Messages from Prof. Vijay Pande

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

December 19, 2010Updates thread

For some time, we've been keeping an updates thread with information for every change that we do to the FAH backend (new WUs, servers on- and off-line, etc). However, many donors likely don't know about it, so here's a reminder:
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.ph...14714&start=60

[slugbug]

I didn't notice any interruptions on my end at all.

[swmeek]

me neither!

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home
A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
Folding@home - Main
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

January 26, 2011

New GPU3 (version 6.41) client released

The latest GPU3 client is now on our high performance client download page. This new client improves GPU identification and has several other minor improvements.

For those who are unfamiliar with the other FAH clients: there are several types of high performance clients. SMP refers to multi-core GPUs. GPU3 refers to the latest generation Folding@home GPU client. Currently, GPU3 is only available for NVIDIA GPUs, but we are working on a GPU3 release for ATI. For NVIDIA GPUs, we recommend GPU3. For ATI, we suggest GPU2 until GPU3 has passed through its QA testing (going on now). Finally, the v7 Folding@home client (currently in alpha testing) has these functions (SMP and GPU) built in and will not require a special client.

[jellyrole]

It'll be nice to have GPU3 ATI support, that's for sure!

[Blacksmith1]

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande




February 20, 2011

Integration with Facebook

In preparation for our v7 client launch, we will be adding some facebook elements to our Folding@home web pages, including the http://folding.stanford.edu information page as well as stats pages. Today, we have turned on facebook links on the team stat pages, so you can easily recommend your team on facebook. While the integration will start small, we will be working to enhance it as time goes on.

[Leganfuh]

My bad, I'm sorry.

[Blacksmith1]

no problem. since you showed up, we'll skip the court-martial.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 01, 2011

Introduction of a new SMP core, changes to bigadv

We have recently launched a new core type for bigadv work units. We're forking A5 off from our A3 core to make a core that specializes in bigadv workunits. In particular, new A3 and A4 cores use more RAM per thread which makes large-memory calculations very memory inefficient in those cores. A5 does not have this issue and looks to be a good general fix for big RAM (eg bigadv) calculations.

However, to be able to use the new A5 core, one needs to use an updated client: 6.34 or later.

We are shutting down A3 bigadv in the next day, so please update your clients if you wish to continue running bigadv work units (to be clear, all issued A3 bigadv work units will be accepted until their deadlines. We are terminating new bigadv work unit assigns). Older clients will be redirected to standard A3 SMP work units; the switchover will allow us to push an update to the standard A3 core and release a large number of new A3 work units that have been in early testing.

The SMP clients version 6.34 binaries are now posted on the high-performance download page:

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther

They can be dropped into a working FAH installation, but it's always safest to update between work units.

There are several small changes involved, but especially support for new SMP2 cores (A5) that will be released in the near future.

P.S. Do not forget the augments when reconfiguring your client.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 11, 2011



Testing Quick Return Bonus (QRB) with classic WUs

We have had for some time a Quick Return Bonus (QRB) for multi-core/SMP WU's. The nature of QRB is that donors get extra points for returning the WU early. The rationale here is to align what's best to accelerate the science (getting WUs back quicker so next generation WUs can be made and sent out to donors) with what the donors see (points). In the past, we've simply mentioned to donors that it's ideal for us to get WUs back faster, but the QRB formalizes this and is an attempt to align incentives.
We are testing it with the classic A4 core now. I stress the word testing since we are looking to see what are the implications of rolling this out more broadly (there can always been unforseen complications of anything as complex as FAH). However, the general idea of aligning incentives is pretty clear, so hopefully we will be able to tweak the QRB plan if problems arise.
For more details on which project, etc, please see this thread in the FoldingForum.

[Blacksmith1]

cool. this should give those with older, weaker systems a chance to catch up a bit.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 14, 2011

Progress to the v7 client release

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home
A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
Folding@home - Main
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 15, 2011

FAH Support for ATI GPUs

We have been working to improve our support for AMD/ATI GPUs. AMD/ATI originally supported the Brook language for GPU programming, but has since moved to OpenCL, dropping support for Brook. This means that in order for FAH to support ATI GPUs, we have had to rewrite our ATI GPU core in OpenCL. This has been a huge undertaking, but is coming to fruition (check out http://simtk.org/home/openmm for details and a change log with progress updates). Due to ATI's decision to drop Brook in lieu of OpenCL, new FAH ATI GPU core development can only be done in OpenCL and thus can only run on GPUs which ATI supports with OpenCL.

We want to give ATI donors a heads up that ATI does not support all of its GPUs with OpenCL (the series 3xxx are not supported and the series 4xxx does not have sufficient OpenCL support for efficient FAH calculations). For the short term, we will support both the older (Brook coded) ATI core 11, and the newer (OpenCL coded) ATI core 16, but we cannot support the Brook-based core for much longer. We plan to support ATI core 11 until September 1, 2011 (hopefully longer, but we want to get this on donors' radars). Closing support for a given platform is never a popular decision, but in this case, we have no choice due to the lack of vendor support of that platform.

The good news is that ATI's support for OpenCL is very strong and we're excited about our new ATI openCL core (core 16), which is undergoing testing right now. ATI core 16 will be publicly released after the v7 client is released, as the core needs the new client

[James86]

that's good and bad all the ATI cards I have are 4k series

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home
A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
Folding@home - Main
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 17, 2011

Some classic clients not being assigned

There is a problem with the assignment of WUs to some classic clients. We are working on it.
UPDATE: Looks like the worst is over, but we are keeping an eye on this issue. In particular, the port 80 AS (assign2.stanford.edu) seems to be still having issues.