Folding Forum

Hello all,
I am new here. I have loved the idea of FAH since I first purchased a PS3 years ago. I was never able to do much with the Other OS feature of the PS3 but the idea of clustering has intrigued me for some time.
I have recently come into possession of some older PCs but I think that they would work well to build a cluster out of and to add to FAH's wide network of processing PCs.

I am looking initially at putting together 4 PC's.
The hardware I have to work with is as follows.
4 X Intel Core 2 Duo processors
RAM 4GB on Controller PC and 2GB on each slave. (can use more if needed on slaves)
4 X 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black HDD.
I can put 1 Nvidia Quadro FX1800 Video card in each of these machines. I could also put in 2 per machine if it would matter. I would like to use 1 because I will add to this cluster later if I go down this road.
I will probably use a NETGEAR ProSafe 5 or 8 port Gigabit switch for connecting everything to begin with. I might be able to come up with a higher end switch another day.

I would like to document this process as much as possible as well and will be keeping notes. Perhaps I can keep this thread alive during the process.

My question:
I am needing suggestions on which Linux distro to use and which clustering software. I have looked into the rocks software but that seems dated to me and I have also looked at the Beowolf cluster idea. (I believe that is the one I am picturing in my head for all of this) But their is tons of software available for this set up.

Also, Does the current version of FAH support clustered computing? If not, I will most likely abandon this idea and set them up individually and just let them run.

Thanks for any help you can provide and if you need any other information just ask.

Welcome to the folding support forum.

To answer the primary question, no the FAH client does not support clustering - the network interconnects are too slow to be useful for its type of calculations on WU's.

The Quadro FX1800 GPU cards may still be usable, but only for the older Core_15 projects that are approaching end of life. As these are pre-Fermi cards, not all can process Core_15, you would have to opt-in to do these projects.

As for the Core 2 Duo processors, there still are projects that can use them. But you would need to configure the client to use both cores, at times there are shortages of WU's that can be assigned to single core processing.

That is rather disappointing news indeed.
Thank you for taking the time to answer this question.

I have followed a couple more threads and have come to realize that FAH is definitely not the route for these PCs.
Sigh...
Perhaps I will use them for a couple SMTP servers for the office...

Thanks again.

A 3 Ghz Core 2 Duo will get about 3000 Points Per Day, 2.33 Ghz closer to 2k PPD.

Those computers can successfully manage SMTP (or whatever) while running FAH. While they won't win any points competitions, every bit you do accomplish is useful to science, just like they did in the days when they were state-of-the-art.

... then when you get some cash, you can gradually replace the CPU processing with GPU processing by upgrading the GPUs one-by-one while still managing the SMTP processing.