hostgator.com does folding@home

[GatorFord]

As some of you may know, the Folding@Home project by Stanford University is a distributed computing project used to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The client has long been used used as both a metric to measure processors and machines efficiency and also to help the cause. The project is distributed much in the way Seti@Home was, however, with a more direct human goal.

The Folding@Home project simulates complex mathematical formulas about how these proteins fold, unfold, and misfold with the goal to hopefully one day learn better how many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes actually work and occur. The project has already come up with many notable scientific results, and is definitely going somewhere tangible as you can see at :

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

As for how this all came about; I was first introduced to the project when I was looking for something better to do with my Spare CPU cycles than let them idle. The beauty of this software is it scales and renices it self so well, so you can be running it and it will use a defined amount of CPU at all times, but when any other process needs the CPU it will throttle itself. You can literally play high end games with the client running, as it will just scale back.

I really began to get involved in the project when I picked up my very own PS3. I wanted to put the powerful Cell processor through it's paces so I immediately downloaded the client and started running work units. Now, as an administrator here began thinking how helpful it could be if some of the machines we have that idle certain days of the week at HostGator were to fold in the background while the machine was not in use.

So, drumroll please....

We've recently launched a hostgator.com folding@home team! Since starting our hostgator.com folding@home team just a few days ago at ( team # 122600 ) we've already hit a ranking of 5,698 out of 117,620 teams with more than 115,000 folding points and nearly 2,000 work units completed. More information on our statistics can be found here :

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...teamnum=122600

Keep in mind the above page is on an interval while stanford processes a huge amount of statistics data. If it shows as being unavailable you can also check a third party tracker that I also like here :

http://kakaostats.com/tsum.php?t=122600

We're eclipsing and overtaking teams at an amazing pace, with around 30,000 points being completed a day by our NAS boxes, and our employees personal machines. We're aiming to get in the top 50 and are even surpassing NAVY teams, Civilian Air Patrol teams, Universities and so forth. (not just passing them, crushing them).

We've already informed any HostGator.com employees that have any free computer, or PS3 to download the folding@home client from Stanford at http://folding.stanford.edu

There are clients for every operating system and this also runs on PS3's (If you happen to have a PS3, you can download it directly from your PS3 dashboard, and they are some of the strongest computational units for this project due to the cell architecture, so you will get bonus points).

We're now asking our customers that would like to run folding@home to do it for a good cause! I've spoken with Chad and Brent and there will be some sort of prizes for customers who contribute the most points to the team.

Please make sure when installing the folding@home client that you use team number 122600 and a Donor name (username) of either "hostgator.com" or, your Forum name. This way we can see who's contributing the most.

Thanks all and lets start doing our part for one of the greatest causes on earth!

[adamc]

Done! I agree, a great cause, and use it on all but one machine. Trying to get everyone I know to use it.

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by adamc

Done! I agree, a great cause, and use it on all but one machine. Trying to get everyone I know to use it.

Awesome! Every machine helps


On a side note I'd also just like to point out to everyone that may be wondering :

This is NOT running on our shared, reseller, or dedicated boxes.

If you'd like to run it on your dedicated machine, you're more than welcome. I also have an automated installer for them. Just PM me for the details but it's fairly simple to setup really.

This is currently only running on our NAS boxes which are basically inactive 6 out of 7 days a week, a few computers here in our office, and mostly employee machines.

One thing I have noticed is it's not at all about the amount of work units you do, but moreso how quickly you do the work units in comparison to Stanfords benchmark machine. If any of you have more than one physical cores (read core2duo, core2quad, or a dual processor machine, etc) it's to your benefit to use either the Windows High Performance SMP client or the Linux SMP client as you'll see a *huge* increase in the speed at which work units are completed.

With a side note, the faster your machine is generally the larger a work unit Stanford will assign you (I noticed the initial units they hand out are 150,000 frames).

If you happen to have one of the newer ATI cards or SLI ATI cards you can also use the Folding GPU client to have your graphics card fold units, crazy stuff!

[GatorChrisN]

I'm doing a reinstall of gentoo to migrate from 32-bit to x64 on three of my machines just to be able to run the SMP linux client

yeah, i'm that bored

[adamc]

Just noticed the SMP clients. Re-install on the machines time! Time for linux to get the update. Can I run it all form the Terminal (i.e putty, over the network?)

