Fold for Stephanie

[btarunr]

Some of you may know Scott Sherman from Bjorn3D. To be honest, I don't know him personally, and my knowing him is not relevant to this thread. He is a great reviewer and tech-commentator.

Scott's 13 year old daughter Stephanie, is battling Hodgkin's Lymphoma at a very advanced stage (4B). Being a great supporter of the Folding@Home initiative himself, Scott asks you to do a little favour: fold. He has announced a contest.

The contest is simple: fold for a month, stand a chance to win some great prizes. Up for grabs are:

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator signed by Jen Hsun Huang, Co-founder, president and CEO of NVIDIA. A great graphics accelerator with added collectors' value.
• An XFX GeForce GTX 285
• Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1333, 2x 1GB memory kit

For rules about participation and other information about the Fold for Stephanie Contest, visit this page.

If your generosity takes you beyond this contest, please visit this page.

[btarunr]

No fights, no off-topic posts, no drama, no nonsense (in this GN thread). Consider this the first and last warning.

[DonInKansas]

An awesome idea. I'll re-fire the folding when I get home from work. As a father, anything I can do is cool.

[Steevo]

I have already added my other multi-core machines at work and have more that I can add to the "fold".


However, I fold for the science, and not for prizes or glory. I too have relatives suffer, and I hope that what is learned from this long project will help, or cure those suffering.

[imperialreign]

As a survivor of Hodkin's Lymphoma myself, my support goes out . . .

[hat]

I'll fold for Stephanie, heh. I'd do it anyway, but hey, GTX285 would brighten my system up a bit.

I don't see how this is nonsense though...

[blkhogan]

It's is always nice when you can put a name or face behind a reason to do something. I will be firing my folding rig back up today and do my part to help.

[FordGT90Concept]

Protein folding has absolutely nothing to do with Hodgkin's lymphoma. I have never heard of a computing project aimmed at understanding mutations in the lymphocytes. Various theropies are pretty damn successful though (80%+ success rate).


All the best to her and her family.

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by hat

I don't see how this is nonsense though...

No other place to post in.

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

Protein folding has absolutely nothing to do with Hodgkin's lymphoma.

I know, but that's not the point. Hodgkin's disease is a cancer in the broader classification. So he's generalising F@H with "helps find cures for cancers (...)", to reach out and spread awareness, even if F@H/protein folding computation has no direct implications on Hodgkin's. If a chance to win a GTX 285 serves as an incentive to fold, why not.

[FordGT90Concept]

Well, my server is mighty bored so I guess I could until F@H pisses me off again. Which client should I run on a two-way quad-core Xeon platform?

[imperialreign]

Originally Posted by btarunr

No other place to post in.



I know, but that's not the point. Hodgkin's disease is a cancer in the broader classification. So he's generalising F@H with "helps find cures for cancers (...)", to reach out and spread awareness, even if F@H/protein folding computation has no direct implications on Hodgkin's. If a chance to win a GTX 285 serves as an incentive to fold, why not.

unless I'm mistaken - F@H won't find a "cure" for most cancers, but the results of F@H can go a long way to improving the quality of chemotherapy treatments, as well as other supportive medications doctors adminster to those undergoing chemo and radiotherapy treatments . . . medications that keep the immune system up, fight naseua, muscle relaxers, etc.

[Steevo]

Dual SMP clients.

[KainXS]

If I win anything, I will sell it and donate the money i get for it.

[FordGT90Concept]

Originally Posted by Steevo

Dual SMP clients.

Two instances of the SMP client?

[Steevo]

Each will only use 4 cores.

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by imperialreign

unless I'm mistaken - F@H won't find a "cure" for most cancers

Which is why I said it "helps". The results of F@H help in many ways. The ultimate goal of any cancer research would be to find cures; with support drugs, and treatment methods being milestones, short-term goals. The whole idea is to mobilise people to take up F@H, advertising the ultimate goal of cancer-research as an incentive.

[imperialreign]

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

Two instances of the SMP client?

yeah - one SMP client works with only one multi-core CPU . . . so you need two SMPs running simultaneously. One for each CPU.

You can also get your video cards folding as well - although, they'll need one CPU core per GPU client. It gets a little confusing.


For example - if you have a quad-core CPU and two GPUs that can fold, you would need two GPU clients, and one SMP client. Although, the SMP client would only be able to thread for 2 CPU cores instead of 4, the other two CPU cores would be working with the GPU clients and the GPU core calculations.

[blkhogan]

My father has fought lung and prostate cancer in the past few years. If the f@h program is trying to help make the world a better and healthier place, we should support it even if it doesn't have a direct impact on what is going on. Finding cures to somethings can lead to advancements on others.

[FordGT90Concept]

It has an 8500 GT. Is it worth giving up four cores for the 8500 GT? Mind you, this is a server: stability is paramount.

I have to use the MPICH SMP client because Deino MPI is not 64-bit compatible.

[Castiel]

This is so sad for her to go through this, she is in my prayers and I'm folding for her not the prizes.

[DonInKansas]

The GPU client is huge pointsiwse; your vid card will net you more points in a day than those CPUs will net in a week. Even if you just run your GPU you'll be in good shape; I can't imagine your server uses it much.

[FordGT90Concept]

Heh, the entire system is running at 0-1% CPU all day every day. The GPU is doing 2D only.

[imperialreign]

The GPU clients can fold some mathematics that their architecture is best suited for . . . and fast, too.

For ATI owners, F@H is capable through the X1900 series (possibly X1600 and X1800, can't remember).

The GPUs fold in their down-time . . . when they aren't actually being used for intense work (such as game rendering) . . . from my personal experience before, I found the best balance for my system was one SMP client with two dedicated CPU cores, and two GPU clients - one for each GPU.


One word of warning, though - F@H clients are EXTREMELLY sensitive to OCing . . . not saying that you can't fold with OCed components, but if the OC is not 100% stable, you will end up with errors that either crash the client, or result in faulty-folding where the work-packet is sent back unfinished, terminated early, or with errors, which result in no points being awarded (as the work-packet will have to be reviewed and then sent back out to users), and an increased and un-productive work-load on your system as it'll be turning in work early and recieving new work-packets sooner than you should.

[FordGT90Concept]

I tried starting the GPU client and it says:

NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT detected
At present your GPU is not supported or you need a current driver.
You may wish running our standard client,
which you can download at folding.stanford.edu.

The SMP clients are already running but it's only using 25% (2 cores).

[imperialreign]

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

The SMP clients area already running but it's only using 25% (2 cores).

what I've found works for me in the past - manually setting the CPU affinity for the clients.

although, depending on how much system work your CPUs need to address (applications, background tasks, etc.), it might be a good idea to leave a couple of cores free to handle the day-to-day of system operation.