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Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 12:50 pm
by Woodles
Looks like Amazon have donated their spare cloud instances to Folding - https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... =&t=238068

2.5 BILLION points a day! :o

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 1:08 pm
by chriscambridge
It seems to be the "member" EC2Spot

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... =&u=928671
Amazon EC2 Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available to you at steep discounts compared to On-Demand prices.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 1:23 pm
by Woodles
Not bad going for cheap left-overs :lol:

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 2:21 pm
by bigsinky
Folding now running 1.5 Exaflops. That’s a lot of computing power. I couldn’t get folding WUs so have switched all my CPUs to Rosetta. Coming up on my 1st million. Again I’m in a high risk group so a vaccine would be greatly appreciated. Now in 10th day of social distancing. Slowly going stir crazy.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:06 pm
by homefarm
HI everybody,Hoping you are all well.

I'm 12 week isolated as I'm old and vunerable, except of course I have to feed the cows etc. However so far they are symptom free, as I hope to remain. :wink:

I am running Folding in the background on 3 PCs, and on 2 GPUs ( 2080ti and Titan V). F@H shares the GPU, and Afterburner usefully shows the various parameters on the "detach" section at the bottom of the display. Sadly one of my 2080ti has lost it's ability to hold down the temperature. I have set a manual fan profile, which allows it to run short tasks such as GFN-15, taking 25-30 seconds then getting a breather for reload times 2-3 secs. Anything longer and the temp rockets to 84C. (it's normal limit)

In the Boinc arena I have GPUgrid, and Rosetta (mainly Covid) running. Rosetta however throws up loads of error runs, wasting precious CPU time, so I have disabled it for now. The 7890XE runs perfectly on other tasks, so I'm pretty sure it's the Rosetta tasks which are the source of potential errors.

There is a Primegrid 3 day bash, starting tomorrow 12:00 UTC, for Sophie Germain prime hunting. I will move all over to that for the 3 days, then return to Covid.

As a separate task I volunteered to type in 2800 pedigree records for Aberdeen Angus Cattle 1985 herdbook, as the Society is trying to get all records on line. There's about 15 of us slapping on keyboards, and I'm no typist!!

Take care, stay safe.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:59 pm
by damienh
Glad you're staying safe Richard. I have been helping Tim on his mission to get 10m SETI credits before is all shuts down. Mark has bee in on that too. It's been a good bit of fun.

I have done a fair amount of Folding@home and also a bunch of TN-Grid, which is also somewhat Covid-related.

Other than that, I am slowly going stir crazy at home and have already put on 1kg from comfort eating and ... not going out much ...

Looks like tomorrow will start another Formula Boinc Sprint, so that will be good. Hoping it's Rosetta, so that Chris C will join in.

All the best

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:47 pm
by homefarm
Glad you're ok, Damien, even if you are expanding :lol:

Re Seti, I started on it 2 Sep 2004, but later cocked it up and lost a lot of credits.

I also didn't want to wake up the aliens, there's enough nasties already down here. Now we've Covid-19 aliens, but no radio frequency signals from them (yet).

As the Chinese saying goes... May you live in interesting times.

Cheers

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:57 pm
by UBT - Timbo
homefarm wrote: Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:06 pm HI everybody,Hoping you are all well.

I'm 12 week isolated as I'm old and vunerable, except of course I have to feed the cows etc. However so far they are symptom free, as I hope to remain. :wink:
Hi Richard

Good to hear from you.

I'm not self-isolating as I am a one-man band at work and I have orders to fulfill (mainly to resellers with ecommerce websites) - however, I'm only shipping 2 days a week at present and people are being patient which is nice - as usually they want items shipped "yesterday". The nice thing is that leaving home at around 9am this morning there was virtually no traffic on the roads...and my route takes me over a bridge over the M6 and it too was pretty much empty - so, 9am on a weekday and NO TRAFFIC. It's like a scene from the 50's film version of "Day of the Triffids". It was the same tonight - and driving to and from was so relaxing...as there weren't any twats rushing to overtake you or cut you up... absolute bliss !!
homefarm wrote: Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:06 pm I am running Folding in the background on 3 PCs, and on 2 GPUs ( 2080ti and Titan V). F@H shares the GPU, and Afterburner usefully shows the various parameters on the "detach" section at the bottom of the display. Sadly one of my 2080ti has lost it's ability to hold down the temperature. I have set a manual fan profile, which allows it to run short tasks such as GFN-15, taking 25-30 seconds then getting a breather for reload times 2-3 secs. Anything longer and the temp rockets to 84C. (it's normal limit)
84C on any GPU is far too warm - I found that to my cost when I was running a pair of GTX580's about 5 years ago...but very nice in winter as no central heating was required (in that room)...

