burning in new servers

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firedfly

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - February 2012
Joined
May 17, 2011
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So, I have access to run folding@home to burn in 4 new servers over the weekend. Each server has 4 Xeon X7560 processors (32 cores/64 threads). What is the best configuration to run on such beasts?

Given the shortage of -bigadv WUs, should I use regular SMP? How many threads can the regular SMP client use (i.e. how many instances should I run)?

Does anyone have suggestions on an easy way to get an installation up and running without hard disks? The current plan is to boot a live cd and install fah in a ram disk.

Any advice would be appreciated. The systems should be ready sometime tonight or tomorrow.
 
You could do a usb flash drive with persistence to accomplish this. I don't think you would make any bigadv deadlines just over the weekend so you would probably be best sticking to smp.
 
itsrickjames said:
I don't think you would make any bigadv deadlines just over the weekend so you would probably be best sticking to smp.
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The servers are available now, so I will have access to them for about 3.5 days. If my 2600k can do a bigadv in 2 days and the quad 34's do them in under a day, I don't think it would be a problem for these servers to complete them. The only issue is availability of the bigadv WUs.
 
Brak710 said:
Might as well leave -bigadv on, it couldn't hurt really.
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If he doesn't get any -bigadv it could as the servers are not rolling back to assign -smp work automatically. I would ahve a mix of clients - set a couple to -Bigadv and see how you get on, with 32/64 threads a standard smp WU won't take long to complete.
 
Nathan_P said:
with 32/64 threads a standard smp WU won't take long to complete.
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Does that mean the standard smp WUs will scale up that high? I wasn't sure if I needed to run multiple instances.

I do plan on trying bigadv on a system or two overnight to see if I get any WUs. I'd love to see how the tpf on them compare to the quad g34 systems.
 
I ran one of these for a while on Linux and even though it only had the 2.0 GHz CPU's it would complete a bigadv in 12 to 16 hours. Yeah its fast real fast!
One of these puppies will put you in the top 20. If you get bigadv units all 3.5 days you could be top 5 for those few days. Standard SMP's will run on it but you will cry because it just isn't the same.
 
But, unless Stanford does something, you wll not get bigadv. If you really want to burn them in, just set the -smp 64 flag and let them go. That way, you should be ale to keep them fully loaded over the weekend. One instance should be fine, but you do need to specify -smp 64. Just -smp will only run 32 threads.
 
even with normal smp units those suckers will burn through WU's like crazy
 
No updates yet. I was told they were ready last night, but that apparently was not the case. Hopefully sometime this afternoon they will be folding.

I won't have any task manager screen shots. These will be booted off a centOS live cd and then accessed via ssh. I will try to post frame times at some point.
 
set up the new -bigbeta or whatever it is, appears to be working now. Bigadv was also restocked apparently.

64 threads crunching those could be over a million or two PPD I think.
 
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