New to folding concept and wondering...

W

Whaler_99

New member
How do "server" class system work towards folding? In my line of work I decomission "older" systems which I can pretty much do with as I like. Most are in the P4 Xeon range, typically 2-4 core with and without Hyperthreading. I get single and dual socket CPU systems.

I could probably run three or four at a time in my "network" room and as I get newer ones, swap out older.

I take it disks (SATA versus SAS) and large amounts of RAM don't make a lot of difference?
What is the best performing server os? 2003R2, 2008R2, 2012? x86 versus x64 make a difference?

Thanks for any info.
Whaler
 
Honestly, it's probably not worth the power bill running P4 class cores on folding. Even C2D is getting old hat these days.

The OS choises that really matters is Windows vs Linux. Beyond that there will be very little difference in performance.

Amount of RAM makes no difference beyond making sure you have enough.... 2gb should be plenty. Disk drives, again, make no difference.
 
My thoughts are ,
when its doing nothing and it is on anyway , then it is always worth Folding on them (it)...


The rest is already been said above me..

Greetings, Ray....
 
I am hoping they will be on most of the time. One system runs Hyper-V and I have my firewall, Teamspeak server, etc. So will be on 24/7. Couple other systems mostly. :)

Just having some issues on the first box - running Server 2012, v7 client installed fine, but no way, no how will it download WU's. Trying to sort out why. Google not coming up with much, so "may" be a firewall issue, but don't think so.
 
Whaler_99 said:
So, I have a Dell 2950 running, dual E5405 CPU's. Running Hyper-V, my firewall, voice server, couple of things. Have three folding VM's on it right now...

Using the image found here http://www.linuxforge.net/docs/crunching/fah-native.php to get them up and running. Was pretty easy. Then as I free up a few more systems, will add them to the mix.
Click to expand...

The E5405 CPUs are pretty decent folders. I have two of same CPU only they are the 3ghz versions. They are Core 2 based, with the tweaks and extra cache that the 45nm Core 2 have over the 65mn (although I'm sure you already know that).

If you can get a single instance of FAH running 8 threads over all the CPUs that will net you the most points due to the way the bonus points work.

As FAH runs with a low priority it's normally possible to have it taking up 100% of the CPU time and when other services or aplications require CPU time, they can take it as is needed.

The other option would be to run SMP over 7 cores leaving one core free for everything else plus the ability to steal CPU time from FAH as needed.

I'm not familiar with Hyper V so I have no idea if you can run FAH as an application or if you have to have everything running in a VM.
 
Pickster said:
I'm not familiar with Hyper V so I have no idea if you can run FAH as an application or if you have to have everything running in a VM.
Click to expand...

That's the trick with Hyper-V. Once installed, your main OS becomes a guest OS for all intense and purpose. It no longer has visibility into the CPU utilization on other Guest OS'es or memory use... You then have to use the performance monitoring tools.

If I install FAH on the "main" OS - it will basically kill the system. :) If will never see that my other guests systems need CPU resources. I am thinking though, to maybe tweak my VM's and see of I can go from three dual core to maybe one 6 core unit. That probably give me better results...
 
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