Newbie Folding Questions!

Wow 5Ghz. You must of had some damn good cooling on that to be folding on it. My GPU folding feels a bit like cheating when you can just buy a couple of high end graphics cards, thrash the bollocks off them, and get almost half a million points per day. And I'm only running one machine! Reading the older comments on the forum you realise that points were rather harder to come by with previous generations of kit and the older software. The latest core 17 has certainly unlocked the potential in AMD cards, and is a bit of a game changer in the Nvidia Vs AMD folding contest.

 

Petaflops - read your PM's

 

Yep. Looking back to the early GPU2 client back at the beginning of 2009, I had 9x Q6600/Q6700 OC'd PC's and 8x GTX260's all running flat out ... and the total PPD? About 55,000!!!

 

That's got me thinking. I wonder what the greatest PPD it would be possible to get from a single machine? Could you make a 1 Million PPD desktop computer? Now that would be a bit of fun. Would need a hell of a PSU and a great deal of cooling and some damn fast graphics cards.! Hmmmm. What about everyone else out there. What's the best PPD from one machine that you have ever achieved? Go on, you can brag about it!
Pete

 

Quad e5 4650 running on a SuperMicro X9QR7-TF+ will net you 1mill PPD from a single machine.

Or a board running 5x Titans would manage it too. Better PPD/W with the CPU based rig though.

 

Just what motherboard did you have in mind for running those 5 Titans? And what PSU for that matter? Hinkley Point!?

So how many cores are there in an E5 4650? That's a Xeon processor I presume. and what's the cost of that little lot then. Hey, or maybe you could have the 5 titans on the SuperMicro board and have 2 million PPD. Genius!

 

In a cocked hat sir... job done

Sent from my XT890 using Tapatalk

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7121/...d-processor-system-4x-e54650l-from-supermicro

 

Wow! 32 cores and 64 threads on one motherboard. That is insane. When I said desktop, I didn't mean that the computer case had to be the size of a desk! So come on, tell me, had anyone actually folded on one of these? Apparently the price is $20,000 with seems rather steep, especially as in the conclusion he say that you need to learn to program it to get the benefit of all the threads. I suspect that the GPU route would be the cheaper way to go.

So, will a Titan actually fold 200K PPD. I thought in the video link from DocJonz, they said that a Titan would only fold 120K PPD, which is a long way short of the 200K PPD needed per card. Anyone with a Titan out there? And we still need to find a suitable motherboard and PSU that could cope with the 5 x TItans. By my calculations 5 x HD7990's would do as well, and be a lot cheaper than the Titans. So come on, lets hear your suggestions for this dream folding machine!

 

One of the guys on this forum folds on a 64T AMD machine, think it is Scorpuk...

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=245135

 

There are guys out there folding with 4p Xeon e5 machines that are touching a mill per day. Very difficult to get hold of the 4p e5 boards though, 2p are easy to get but the CPUs aren't as cheap as they used to be sadly. when the ES (engineering sample) chips were being flogged on eBay you could get a half mill per day machine for a grand (board+cpus).

 

I'm rather tempted to have a crack at making a PC capable of consistently producing 1 Million PPD but to do it with fairly standard PC components and with just a reasonable budget. Do you think that it would make an interesting project log? The aim would be to hit 1 million but to do it as cheaply as possible. Worth doing? I do love fiddling about with hardware, and it would be fun to have a particular objective in mind. I don't think that I can post attachments yet, so that might rule out photographs. How may posts do you need before you can post photos?

 

I think that would certainly generate some interest. You might even get the mag (CustomPC of course) to be interested to do an article on it ....

** rant ** - the mag, apart from the Folder profile page, seem to have forgotten they have a top-notch Folding team, as there has been no mention of Folding performance on new CPU or GPU reviews, and no article for ages, so this might give them a good excuse ** rant over! **

 

For a 1 mill PPD rig I would probably go for the following:

Supermicro MBD-X9DRD-IF-B £250

2x Xeon E5-2680 £1000

That will get around 300,000 PPD, then use risers and fill it with 3-4 7990s in an open top case and you are done

Would probably need either a 1600w PSU or a pair of 1Kw ones to run it though lol.

 

Just host them on a site like imgur.com and use the insert image function

 

or postimg.org

 

Hi Doc. Thanks for the encouragement. Yes I think Custom PC could push the team a bit more, and certainly provide a bit more up to date info and stats on various GPU's and their folding ability. When you think of the types of people who are likely to be reading the mag regularly, they must have some pretty awesome machines between then all.

 

Hi John. Do you know how many posts I would need before I could post attachments. I'm not that software savvy when it comes down to it. Hardware Yes, Software, Not really! I could probably just cope with importing a photo as an attachment into a project log from a USB stick!

Pete

 

sorry i dont know minimum post count for pics

upload some to postimg and copy forum link to here to try