What's Up?!?

[treadlightly]

Ok, I've been gone for a LONG time, still folding, but totally out of touch with the latest news. I just put in two dual core boxes at work and want to know how I should set them up. Remember, I haven't done anything new with folding in a long time, so I'll probably need some seriously basic info. The boxes are both running XP.

[Aardvark]

Hang in there! I can't give you any help with the XP environment, but there will be others along that will be willing to "stick their oar in". We have been in a period of "extreme Quiet" on this board (Much like the sunspot absence). Keep the faith, Help will arrive.....

[jackrabbit]

Bob! Long time on see!

These days, SMP folding is all the rage and getting quite stable too. You'll need quite a bit of RAM though. Grab the latest fah6 and it should get you an FahCore_a3.exe. This core is multi-threaded, so a single client will use all of your machine. You should get a passkey. Fold 10 units with the key and you will start getting pretty big bonus points.

I don't have any windows boxes folding, so can't really help you with the best way to set it up. The above is the generic works-everywhere advice...

[treadlightly]

Unfortunately my Windows machines are not folding because there just isn't a way to set them up to run that I can figure out. Once a staff person restarts them, the folding stops and I usually don't know it until I check (often much too late to salvage the unit).

[jackrabbit]

You should be able to set up the client as a Windows service. I believe the setting is under the advanced configuration options. Alas, without a Windows machine, I can 't give you specific instructions...

[www.NeXTComputers.org]

Hi Treadlightly,

I’d be more than happy to help you get your machines set up to automatically start the folding client. I have two XP boxes running with both the SMP client and multiple GPU clients, and everything starts automatically at boot time. I set up my XP boxes a long time ago before the option to run the client as a service was working. I’m not familiar with running the client as a service, so it may be the better way to go. Maybe someone who has experience with that can chime in. But this is how I have mine set up.
The SMP client can be launched automatically with a shortcut placed in your startup folder on the start menu. This allows the console client to run minimized on the task bar, making it easy to monitor and shut the client down. There’s a potential race condition that you may have to work around, because the SMP client tries to start before the MPI interface is initialized. This is easy to overcome by launching the SMP client with a batch file that delays the starting of the client for 10 seconds or so.
You can use notepad to create a batch file named something like “start_fah.bat” in your SMP client folder. Copy and paste the following code to the file:

Code: Select all

PING -n 25 127.0.0.1>nul
start "CPU-SMP" /d "\Program Files\Folding at Home CPU\" /MIN "C:\Program Files\Folding at Home CPU\Folding@home-Win32-x86.exe" -smp –deino

The first line tells the PC to ping itself as a delay tactic, and you can increase the number of pings above 25 if you need a longer delay. You’ll need to change the pathnames in the second line to match the pathname of your folding client. The second line also assumes that you are running the Deino MPI version of the client. If you’re running the MPICH version then you can drop the “-deino” flag from the end of the second line. The only thing left to do now is to create a shortcut in your startup folder with the “start_fah.bat” file as the target. Hope that help you out.