Folding Forum

It's 102 here now. It's going to be 108 degrees actual here tomorrow!!!

Don't know how long I'm going to be able to keep my Folding Rigs going if this keeps up!!!

Mel

Ha, a that's cool day where I am living.. reduce overclocking, increase airflow, fans to 100% and foldon.

Heat can be a problem for computer equipment. I'm pretty sure that most, if not all, computers come with built-in temperature monitors, and will automatically shut themselves down if the components get too hot. My laptop has done this at times. You can change your configuration so that you aren't using as much computing hardware. For example, you could disable any GPU folding, or lower the number of cores the SMP slot can use, change to a uniprocessor slot, all sorts of options.

Jesse V.
Big Lake, Alaska

101 here today and I'm no where close to Arizona. These are late August temps and not June temps. Anyway, purchased a LG portable AC unit to keep the beast and me cool. Once I see a few electric bills then next year might be different.

Folding for now

Barely getting above 8C/46F here.

That's outside, but seeing as that is where my radiator/heater core is I'm able to run it passively with a loop temp of 20-30 degrees C depending on load and an average core temp of 30 deg C at idle. Running full fan would drop the loop temps down to within a few degrees of ambient but idling the fan saves some power and I have thus far only hit 81 degrees C once after a long sustained period of load on a (relatively) warmer day.

Only downside is I can't recycle the heat so I'm leaving the folding to the computers inside my house, they're newer, more efficient computers although probably less powerful and certainly less exotically cooled!

They've talked a lot about 'hot water' cooling this week but my system has been able to run overclocked with a loop temp of 30-35C+ for years now, not far off the 45 quoted in the new IBM system. At stock voltages and frequencies I could probably easily run the loop at above 40 degC and keep within my thermal boundaries, except I would be nervous about the thermal expansion of the tubing. Probably get a good amount of thermal dissipation from the tubing itself!

*ADD it's a pity that the 10% of the worlds population who live in the Southern Hemisphere can't make up for the 'Northern Hemisphere Summer shutdown'.

If you are running an Intel CPU, consider disabling HyperThreading if heat is an issue. You will incur a slight performance penalty, but temps tend to drop by a good margin.

Much like HyperThreading, Overclocking tends to be an important source of extra heat. Consider restoring your clock rates to more traditional values during the hottest months of the year and setting them back to your current values when it cools off (or even consider underclocking). You'll save on your electric bill, too, especially if your computer(s) is/are in an air conditioned area.

For people that have Time Of Day variable cost plans, consider folding only during the "off peak" hours, typically the cost of electricity is half or less than half the peak rate.

Most modern computer BIOS support a "startup" at a certain time feature, and you can add a scheduled task to shutdown at a specific time. Easy...

Nearly 100 F in Cincinnati. Maybe I should start to fold at home when I leave for work (I work nights). Then turn the computer off when I get home (at dawn). The work units should still get done well before the final deadline.

It will be slightly easier on the air conditioning in the house.

(And please be careful when going outdoors.)

Musiclover wrote:Nearly 100 F in Cincinnati

Same My computer actually overheated yesterday and restarted a few times because I had my window open and the AC off

mele wrote:It's 102 here now. It's going to be 108 degrees actual here tomorrow!!!

Don't know how long I'm going to be able to keep my Folding Rigs going if this keeps up!!!

Mel

Toasty, beats the 65 and rain that i keep getting. Fans to max, clear out the dust, add extra fans and fold on. Gpu's are good to about 100 celsius. Dial back the over clock if needed or shut down the slowest rig or a couple of gpu's.

Looks like the hot temperatures are driving TFLOPS down.

Current production is down 250 x86 TFLOPS on 7 days ago, although encouragingly, this only represents a 4% drop on total production, which is pretty small given the extreme (early) temperatures in some parts of the world.

Given limited stats from 2012, the Northern Hemisphere heat has certainly come early this year.

You guys should just move to Sweden. Always cold and comfy around here.

7im wrote:For people that have Time Of Day variable cost plans, consider folding only during the "off peak" hours, typically the cost of electricity is half or less than half the peak rate.

Most modern computer BIOS support a "startup" at a certain time feature, and you can add a scheduled task to shutdown at a specific time. Easy...

Great minds think alike.

This is what I do in the summer since it is very hot in AZ. I scale back so I'm only folding at night when it's cooler outside and power is cheaper. During the winter the computer just becomes another heater though.

7im wrote:For people that have Time Of Day variable cost plans, consider folding only during the "off peak" hours, typically the cost of electricity is half or less than half the peak rate.
Most modern computer BIOS support a "startup" at a certain time feature, and you can add a scheduled task to shutdown at a specific time. Easy...

I had a look at this - in New Zealand day/night* requires a special meter with two registers or a third if you use peak/off-peak/night** ('smart' meters are not that common, prices for peak/offpeak/night does not seem to be listed).

You'd need to consume a substantial amount of your power at night for this to work as night is 6c/KWh cheaper than flat rate (19c/day [15.7c US]) while day is 4c more expensive but is twice as long (16 hours day/8 hours night)! If you were to run folding by the clock I guess you'd save anyway by running for 8 vs. 24 hours, on top of the reduced rate... I'm not exactly sure what the break even rate is in terms of proportion of power required for pay off, I think it requires an average W/hour draw at night 66% higher than on peak? I'd say a home owner would probably need to pay particular attention to their daily use, perhaps through a mains power monitoring tool...

Actually, the real sad news is that I plugged a few calculations into the old excel machine and worked out that the power consumed by a power bill of US$164 a month in New England (the threshold for variable pricing there) would cost US$410 here.

* Off peak: 11pm-7am. Peak 7am-11pm
**Off peak: 11pm-7am. Peak 7am-11am,5pm-9pm. Off-Peak 11am-5pm,9pm-11pm.