Idle state and servers

[kreuzerkrieg]

Hi, I have some little 24thread monstrosities here and there idling for most of the time. initially I thought it would be a good idea to use it for folding, however after looking into how the "on idle" works made me realize it wouldn't work, since the fah wouldn't stop when real workload kicks in on this server. Any solution for server appliances?

[everyman]

If you are running Linux and your workload comes at predictable times (like 9am to 5pm) you could set a cron job to start and stop FAHClient. See the manual and/or info pages for your preferred version of cron.

For systemd:

Code: Select all

service FAHClient start
service FAHClient stop

For old school init:

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/FAHClient start
/etc/init.d/FAHClient stop

For windows you might be able to use the Task Scheduler.

Hope that helps,

E

[Joe_H]

There is a supported telnet interface to FAHClient as well. A number of scripts have been posted here in the past to have the client pause and resume folding. If you have a way to detect when these workloads will kick in, then you could run a script to pause folding and then resume afterwards.

However, CPU folding is by default set to run at the lowest priority. So in most cases it will let computing resources go to any other process running that needs it. Letting your OS scheduler handle prioritization of assignment to being run may be sufficient in many cases.

[kreuzerkrieg]

ok, first things first
all of these are Win machines
the workload is unpredictable, since these are CI machines, so the workload may begin any time, or it can be days without any workload

as mentioned by Joe_H, I will check if the scheduler does the trick, if it does the issue is closed.

[kreuzerkrieg]

The CPU scheduler works well for CPU folding..

Well, it is not, apparently.

In fact, since most servers have slots that will support GPUs and they'd be idle most of the time, that's a good way to process FAH, even without using the idle setting.

GPU on server??? what GPU supposed to be on 1U server except the build-in one? which worth a little less than nothing. in any case, f@h did not detect the built-in GPU.

Demagogy aside, just finished benchmarking now. Ran some of the workload, with the f@h paused, it took 21:09 minutes (as it should), then ran it with Full f@h load, it took 26:27. Not acceptable, but I think I have an idea that a while ago I've implemented.
So my question is to whom I may speak to discuss feasibility of my proposed technical solution which implies code changes for windows based machines?

[kreuzerkrieg]

oh, I was hoping the phpBB died a decade ago. Someone can enlighten me how did my post migrated to GPU usage thread?

[7im]

Communication with Pande Group is facilitated at /r/foldingathome

[bruce]

Someone can enlighten me how did my post migrated to GPU usage thread?

I hope that you'll find it acceptable in it's (new) un-migrated form.