkey, i made a new thread in the distributed computing forums, here , if your building a farm, feel free to bung it in there.

its not a worklog (i havent actually done much of anything physical, aside from a test-fit, most of the work so far is software). but it will stop us from hijacking here

</spaaaaaaaam>

 

I actually had my main system hang on a couple of WU's last week. Had to clear em out and start from scratch, one hung at 375 of 400, sat there for about 12 hrs... had to clear it out. Cyber is climibing up the ranks quickly too, givin me a run for my money.