Folding@Home has been a bit of a technical challenge for me. Computers do not normally run flat out on a users job. To put it under full stress and then do some good at the same time, it gave purpose to the exercise. My mother suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Her mother before her was taken from us by Alzheimers, or was it leukemia? We were never sure, but she had both. Folding works on both these diseases so it seemed right to hopefully get a cure in place before my generation got to these elderly times.
But then something changed. Cancer decided not to play fair. On the 6th of December 2017 we learnt that it decided to target a friend, of similar age. She is still young, she has children to care for, she has so much to live for, and we cannot bear to lose her.
Oh course, this means WAR.
Medical science will deal with the primary problem as best it can, and it will do a good job. However we need to stock its arsenal of weaponry. It needs bigger weapons, more powerful weapons, smarter weapons. This is ultimately where Folding comes in, but it needs more processing power and it needs it NOW.
So a change of strategy for the Dwarflord server as it now enters full time running. A modification of its configuration such that it uses half of its processors for one folding work unit, and the other half for a completely different work unit. Each side, download a work unit, process it and return the results.
Meanwhile, the Thorin server was experimented with to see where its most efficient configuration was. Different strategy for Thorin. It’s just too power hungry to run full time, so instead it is run for a few hours a day, two work units, twelve processors per work unit. Get them, cook them and get the results back PDQ.
Positive side. Results were going back faster than “Darmain” had ever seen, since the Enterprise servers came on-line. At the time of writing, early on a Saturday morning on the 17th Februray, this is the statistical position. The lifetime score has gone up by 316%. The rank position has gone up the board by 51792. No, that is right, over 50000 positions against over 1.9 million donors. In relation to all those donors I have gone from 7.1% in the world to 4.2%.
Itchy side. Electrical power consumption. I keep meter reading logs so I can compare before and after. The exercise is chewing through about £1.50 of electricity, per day. A monthly bill of £38 has now gone up to £84. If this maintains then this is £550 a year extra!! Gulp! But is Tonya’s life worth more or less than this? No need to answer that obvious question.
Technical downside 1 – Cooling
It’s winter and its cold outside. The useful heat off the servers is helpful. However, once summer arrives it will not be helpful at all. As the ambient temperature warms up so the cooling fans in the servers will spool up to compensate and keep the sweating circuits cool. Its not a problem for these machines to tolerate UK summer temperatures, however it will be a problem to us, living with them. The noise is similar to a hair drier, running 24 hours a day. The investment into a phase change heat pump, or similar air conditioning, is not viable. There is no alternative, we will have to throttle back.
Technical downside 2 – Stress
These enterprise servers are designed to run continuously, they are designed to work hard. But what I’m doing is thrashing the living daylights out of them. They have a lot more monitoring than a normal PC. 30 temperature sensors tell what is happening inside. The twin Xeon processors are running at around 55 degrees on the silicon. They have a fan each to drive air through the large stainless steel heat sink. Beyond that the air meets the Voltage Manager Unit, the VMU. This is responsible for maintaining the correct supply voltages into the processors, and its getting a right thrashing. While it is being force cool it is reading 95 degrees on its sensor. Perfectly allowable in Hewlett Packards view but too damn hot in mine. I fear for a reduction in the machines operating life if we go on like this.
Change of strategy then, perhaps addressing both these problems. The Folding client has been reconfigured to only run one work unit at a time and to only use half of the available cores. Plus side, steady work being done, the machine runs cooler, the fans run quieter, and the internal power metre tells me that we are using 40W less. That’s about a kilowatt hour a day less. Happy times.
