It became very clear in the Spring of 2020 that Folding@Home was the key to our way out of COVID and absolutely necessary to save lives.
Good news – Stanford pleaded for more support. Linus Tech Tips got in on this and broadcast to the world. GitHub, Microsoft, Amazon, all sorts of big data centres, down to the smallest PCs were suddenly brought into action. The load was so great that Standford’s servers couldn’t keep up! This is brilliant news! Again LTT came to the rescue and built a server for Stanford to use.
Astounding news – The total computational power brought to bear, peaked at 2.4 ExaFlops, which is processing power that makes the SUMMIT super computer look like a calculator.
Bad news – If you can call it that. I had just managed to get me position on the score table to 50,000. Then all this happened, and within a matter of a week I was at 80,000 and falling. NO!!!! So I fault back. The big machines, JARVIS1, JARVIS2 and JARVIS-WORKSTATION, were run from 0830 to 2330 every day. JARVIS3 was on 24 hours anyway but was a fraction of the CPU power. This ran for the month of May 2020. Then the electricity bill came in. Oh dear! The machines were using more power per day than the rest of the house combined. I had to make an emergency payment to my energy provider of £150. I had to be sensible here and I backed off.
So I carried on, helping out the “myplayhouse” team to get into the top 100. My contribution was pathetic compared to others. What was I doing wrong? Two things it would appear –
- I didn’t have PassKey to lock my machines to my account. Having one of those meant many more points. They were not wrong and after getting 2 million points in the last 8 years, I made 10 million by the end of the 2020.
- My second problem came to light while watching a video post from “myplayhouse” where the use of a Graphics Card was demonstrated to accelerate F@H by stupid amounts. Ah ha!!!
So I did some research and ended up buying a GTX1650 based Graphics card. The GTX1650 bit is the chip set from NVIDIA. I fitted the card to JARVIS-WORKSTATION, alongside the existing card. I set it up so that the new card was purely for Folding, the old one was good enough for the displays. Once ready I let it rip.
Why, oh Why, did I not do this before? The processors were working on a job, that took seven hours and gained me 20,000 points. The GPU took on a job, completed in two hours and returned 700,000 points. This card was blowing the Enterprise Servers out of the water!
So, JARVIS1, the media server, has space in the back! A second GTX1650 was purchased and fitted, and let rip!
Two months later I had decided to take a break. The power consumption is still high but so much more work to the Watt is returned. Also, a lot of heat, which is fine in the winter, but its too much now.
I am just short of 50 million points and I am at 32,000 on the league table.
When it gets colder again I will resume. The heat off-sets the heating bill so its not totally lost. This will resume!
