Friday, August 29, 2008

Points Milestone - BIGMAN - 10k

BIGMAN has just passed the milestone for 10,000 points!

Only on the 9th, this guy had passed his 5k points milestone. Now he's sitting on 10,141 points from 28 work units and 196,933rd position of 1,061,402 all-time folders. Great stuff mate.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Points Milestone - Lahm_Family_PS3 - 1k

Lahm_Family_PS3 has passed the 1,000 points milestone!

Now on 1,500 points from 2 work units, it's positioned 460,950th out of 1,060,764 all-time folders.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Work Units Milestone - Greg - 100

Greg has returned over 100 work units!

Sitting on 101 work units and 11,562 points to be exact, he's positioned 182,207th out of 1,060,155 all-time folders. But on the team leaderboard he now sits insided the top 10, pushing magicgate3 back to 11th spot. Great stuff mate.

New Team Member - Lahm_Family_PS3

Well i've decided to keep the bonus PS3 I got with my Bravia TV after all. Not selling it anymore, my old man is going to use it mostly for his music and for watching DVD/Blu-rays on the 2nd TV.

Lahm_Family_PS3 is the name the new PS3 will be folding under. It's returned it's 1st work unit already! So far its only got 250 points, but I noticed its crunching through a big 1,250 point work unit now, so it looks like the 1k PPD increase due for the team in one month! that i was talking up a month ago, should hold true! Haha.

I'll post a 'Folding Setup' picture for this PS3 soon.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Points Milestone - Greg - 10k

Just last night ROO_BOY29 moved into 12th spot on the team, and already he's been overtaken by Greg! His move into 12th spot has brought up his 10,000 point milestone as well!

Its been a bit longer between drinks for Greg as he made his 5k points milestone nearly 2 months ago. But he's had a sudden rush of work units in the last 24 hours, returning 5 for 1,480 points! Whatever he's done or changed lately, the effort is certainly appreciated! Haha he's now returned a total of 97 work units for 10,287 points. Great folding mate - Keep going!

Monday, August 25, 2008

Points Milestone - ROO_BOY29 - 10k

Just a fortnight after passing the 5k points milestone, my mate ROO_BOY29 has passed the 10,000 points milestone!

Folding with both his PS3 & Quad-Core Computer, he's pushed himself up to 12th spot on the team leaderboard. He's made a short-term goal to claim Delta_Leviathan's 8th position which is only ~7k points away.

Between his machines he's now returned 37 work units for an exact 10,088 points. This positions him 196,636th out of 1,058,950 folders for all-time.

Points Milestone - smASHer88_PS3 - 200k

Your team leader, and my Playstation - smASHer88_PS3 has just passed the 200,000 points milestone!

Purchased on Boxing Day (26th December) last year, i've had it folding mostly 24/7 since then, only really stopping to play the odd game, or watch a movie.

So far it's crunched through 872 work units for a total of 200,451 points, which places it 18,691st out of 1,058,875 folders for all time. It also means that it has produced just under 30% of Aussie Rules Footy's total points.

I'm aiming to make 300k points by Boxing Day this year haha. Keep folding team, ya doing great!

Sunday, August 24, 2008

New Folding@Home Clients Installation Guides

A new page of Client Installation Guides has been added to the Folding@Home website, making it easier for newcomers to install anyone of the various types of folding clients that are now available.

Existing folders can also benefit, whether it's adding an SMP or GPU client to the mix, these new guides will certainly help ease the process! Remember you can always visit the Folding Community Forums as well should you need further help, or just want to provide some feedback on your experiences.

Monitor your PS3 carefully!

Just as a warning, apparently a lot of PS3 folders have had troubles with certain work units, and experiencing funny things like title screens locking up, HDD activity taking way too long and more unfortunate results such as work units being lost, or a complete reset to default settings such as what I experienced!

It seems that Dan Ensign from the Pande Group has removed some problem work units saying:
'I'm going to pull projects 4026-4037 until I get a better sense of what's wrong, from our side. Sorry for the inconvenience.'
Watch these two threads (PS3 stalls at zero frames - various WUs & 4033 flatlined?) from the Folding Community Forum to keep updated on the situation.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

GPUs push Folding@Home past 3 Petaflops!

Following a thread in the Folding Community Forums - Highwater Mark , it seems that the total project power of Folding@Home has now passed the 3 Petaflops mark!

This is quite a significant achievement for the project, as 1 Petaflop was only achieved back in September last year. It just goes to show how much the project has grown since then. The release of the more mature GPU2 client has been the significant factor in getting the project to the power it's at now and undoubtably it's also going to be the big push for the project in the next couple of years.

There has already been around 25,000 GPU2 client installs to date, with a healthy 16,000 of those currently 'active'. This easily gives the GPU clients the best active/total CPU ratio of any type. Most others are less than 1:10.

Now there was a bit of a discussion on whether this 3 Petaflops measurement was 'legit' as the whole Stats Server issue could have produced unrealistic figures, but thats seemed to have settled well and truly, and we are definitley past 3 Petaflops by more than a whisker!

