Big Advantage Folders Grab Your Arses

[stevehat1]

Big advantage folders read this....

http://folding.typepad.com/news/201...ed-ba-projects-effective-january-16-2012.html

 

[hmmblah]

Wow, that sucks! Luckily, my bigadv rig is 24 cores. Too bad it can't be over clocked.

 

[kup]

Ouch! That cuts out my 3 rigs..

 

[thestepster]

blinking hell i know i dont fold these days but damn that is litterally a f@h game changer this will wipe out tons of ppl's kit

this i will put money on causing a lot of ppl to quit or huge rumbles will start and they will back out

 

[riotcity76]

blinking hell i know i dont fold these days but damn that is litterally a f@h game changer this will wipe out tons of ppl's kit

this i will put money on causing a lot of ppl to quit or huge rumbles will start and they will back out

There seems to be a lot of people that actually support the change. Bigadv was never really meant for consumer setups to begin with...it just so happened that overclocked i7s became powerful enough to run bigadv work on 4 cores/8 threads. But the work was always meant for dual cpu/8/12/16 core machines.

Personally it doesn't affect me since my SR2 is 24 threads, but it will suck for alot of people. But I do know that they scaled bigadv points back a couple months ago so it might not be that far off from regular smp by now.

 

[thestepster]

yeah but i bet its just wiped a whole ton of i7's off the map with this change and if they are capable of coping with these work loads then y not let them continue cause there isnt gonna be very many ppl rocking sr2's with dual xeons packed in there cause of the monstrous costs involved, possibly see more AMD set ups, any idea how bulldozer folds? cause it might turn out to be a pretty bad ass server chip if they can nail together a chip rocking 16 cores each

 

[riotcity76]

yeah but i bet its just wiped a whole ton of i7's off the map

They can still fold regular smp! Maybe kup will be able to give us numbers on how much ppd he loses from this change.

and if they are capable of coping with these work loads then y not let them continue

Probably because they plan on increasing the bigadv work to levels that i7s will no longer be able to return quick enough.

I see it as sort of a revolving door...but Vijay said it best in his first few sentences in his post:

Big Advanced (BA) is an experimental type of Folding@home WUs intended for the most powerful machines in FAH. However, as time goes on, technology advances, and the characteristics associated with the most powerful machines changes. Due to these advances in hardware capabilities, we will need to periodically change the BA minimum requirements.

When we get to a point where mainstream i5s can fold bigadv*, it's time for bigadv to be updated. It sucks, but it's a necessary change imo if bigadv is going to be successful as it was intended. Hell, it's hard to imagine but there will be a time when my sr-2 just won't cut it with whatever WUs they are releasing in the not-too-distant future.

At the very least you have to give Stanford credit here for the communication. They've given us a timeframe when it's going to happen and explained their reasoning behind the decision. This is more than we're used to from them, frankly.

*Granted, for an i5 to fold bigadv the client needs to be spoofed to make it look like it has 8 threads, but they are still technically capable of completing the work.