I too am running Afterburner and with my specific NVidia GPUs I slide the "Core Voltage" and "Power Limit" DOWN to maybe 60-75% of the "default" settings and this doesn't seem to have any bad effect on crunching times...but it does run the GPU at cooler temps. I've also clicked the "down arrow" to the right of "Power Limit" and this allows you to "Prioritize" the Temp Limit, which you can set manually...so if it gets too hot, it will automatically reduce the Power that the GPU consumes.

You can also adjust the GPU fan speed manually...or leave it on "auto". And if you click on settings, then on the 2nd tab, you can adjust the fan profile such that the fan spins faster at higher temps, which cools it down.
homefarm wrote: Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:06 pm In the Boinc arena I have GPUgrid, and Rosetta (mainly Covid) running. Rosetta however throws up loads of error runs, wasting precious CPU time, so I have disabled it for now. The 7890XE runs perfectly on other tasks, so I'm pretty sure it's the Rosetta tasks which are the source of potential errors.

There is a Primegrid 3 day bash, starting tomorrow 12:00 UTC, for Sophie Germain prime hunting. I will move all over to that for the 3 days, then return to Covid.

As a separate task I volunteered to type in 2800 pedigree records for Aberdeen Angus Cattle 1985 herdbook, as the Society is trying to get all records on line. There's about 15 of us slapping on keyboards, and I'm no typist!!

Take care, stay safe.
I think a lot of people will be tempted to crunch on Rosetta...but as you say there could be issues with tasks that cause them to error out. Hopefully they will resovle that issue once they see lots of "Error" reports.

Good luck with the cattle herdbooks - I s'pose it makes a change from counting sheep !!

regards
Tim

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 9:19 pm
by homefarm
Thanks Tim, I'll try again with the GPU settings. The only good side is that I'm finding GFN15 primes :lol:

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:04 am
by damienh
Richard, do you know if your GPU fans are actually spinning up? I can only think that one of your fans has failed or your cooler is coming away from the card. I’ve removed a few coolers in my time - it’s worth at least visually checking it and to tighten screws where you see them. You may also spot fan cables underneath the shroud too - they shouldn’t really come loose but worth checking if you do see one. If there’s a lot of dust where you are, you may also need to pull off the outer shroud and clean the heat sink? Just a thought ...

On Tim’s note about power target, although my GPUs are water cooled, I also now tend to run them at 75-80% power target via MSI Afterburner on Windows. I then apply a modest frequency overclock.

Overall I see very little difference vs running them at 100% power.

On Linux I’ve only found ways to reduce GPU frequency rather than the power target. If anyone has seen a tool to adjust power targets on Linux then let me know.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 8:22 am
by homefarm
Thanks Tim, Damien.

Forum benefits, getting valuable tips.

I had been jiggling the parameters, but reducing the power limit to 75, and max temp to 75, has proportionately reduced the Mhz from 1945 to about 1845, allowing it to stabilise. I realised the overclock was high, and previously it had been OK. About 2 weeks ago I used the Afterburner OC button to test and reset the GPU, that must have upset the balances in play.

So, very grateful for the impetus to reset parameters according to your suggestions. It's now running GFN 17 Mega, at 1845, 58C; much better balance.

Thanks guys.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:21 am
by Woodles
Damien Healy wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:04 amOn Linux I’ve only found ways to reduce GPU frequency rather than the power target. If anyone has seen a tool to adjust power targets on Linux then let me know.
I've seen a couple of people recommending nvidia-smi for controlling Nvidia cards (TSBT :oops: )

Not tried this myself.

[Edit] '-pl' (power limit) seems to be the parameter that you want - "nvidia-smi -pl 85" sets the power limit to 85%

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:29 am
by damienh
Woodles wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:21 am
I've seen a couple of people recommending nvidia-smi for controlling Nvidia cards (TSBT :oops: )

Not tried this myself.