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by adamc

Just noticed the SMP clients. Re-install on the machines time! Time for linux to get the update. Can I run it all form the Terminal (i.e putty, over the network?)

Yes, it's designed to run in a console via shell. Keep in mind this is not something you should run on a shared or reseller account or you will likely face a suspension of the account until it is removed.

[iranhost]

Count me in

[adamc]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Yes, it's designed to run in a console via shell. Keep in mind this is not something you should run on a shared or reseller account or you will likely face a suspension of the account until it is removed.

I wanted to run it on my home server (running Xubuntu). Sorry for any confusion. I take it I just run some commands to install etc.

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by adamc

I wanted to run it on my home server (running Xubuntu). Sorry for any confusion. I take it I just run some commands to install etc.

No problem, installing this locally is quite easy. I generally create a user for this to run under. I have a fairly simply script that creates a user folding with a random 50 char password and go ahead and start it up (no guarantees here, but I haven't seen it have any problems yet) at :

http://www.hostgator.com/~fordm/fold..._installer.smp

This is going to install the default client.cfg with 'hostgator.com' as your donor name and our team 122600. If you want individual credit for your username you'll need to change /usr/local/folding/client.cfg username to something unique and restart the folding daemon. Thanks folks we're starting to move up in the ranks points wise putting up around 30,000 points a day now!

I've been using http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ for a while now. I like the flexibility of being able to choose which project you wish to contribute to. Either way, both projects are A+ and I just got folding@home installed. : )

[GatorFord]

Starting to get up there for sure.

Team ranking including aggregate is at :

3975 of 118050

kakaostats.com projects us to be at rank 1,129 within 30 days or so but their projections can be slightly off given how new our team is :

http://kakaostats.com/tsum.php?t=122600

[GatorChrisN]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Starting to get up there for sure.

Team ranking including aggregate is at :

3975 of 118050


kakaostats.com projects us to be at rank 1,129 within 30 days or so but their projections can be slightly off given how new our team is :

http://kakaostats.com/tsum.php?t=122600

I am up to 8 processors now, so the rank should move a little faster hopefully. This folding stuff is motivating me to build up all the random parts I have laying around the house into systems

[Clinton]

Got SMP going on 4 computers, 14 cores all together, glad to be doing my part!

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by Clinton

Got SMP going on 4 computers, 14 cores all together, glad to be doing my part!

Awesome that's a lot of cores to be donating. You'll start skyrocketing quickly through the ranks. Just be patient, it seems with the amount of machines that are reporting back work units Stanford takes its sweet time in updating statistics.

Just out of curiosity. Is anyone selecting the :

"Allow receipt of work assignments and return of results greater than 10MB in size(Note that such work may have large memory demands" ?


I do, and my typical work unit frame numbers are always 400,000 :

For instance, the last 4 units on my core2duo have all been these 400,000 step slices :

[05:48:49] Completed 212000 out of 400000 steps (53%)

Anyone else out there besides Josh running those 5,000,000 step units?

[Clinton]

I am, started yesterday, and now I have 3800000 out of 5000000 finished. I'm getting projects greater than 10mb obviously and my cpu is always maxed out. It doesn't effect anything I do though. 76%

[GatorChrisN]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Awesome that's a lot of cores to be donating. You'll start skyrocketing quickly through the ranks. Just be patient, it seems with the amount of machines that are reporting back work units Stanford takes its sweet time in updating statistics.

Just out of curiosity. Is anyone selecting the :

"Allow receipt of work assignments and return of results greater than 10MB in size(Note that such work may have large memory demands" ?


I do, and my typical work unit frame numbers are always 400,000 :

For instance, the last 4 units on my core2duo have all been these 400,000 step slices :

[05:48:49] Completed 212000 out of 400000 steps (53%)

Anyone else out there besides Josh running those 5,000,000 step units?

I have my AMD Phenom quadcore doing large work assignments, i got one for like 5,000,000

on my core 2 duo I have it enabled as well, most of my other machines are less powerful and therefore i chose NO. PS3 i think only does small work units

[Clinton]

Five million steps sure does take a while to get through

[GatorChrisN]

Just bumping this, so hopefully more gators will come aboard. Folding@Home is a really good project and after starting with this back when Ford sent out the company e-mail i've been researching exactly what this is doing and it's just good stuff for everyone around the globe. Also Hostgator's contribution has been massive in just the month or so that we've been folding. We will be in the TOP 1000 teams within 30 days (hopefully sooner if YOU decide to help )

Just to re-state the details:

Download the clients here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download

Use team number: 122600
Identify yourself: Employees GatorFirstnameLastinital
totally awesome forum members: Forumname

Check our Team Results here:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...teamnum=122600

If the above site is updating, check out the stats here:
http://kakaostats.com/tsum.php?t=122600

Besides, i'm sure most of you guys have awesome computers that you are proud of, why not put those cpu cycles to use!

