@ Mr Impaler

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I have now firmly beded my new dual xeon in by giving it a good Boincing. It is currently has a RAC of 2,000 + :)

It is time to have a go at Folding ;)

I could not find the thread (must have been pruned), but I remember a challenge, my beastie against yours to see who had the best ppd/$.

Are you still up for it?

I am currently running down my cache in Boinc (should take about 30 hours) and I am ready to go.

Dunc
 
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Ah! I'm being summoned. I'm usually up for a challenge but could we perhaps wait a week? :o The Team Hackaday forum ran into a bit of trouble over the weekend and I'm using the rig to host the backup database ATM. It should be all done by this coming weekend though.

Let us use the mean time to generate some rules. What counts in the price, the full rig or just the greasy bits (seeing as the case, drives, et al. make little difference in the rig's performance)? How long shall we compete? How shall we guage performance?

EDIT: And I just made a new sig to celebrate it...
xeonsig2bl.jpg
 
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Soldato
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BillytheImpaler said:
Ah! I'm being summoned. I'm usually up for a challenge but could we perhaps wait a week? :o The Team Hackaday forum ran into a bit of trouble over the weekend and I'm using the rig to host the backup database ATM. It should be all done by this coming weekend though.
I can wait a week. I fired the rig up on folding to see how it would do in preparation :p

BTW the Howto is excellent Mr Impaler Sah

Let us use the mean time to generate some rules. What counts in the price, the full rig or just the greasy bits (seeing as the case, drives, et al. make little difference in the rig's performance)? How long shall we compete? How shall we guage performance?
I would say the whole lot, greasy bits and all. I bought mine off the shelf, whole, so I am unsure what the components would have costed.

The easiest way to monitor the performance may be to create a new account each for the beasties, under Team 10 of course. I guess we should open it to the floor... :)

EDIT: And I just made a new sig to celebrate it...
xeonsig2bl.jpg
:D

Let us see your spec guys, so we can place our bets

I have a dual 3.2mb 800mhz 2mb cache with 2gig DDR2 beastie.
 
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Bigstan said:
Let us see your spec guys, so we can place our bets :D
dunc said:
I have a dual 3.2mb 800mhz 2mb cache with 2gig DDR2 beastie.

Tis dual 1.6GHz Prestonias @3.21GHz and 800MHz FSB (200 MHz quad pumped) featuring 512k L2 cache with 2 gig DDR 400. I have no doubts that you will be victorious in pure pointage due to all that tasty cache :). It gets interesting when the price comes into the equation. I guess we should each have a new account so that observers can see that the CPU count never goes over 4. I think that I'm going to run the Linux client becasue my Windows partition has been a fair bit dodgy of late. I'm also thinking this Friday at 00:00 GMT would be a fine time to start. Now that I've said that it'll probably break :o

Are there any ground rules we'd like to set beforehand? How long shall we go? A month?

EDIT: Some rules to start off with:
  • No deleting WUs just becasue they are the pants. It's all the luck of the draw, you crunch what you're given.
  • At the start of the we begin by downloading new WUs under new names. These new names will be given unto each of us by some 3rd party at the time of kickoff (how about Rich does it in the news post). This way there can be no pre-stashing.
  • Similarly, when the contest is over, stats are frozen. We may finish the WUs in progress and return them but they will not count toward the race total.

I'm not so sure about that last one. It seems like it's the only fair way to do it but if I has a 1000 point monster that I'd been crunching for a week I'd be pretty upset if it didn't count.

EDIT: Changed start time to this Friday to coincide with Rich's F@H news. ;)
 
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Rules sound good to me. Mr 99million can be the adjudicater (sp) and define the new accounts. I will have to look up the cost of my rig, but it was somewhere in the $1,500 region. It is made by a well known manufacturer so overcloking is impossible (ish). I hope to replace the mobo at sometime in the near future ;)

Dunc
 
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Dang it, we can start crunching today but I won't have the machine ready by then. I suppose that in a month of operation a day or two won't matter all that much. This database thing is starting to irk me in the most unpleasant of ways. Grrr....

