Maximum PC

Anyone want free cloud access to use for folding?

Details are here:
http://distributedcomputing.cloudapp.net/

Free 90-day trial of Windows Azure to use with Stanford's F@H project.

Enjoy!

Thanks, I got one set up.

BUT, now do I get it to SMP on the 8 cores? The instructions are vague there...

And how do I get 11108 in as team...

I saw this too late to set it up last night, but wanted to make others aware of it. If you don't get answers before this evening, I'll see what I find out.

I'll give this a try when I get home tonight.

I have two instances of a single core running right now. I played with flags, no change. I am not a programmer, so "slight tweaks to the code" does not help. But I got it going so I should be close.

OK so far it has garnered 107 points for FAH. Unless it can go SMP then it is not worth the 2 hours to set up.

Hi All,

I would be interested in this if it yields some decent WU's and points, keep us updated. Cheers,

Danners

I'm waiting for the crap to install right now. it's frustratingly long...
I'll see what I can setup when I have time later unless it finishes really soon.

When up, go into configure, that is where I changed the instances from 1 to 2, that doubled the cores to 16, but obviously is still 2004 old school single core taking 14 hours for a single 107 pt WU.

I tried adding smp flags, bigadv flag, #cores flag and that has no effect.

Bummer. I finally got to read the FAQ.



Doesn't look like this will provide significant points per individual. Given the set-up time required, many of you will not want to take part in this. For those that do, here might be your greatest contribution:

more MS fail

I may finish setting up an account, but I'd just rather do something else, make some buxx, and donate $10 to Stanford myself. Taking up a few hours of my time for MS to donate a measly $10 to stanford is really not worth my time, for the most part.

Dont bother, waste of time.

No benefit to MPC, little benefit to Folding.

Geez... I think my P4 would pull better PPD then this... lol I'd rather spend the time to go downstairs to the kitchen PC and install F@H and go back up stairs after 10 mins...

I have an old Athlon 64 x2 4800+ that I know does better than what MS is offering, think I will give this one a pass. Always hopeful though, you never know.

Danners

Oh the good ole times back in those days... although I was donating the spare cpu cycles for SETI.

True, there is no benefit to the MPC team score (as is...), but it is extremely beneficial to Folding @ Home. Just because everyone focuses on the high scoring SMP & GPU work units these days, it doesn't mean that the old single core work units can just be discarded. Each Work Unit, be it a GPU, SMP, or single core Work Unit, is part of a larger simulation, & incomplete simulations don't give good answers.

Do you fold for points, or do you fold so that one day families like the Smitheman's don't have to loose loved ones to cancer anymore, or Huntington's Disease, or ALS, et.al.

If it's for the later, than these WU's and this work very much matters...

BTW... the client for this IS configurable including changing team name, changing client used (SMP), and entering your passkey... But beware, you are limited to a certain number of hours per month, using SMP will chew through them a lot faster.

I already chewed through the hours. Not sure what it produced as it was mixed in, but how did you get it to go SMP? I used the smp client instead of theirs, I added the flags and numbers, but could not get it to SMP, only single core. And even the single cores chewed through the free hours.

So far I can't get the darned thing to run, I'm attempting again this morning. However, I'm using Windows 8 and there are extra steps you have to do to get everything installed correctly, & I seem to have missed something previously... So today, I'm going through very slowly, & double checking everything, and hopefully by this afternoon... [crosses fingers]

The SMP client came with the @home with Azure package, and was already selected in the .cloud configuration file when I opened it up, so maybe it was an update to the program since the OP. However, since the program defaults to one CPU, I think that you may need to add the -smp flag as well as the flag for the number of cores you want to use. i.e. -smp -8 which would burn through the available hours in 3 days...

Also, "<Instances count="1">", I think that tells the program how many CPU cores to use. In the case of the single core client, setting it to 8 would enable 8 single core programs to run, but for SMP, it should replace the -8 flag. Or at least that's what I'm thinking anyway.