Folding@Home has been a bit of a technical challenge for me.\u00a0 Computers do not normally run flat out on a users job.\u00a0 To put it under full stress and then do some good at the same time, it gave purpose to the exercise.\u00a0 My mother suffers from Parkinson’s disease.\u00a0 Her mother before her was taken from us by Alzheimers, or was it\u00a0leukemia? We were never sure, but she had both.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But then something changed.\u00a0 Cancer decided not to play fair.\u00a0 On the 6th of December 2017 we learnt that it decided to target a friend, of similar age.\u00a0 She is still young, she has children to care for, she has so much to live for, and we cannot bear to lose her.<\/p>\n
Oh course, this means WAR.<\/p>\n
Medical science will deal with the primary problem as best it can, and it will do a good job.\u00a0 However we need to stock its arsenal of weaponry.\u00a0 It needs bigger weapons, more powerful weapons, smarter weapons.\u00a0 This is ultimately where Folding comes in, but it needs more processing power and it needs it NOW.<\/p>\n
So a change of strategy for the Dwarflord server as it now enters full time running.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Each side, download a work unit, process it and return the results.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Thorin server was experimented with to see where its most efficient configuration was.\u00a0 Different strategy for Thorin.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Get them, cook them and get the results back PDQ.<\/p>\n
Positive side.\u00a0 Results were going back faster than “Darmain” had ever seen, since the Enterprise servers came on-line.\u00a0 At the time of writing, early on a Saturday morning on the 17th Februray, this is the statistical position.\u00a0 The lifetime score has gone up by 316%.\u00a0 The rank position has gone up the board by 51792.\u00a0 No, that is right, over 50000 positions against over 1.9 million donors.\u00a0 In relation to all those donors I have gone from 7.1% in the world to 4.2%.<\/p>\n
Itchy side.\u00a0 Electrical power consumption.\u00a0 I keep meter reading logs so I can compare before and after.\u00a0 The exercise is chewing through about \u00a31.50 of electricity, per day.\u00a0 A monthly bill of \u00a338 has now gone up to \u00a384.\u00a0 If this maintains then this is \u00a3550 a year extra!! Gulp!\u00a0 But is Tonya’s life worth more or less than this?\u00a0 No need to answer that obvious question.<\/p>\n
It’s winter and its cold outside.\u00a0 The useful heat off the servers is helpful.\u00a0 However, once summer arrives it will not be helpful at all.\u00a0 As the ambient temperature warms up so the cooling fans in the servers will spool up to compensate and keep the sweating circuits cool.\u00a0 Its not a problem for these machines to tolerate UK summer temperatures, however it will be a problem to us, living with them.\u00a0 The noise is similar to a hair drier, running 24 hours a day.\u00a0 The investment into a phase change heat pump, or similar air conditioning, is not viable.\u00a0 There is no alternative, we will have to throttle back.<\/p>\n
These enterprise servers are designed to run continuously, they are designed to work hard.\u00a0 But what I’m doing is thrashing the living daylights out of them.\u00a0 They have a lot more monitoring than a normal PC.\u00a0 30 temperature sensors tell what is happening inside.\u00a0 The twin Xeon processors are running at around 55 degrees on the silicon.\u00a0 They have a fan each to drive air through the large stainless steel heat sink.\u00a0 Beyond that the air meets the Voltage Manager Unit, the VMU.\u00a0 This is responsible for maintaining the correct supply voltages into the processors, and its getting a right thrashing.\u00a0 While it is being force cool it is reading 95 degrees on its sensor.\u00a0 Perfectly allowable in Hewlett Packards view but too damn hot in mine.\u00a0 I fear for a reduction in\u00a0 the machines operating life if we go on like this.<\/p>\n
Change of strategy then, perhaps addressing both these problems.\u00a0 The Folding client has been reconfigured to only run one work unit at a time and to only use half of the available cores.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That’s about a kilowatt hour a day less.\u00a0 Happy times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Folding@Home has been a bit of a technical challenge for me.\u00a0 Computers do not normally run flat out on a users job.\u00a0 To put it under full stress and then do some good at the same time, it gave purpose to the exercise.\u00a0 My mother suffers from Parkinson’s disease.\u00a0 Her mother before her was taken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foldingathome","category-websitedesign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darmain.co.uk\/darmainworld\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}