Diskless Folding

[ZhengHe]

If you are interested in Diskless folding, which should cut down on power consumption since it uses less hardware take a look at this excellent guide (http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/) by NotFred of TheTechReport. I will probably be trying out the live cd this week to see how it performs on other computers across campus. The windows version still used XP as a guide, but you should be able to follow along with Vista easily enough. There doesn't appear to be anyone using this option on the team, so if anyone wants to try it out feel free to let us know how it works out.

The concept of diskless folding is not particularly new at all, though it has had to be modified over the years for changing times and clients. If anyone finds a better guide feel free to post it up as well.

[Kougar]

Interesting, I should of known there is a guide for this.

I booted a machine to Knoppix using their Live CD, system didn't have a hard drive. I put F@H on a flash drive, plugged it into the machine and let it fold.. It worked surprisingly well, however I couldn't figure out how to get it to save its progress to the flash drive so a restart of the system would cause it to resume work at 0, but that was probably just because I didn't set something up correctly. :)

[Nocutius]

The title of this thread is really easy to misread :grin:, i have bad glasses.

[Sadasius]

The title of this thread is really easy to misread :grin:, i have bad glasses.

Yeah I thought the same thing as well with a quick glance.:lol:

[werty316]

I remember reading about this way of folding however I have yet to give it a try... Maybe one day...

[slugbug]

I might give it a go this weekend. I have a few 512mb usb sticks lying around gathering dust.

[slugbug]

I might give it a go this weekend. I have a few 512mb usb sticks lying around gathering dust.

Trying it on my Opteron 165 rig now. I set it up to copy the install to a usb stick but I'm not sure if it did. The network share it created works just fine though. It did take a bit of searching to find the folder to add it to FahMon. It was in etc/folding/1

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3894/fahmongh2.jpg

I didn't check the ppd on the Opteron rig earlier with FahMon, so I have no idea if this is faster than the Windows console client or not.

edit April 4th,2008: Work Units crapped out on both machines today :(
The diskless one on the opteron rig was at 63% and the one on this rig was at 20%.

Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x1
[17:39:59] Deleting current work unit & continuing...
[17:44:20] - Warning: Could not delete all work unit files (2): Core returned invalid code
[17:44:20] Trying to send all finished work units
[17:44:20] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[17:44:20] - Preparing to get new work unit

[slugbug]

I was getting very poor folding speed with the Linux folding client so I burnt a new diskless folding cd and decided to try it again on my Opteron 165 rig. I'm getting 1335 ppd right now, whereas with Vista 64bit and the windows SMP client I was only getting about 900. That's quite a boost if it works this time.