[Edit] '-pl' (power limit) seems to be the parameter that you want - "nvidia-smi -pl 85" sets the power limit to 85%
That's great - thank you. I will see if I can make that work.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 3:18 pm
by UBT - Timbo
Damien Healy wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:04 am Richard, do you know if your GPU fans are actually spinning up? I can only think that one of your fans has failed or your cooler is coming away from the card. I’ve removed a few coolers in my time - it’s worth at least visually checking it and to tighten screws where you see them. You may also spot fan cables underneath the shroud too - they shouldn’t really come loose but worth checking if you do see one. If there’s a lot of dust where you are, you may also need to pull off the outer shroud and clean the heat sink? Just a thought ...
Good call Damien.

I had assumed that maybe Richards fans would have been working OK...but obviously if the PC case is all sealed up and the PSU and CPU fans are making a noise then any GPU fan noise could easily be "obscured"...so a rise in temps could easily be due to fan failure.

Maybe Richard needs to carefully remove the side of the case cover - the left hand one is usually best, if it's a normal desktop tower type case - and take a peek inside and see - of course, the PC needs to be "on" and running - so don't physically move the PC itself while it's "powered up" as you could damage the hard drive.

So might be best to quit any applications and then check - all you need to see is that the GPU fan is actually running. A small torch and maybe a mirror might help too?

regards
Tim

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 5:15 pm
by damienh
Sounds like he's figured it out - he had a nasty overclock on the card! That would explain it ...

He's now under-clocked it a bit.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 5:35 pm
by damienh
Woodles wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:21 am
I've seen a couple of people recommending nvidia-smi for controlling Nvidia cards (TSBT :oops: )

Not tried this myself.

[Edit] '-pl' (power limit) seems to be the parameter that you want - "nvidia-smi -pl 85" sets the power limit to 85%
So I've tried this and it works, with a couple of small ammendments.

1. It requires to be run as root, so 'sudo nvidia-smi -pl' followed by the power limit target
2. The power limit target is not in % like MSI afterburner and is instead in watts

Note that it is a function of the nvidia proprietary driver, so that needs to be already installed.

I looked up the TDP of my card and did the calculation myself. My 2080ti was runing at about 1890MHz @260w. I applied a 200w limit (~78%) then applied a 100MHz overclock. The card is now running at around 1790Mhz, so I'm getting close to 95% of the compute for 78% of the power (and heat). That's a win :D

I might adjust it even lower though. I'm generally finding that clocks don't drop rapidly with power reductions.

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:02 pm
by homefarm
UBT - Timbo wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 3:18 pm
Damien Healy wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:04 am Richard, do you know if your GPU fans are actually spinning up? I can only think that one of your fans has failed or your cooler is coming away from the card. I’ve removed a few coolers in my time - it’s worth at least visually checking it and to tighten screws where you see them. You may also spot fan cables underneath the shroud too - they shouldn’t really come loose but worth checking if you do see one. If there’s a lot of dust where you are, you may also need to pull off the outer shroud and clean the heat sink? Just a thought ...
Good call Damien.

I had assumed that maybe Richards fans would have been working OK...but obviously if the PC case is all sealed up and the PSU and CPU fans are making a noise then any GPU fan noise could easily be "obscured"...so a rise in temps could easily be due to fan failure.

Maybe Richard needs to carefully remove the side of the case cover - the left hand one is usually best, if it's a normal desktop tower type case - and take a peek inside and see - of course, the PC needs to be "on" and running - so don't physically move the PC itself while it's "powered up" as you could damage the hard drive.

So might be best to quit any applications and then check - all you need to see is that the GPU fan is actually running. A small torch and maybe a mirror might help too?

regards
Tim
Hi Guys

Don't worry as I built the PCs, and have checked them for hardware failure etc. Cheers

Re: Crunching for Covid

Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 8:56 pm
by UBT - Mikee
Hi

LinusTechTips have donated server hardware and bandwidth to Covid19 folding@home research.
2 videos showing a basic 'how to' guide, 2nd showing building and commissioning of the server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMjPs66cTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU4qOebhkfs

Mike