[om1]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

No problem, installing this locally is quite easy. I generally create a user for this to run under. I have a fairly simply script that creates a user folding with a random 50 char password and go ahead and start it up (no guarantees here, but I haven't seen it have any problems yet) at :

http://www.hostgator.com/~fordm/folding/folding_installer.smp

This is going to install the default client.cfg with 'hostgator.com' as your donor name and our team 122600. If you want individual credit for your username you'll need to change /usr/local/folding/client.cfg username to something unique and restart the folding daemon. Thanks folks we're starting to move up in the ranks points wise putting up around 30,000 points a day now!

just used your installer to install it on an Ubuntu 8.04 x86 system... works great

[Andy1984uk]

Just signed up. Haven't noticed anything slowing down at all

[GatorFord]

Awesome glad to hear we have more people coming on board.

We're getting closer to breaking into 1,000th place and are currently ranked at 1,647 of 119,677 with over 550,000 points and more than 6,500 work units.

Keep it up and remember that if you happen to be blessed with an 8 core behemoth of a machine you can run dual SMP clients on a machine to take advantage of all 8 cores. While we're not running folding on any of our shared or reseller boxes they surely could crunch out some numbers if we did. Look at this madness, 8 physical cores.

[root@gator433 ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "processor\|model name"
processor : 0
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 1
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 3
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 4
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 5
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 6
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
processor : 7
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz

I noticed we have more people here in the forums starting to hit milestones in folding. I'm curious as to what kind of machines are you guys using?

[Clinton]

Well... Here's three of my computers, have a few more but don't feel like listing out their specs, as these three I have the specs saved.

Power Supply: 600W Thermaltake (SLI Compatible) (Silent PurePower Edition)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz (1066MHz FSB) (8MB Cache)
Motherboard: nVidia 680i Core 2 Quad (By: eVGA) (nForce 680i SLI) (A1 Revision)
Memory: 2GB DDR2 Corsair at 800MHz XMS2 (Dual Channel) (Extreme-Performance)
Hard Drive 1: 320GB (Western Digital / Seagate) (16MB Cache) (7200 RPM) (SATA)
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 320MB (By: eVGA / Asus) (PCI-Express)
Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy SE (Up to 7.1 Channel)
Cooling: Air Cooled Stage 3 (Silent Artic Cooling (TwisterBoost Overclocked)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Power Supply: 1200W Thermaltake (Triple and Quad SLI Compatible) (Toughpower Edition)
Processor: 2x Intel Core 2 Quad QX9775 3.20GHz (1600MHz FSB)
Motherboard: Intel Skulltrail D5400XS V8 Platform
Memory: 4GB DDR3 Corsair at 1800MHz Dominator DHX (Extreme-Performance)
Hard Drive 1: 150GB Western Digital Raptor (10K RPM) (16MB Cache) (SATA) (Extreme Speed)
Hard Drive 2: 150GB Western Digital Raptor (10K RPM) (16MB Cache) (SATA) (Extreme Speed)
Raid Option: Setup hard drive 1 and hard drive 2 in a Raid 0 Stripe Configuration (Expert)
Hard Drive 3: 1TB Western Digital (7200 RPM) (16MB Cache) (SATA) (Extreme Speed)
Video Card: 3x SLI Triple (nVidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB)
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi FPS Fatal1ty Champion (Includes Front I/O Unit)
Physics Card: Ageia PhysX P1 128MB
Cooling: Liquid Chilled FrostBite Dual Loop System for CPU & Triple SLI
-------------------------------------------------------------
My old crappy computer
450Watt Power
AMD Sempron 3300+
320GB Hard Drive
512MB RAM
Onboard Sound and Graphics

[calum]

I will start folding tomorrow on my quad core.

Does the amount of RAM make a difference?

[Clinton]

No, its only using the CPU.

[calum]

Started with username "calumneilson" since "calum" was taken.