A new addition to the team with some questions

dwaxman · Feb 24, 2003

Alright, I have been reading MacRumors for quite a while now and have seen plenty of signatures stating they are members of the Folding@Home team. So today I read about this Folding thing and decided that I have plenty of extra CPU cycles to donate to a good cause. Now I have downloaded and installed the OS X GUI client AND the screensaver client. Set both to the username Davew135 and the Mac Rumors team number. Now comes my questions for you:

1) I am running the GUI client, is the screen saver going to work WITH it or AGAINST it? Should I keep them both or just pick one or the other?

2) I put my computer to sleep every night / whenever I leave the house for more than 15 minutes. Will this practice make it impossible for me to be a help? Will all of the work my computer has done be lost each time I decide to go to sleep?

3) I have a Dual G4 867 w/ 1.25 gigs of RAM, will I still be able to play Warcraft 3 on BattleNet without quiting the folding ap, or will I notice a lot of performance hit?

I want to be a help to this program, so any information would be great. If I can't fold from this machine because of my above stated practices I will install the application on my 'print server' a Windows 2000 machine with just about the minimum specs to run that OS

howard · Feb 24, 2003

you just run one program, pick either gui or screensaver. i always happen to use the gui, just me. When your computer goes to sleep it won't fold, so its up to you whether you leave it on or not. personally i leave mine on all night long. if i didn't i doubt my little ibook would crank out the work units before there deadline. if your computer goes to sleep or shuts down or if you exit the program you will not lose your work unit, it will automatically resume where it left off. also you will not notice any performance decrease to games as folding only takes up the extra cpu you arn't using and is low in priorty to other things. if you have dual cpu's you can use mc68k's dual processor script and do 2 work units at the same time!! heres the link
dual processor scripts

mc68k · Feb 24, 2003

Re: A new addition to the team with some questions

Originally posted by dwaxman
Alright, I have been reading MacRumors for quite a while now and have seen plenty of signatures stating they are members of the Folding@Home team. So today I read about this Folding thing and decided that I have plenty of extra CPU cycles to donate to a good cause.

looks like our little plan worked.

welcome

1) I am running the GUI client, is the screen saver going to work WITH it or AGAINST it? Should I keep them both or just pick one or the other?

you can run both, but you shouldn't run them both at once. i tried both, and since they save WUs to the same place, they both got the same data and worked fine. i would pick one or the other.

2) I put my computer to sleep every night / whenever I leave the house for more than 15 minutes. Will this practice make it impossible for me to be a help? Will all of the work my computer has done be lost each time I decide to go to sleep?

the work will not be lost. every time the computer goes to sleep, folding stops. work units are composed of frames. if the frame is not competed the work for that frame will be lost. but if you have already completed frames, then those will remain intact.

3) I have a Dual G4 867 w/ 1.25 gigs of RAM, will I still be able to play Warcraft 3 on BattleNet without quiting the folding ap, or will I notice a lot of performance hit?

no, folding@home takes up idle CPU, so you shouldn't see a hit. so if warcraft takes up 99%, then folding will take up the difference, 1%.

I want to be a help to this program, so any information would be great. If I can't fold from this machine because of my above stated practices I will install the application on my 'print server' a Windows 2000 machine with just about the minimum specs to run that OS

run it on that too! i have folding running on two print stations at work and one server.

both processors are not taken advantage of by default, so for your OS X box, if you want to, use my script: http://homepage.mac.com/mc68k if not, then folding will just run on one processor. minimal terminal skills are required, but documentation is included. either way your helping us out.

dwaxman · Feb 25, 2003

Re: Re: A new addition to the team with some questions

Alright, I have switched to your dual processor script. I don't need to run anything besides this now do I? I will install the Folding@home on the Windows 2k box next time I feel like braving the cold of the basement.

mc68k · Feb 25, 2003

Re: Re: Re: A new addition to the team with some questions

Originally posted by dwaxman
Alright, I have switched to your dual processor script. I don't need to run anything besides this now do I?

no, that's it. just make sure that it's running with the top command in a terminal window. there should be 2 fahcore_65 processes and 2 OSX-3.24 processes. it runs in the background, so you can run logged out and you can quit the terminal app if you so desire.
if you didn't select for it to run at startup, then you'll have to manually give the command fold in a terminal window every time you restart.

I will install the Folding@home on the Windows 2k box next time I feel like braving the cold of the basement.

good for you. every machine counts. especially the ones that sit for a long time.

dwaxman · Feb 25, 2003

Re: Re: Re: Re: A new addition to the team with some questions

Ok, I think I might have accidently told it NOT to run at startup. How can I change this now? I realized that after three hours of my machine being on that those apps never showed up in TOP.

mc68k · Feb 25, 2003

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A new addition to the team with some questions

Originally posted by dwaxman
Ok, I think I might have accidently told it NOT to run at startup. How can I change this now? I realized that after three hours of my machine being on that those apps never showed up in TOP.

did you restart? you might not be able to see the processes unless your terminal window is really tall. sometimes the processes don't show up in a small terminal window.

you don't have to have it run at startup, but it is a convinience if you don't want to type in fold every time your machine starts. if you want to re-run the script, delete the folders F@H1 and F@H2 in the root level of your user directory (with folding not running so that you can delete all the contents). then just re-run the script again.

happy folding.

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A new addition to the team with some questions

dwaxman

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howard

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mc68k

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dwaxman

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mc68k

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dwaxman

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mc68k

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