I guess I'll need to make up for it by overclocking a bit higher :D
 
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I don't think it would be fair if your cruncher is not quite ready Billy, unless it's a double-bluff :p

Just under an hour to the official start time and I've announced the winning names (The Alabama Slamma vs. The Ohio Psycho - congrats Stan :D) incase you guys are still up for starting tonight, I don't think either of you would be so evil as to pre-stash - the foldy gods are always watching :p
 
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Alright, it is as I feared, spare hard disk No. 5 has shuffled off this mortal coil. He's gone to the great parts bins where all the great Maxtors of years gone by go when they've spun their last. :(

Whoever said "you can't take it with you" has obviously never heard of hard disk suicide. It took all four WUs with it, most of which were around 70% done. I've got another spare but I have to drive 30 miles to get it. I'll try to get it up and running by tomorrow evening but it doesn't look like that's goning to happen based on the workload I'm running these days. Maybe if I get a few hours I can finish machining some bits for it. Then at least I could accomplish something out of the work stoppage.

Grrr. I'm geting my butt kicked in this battle. I need to stop using hard drives I stole out of garbage-picked computers.
 
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Sorry to hear of the demise of Spare HD no 5. Luckily my rug has Raid 1 on it ;)

Do you want me to stop crunching until you can get re-organized?

Or do you feel that you can catch me with your super duper overclocked rig :)

I may need all the head start I can get though on the cost/performance basis.

Dunc
 
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Ouch! You've not had much luck so far Billy, I hope you get some soon otherwise dunc might get complacent and wander back off to the dark side for a while :eek: :p

you want to watch out for him - he's got incredibly secure floor-dressings
"Luckily my rug has Raid 1 on it" :D
 
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Alright, I got the new disk but more on that later. Before I left for work this morning I put the old disk in the freezer. I never believed those snake-oil/old wives' tale rumors about putting a HDD in the freezer to resurrect it but lo and behold it worked! I took it ice cold and laid it upside down on the desk, connected the IDE and ower calbes and whamo! it works like nobody's business. I don't know how, i suspect black magic. Anyway I took the icy cold dead one and the still-living one to my buddy's place where he's got Norton Ghost. He made a copy on the dead one and placed it on living one. :D

Yay! I'm back a-crunching. Spare HDD No. 5 has been retired to the pile of "mostly dead equipment", downgraded from "probably not broken."


After getting it back up shortly thereater I saw that it had gotten a new WU. It was a weird one:
p1485 p1485_rxnsemi300 166.00 points using FahCore_a0.exe

I had a look around for it wondering what this new core might be. It is called "GROMACS33" on the project summary page but other than that I have no idea what it is. It uses SSE so I hope it's a good one.

I had a look around and found a thread on the official FAH forums talking about it. Apparently it's (currently) a Linux-only Gromacs core that is uber up-to-date with all the shiny new bells and whistles. It's based on the latest Gromacs release, version 3.3. I'll let you know how it goes.
 
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rich99million said:
you want to watch out for him - he's got incredibly secure floor-dressings
"Luckily my rug has Raid 1 on it" :D
:eek:

Got to love them typos

Glad to hear that you got the HD sorted Billy. I've had the old freezer trick work a couple of times too :)

Fold on

Dunc
 
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Hey guys - is the month up?

I didn't want to announce it in the main news incase you were going for another week :confused: ;)

Billy seemed to have had more than his unfair share of problems, I think a rematch should be on the cards :D


anyway the scores as of 17:40 BST 31st March 2006 are...

117 - The_Alabama_Slamma - 11316 points - 62WUs

171 - The_Ohio_Psycho - 3957 points - 18WUs


I will sort out weekly totals if I can't tempt you to go double-or-quits :p
 
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rich99million said:
Billy seemed to have had more than his unfair share of problems, I think a rematch should be on the cards :D

I am up for a rematch :p

The_Alabama_Slamma_2 :D

I think it was a little one sided. However, that plays into the cost/performance ratio. I have Raid1 whereas Billy has recycled HD. I think my machine cost 2.5 times as much as Billy's.

Based on that I have 11316 points and Billy has 9892.5.

Dunc
 
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Well, well, well. It looks like I was well and truly pwnt. Alas, so it is. :o

I definitely want a rematch in a month or two. Let us have a go at it when QMDs make their triumphant return. I promise more uptime. ;)

Shall we invite other OcUK Dual Xeon owners to the party for this next one? I'm sure there are other converts who'd like to join a battle royale.
 
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BillytheImpaler said:
Shall we invite other OcUK Dual Xeon owners to the party for this next one? I'm sure there are other converts who'd like to join a battle royale.
hehe that could be a lot of fun :D


watch out for that mister berserker though - his xeons tend to spew out 10s of WUs all of a sudden :eek: :p
 
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