The NVIDIA GPUs seem to have the most support at the moment, having ~9,000 more active folders than what the ATI camp has. This is most likely due to the fact that the NVIDIAs are being rewarded with a better PPD average than the ATIs, but then again NVIDIA does have a better market share in graphics cards. But they have also recently released a GeForce Power Pack (to show off special NVIDIA graphics card only features such as PhysX demos & CUDA-based programs) which includes the GPU2 Folding client. So that might have atleast spurred the last week or so's jump in total project power to over 3 Petaflops.

Looks like its time to invest in a little GPU folding action! Just a note though, the PS3 active numbers have really taken a dive lately, and i'd just like to indicate that although GPU systems now put out the most folding power for the project, the PS3 work units are still very important for the project's development, just like the old CPU client is still very valuable. So don't worry about the points too much, just fold however much you can, and know that your helping a very worthy project.

Taken from the OS Stats page -

Client statistics by OS

OS Type Current TFLOPS* Active CPUs Total CPUs
Windows 1992096332138357
Mac OS X/PowerPC 78270118934
Mac OS X/Intel 20646859276
Linux 6236482326368
ATI GPU 36633236439
NVIDIA GPU 14051277418556
PLAYSTATION3 111139388584773
Total 3170316338 3252703

Total number of non-Anonymous donators = 1056777
Last updated at Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:04:49
DB date 2008-08-21 06:00:03

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Stats Update delayed due to Power Outage @ SU

Reading Vijay Pande's Blog (particular posts 1, 2 & 3), it seems just yesterday or so, Palo Alto (and therefore Stanford University) has had a pretty serious power outage! It took a fair few servers out of action for a short while, but most are back up now.

One exception though, the Stats Updates server is not operating at the moment. This server usually just updates the Team/Donor stats database every hour, but its just being put on delay for now. A back-logging server is keeping all this information however, so once the updates server starts back up, the database will get updated and you will notice your points and work units count go up two or three days worth to make up for this period of in-activity.

Geez, that'd be chaos at a University! But they seem to be able to fix things up pretty quick which is good.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Got my free Playstation 3! Nice surprise too!

Last week on Wednesday (13th) I received my free Playstation 3 as part of the Sony Bravia Full HD Bonus PS3 in July deal I talked about in my post on the 23rd July - (1k PPD increase due for the team in one month!). I was very glad to see my new PS3 after only 3 weeks since purchasing my new TV, but to top it off Sony actually included a newer DualShock3 instead of the regular SixAxis controller in the box, and also some Video Ezy vouchers! Total champs!

Now to pray that the upcoming 80GB PS3s at the end of the month come with DualShock3s so I can sell this one for a decent price and still end up with the better controller!


Points Milestone - erBotty - 1k

erBotty has passed the 1,000 point milestone! Now sittin with 2,250 points from 5 work units, they sit 393,781st of 1,054,720 folding participants.

I'm a bit slow to report on this one actually, as erBotty passed this mark approximately 2 days ago with a 1,250 point work unit! How do I know this? Well I occasionally checkout the very trusty 3rd party stats provider - Kakao Stats. Specifically I looked up this page - erBotty's Summary and it tells me that they have returned a work unit worth 1,250 points at 22:00~23:00 GMT on the 16th. This is about 8~9AM in GMT+10 Time (What i'm on) on the 17th. So yeh, about two days ago lol.

Just on the 13th, I took a stab at guessing what this team member's folding with (New Team Member - erBotty). Looking at the Project Summary page, I can say now that a Playstation 3 would have to be a correct answer, as there is only two work units which credit 1,250 points, and that is Project 4044 & 4045 which both are PS3 work units.

Congrats to erBotty and hope to get in contact with you soon.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Folding Setup - smASHer88_PS3

Hey guys, just wanted to post a snap of my setup for smASHer88_PS3. Its a 40GB PAL unit, connected to my new Sony Bravia KDL40W4000 Full HDTV. Looks pretty sweet huh? haha


Wednesday, August 13, 2008

New Team Member - erBotty

A person goin by the name of erBotty has joined the team! They've already got 250 points for the team from their 1st work unit and judging by the points amount, i'm guessing they're folding on a PS3. Welcome to the team!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Points Milestone - ROO_BOY29 - 5k

My mate ROO_BOY29 has now passed the 5,000 points milestone!

Using both his quad-core & PS3, hes returned 21 work units for a total of 5,780 points. That places him 258,059th of 1,047,330 total folders for all-time and just behind BIGMAN on the team at 16th position. Great stuff mate.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Points Milestone - BIGMAN - 5k

BIGMAN has passed the 5,000 points milestone!

Now sitting 15th on the team, he has returned a total of 20 work units for the team which has earned him 6180 points so far. He also sits 249,557th of 1,046,930 total folders to date. Good stuff mate, keep it coming!

Monday, August 4, 2008

Work Units Milestone - magicgate3 - 50

magicgate3 has made the Work Units Milestone for 50!

Since joining the team back in October 2007, this guy has returned 50 work units for a total of 11,416 points. He sits 10th on the team leaderboard and is placed 179,158th of 1,044,002 folders for all time. Great stuff mate ;)

Saturday, August 2, 2008

New Look for the Blog!

Thought the blog could do with a bit of a spruce up! I think the layout is a lot more defined now, easier to read and distinguish between the main section and the sidebar.

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