Best PPD / Watt with Core 17?

[CubeSat Guy]

Hi everyone,

thanks to Linus' and Slick's mentions of Folding@Home ("FAH") in the YouTube live stream archives, I got interested and downloaded the client and am since folding on 2 machines. More will follow. In the past, I had participated in malaria research @ home project, climate prediction @ home, etc etc.

Background info:
Now I want to concentrate on the two projects Folding@home and Asteroids@home. I'm willing to donate a dedicated machine for this. Donating means that there will actually be something like a foundation or a non-profit association receiving money (and saving me some taxes) to buy and run this system. The initial costs of the system(s) may be up to 4000 EUR (for parts that may even be used / from ebay - I will assemble the system(s) myself). But the total cost of ownership over the next 3-4 years should be optimized in that the system should deliver the most scientific progress at a low power consumtion (green it). Here, I assume that scientific progress roughly translates to the points per day (PPD) that the system receives from the FAH-servers. The system will be run in Germany at a current electric energy price of about 0,26 € / kWh (= 0,34 USD / kWh) with an expected average 5% increase per year so energy cost is already a point to take into account from an economic viewpoint. Moreover, besides running all systems with green energy, I try to keep my stuff as energy efficient as possible by principle.

Questions:
Now, the general question is, what components I should get to meet the sweetspot of putting out my PPD while keeping the power consumption as low as possible. I did some research in this direction and the so-called 4P-systems (4P = 4 processors) seem to be a good alternative. Whaler_99 from this community has already built or started building such a system and you can find his thread here: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/10066-building-a-4p-system/
Going into the details of 4P, I read (somewhere, unfortunately I lost the tab in my browser), that older 12 core Opterons from the 6100 series (=48 cores total) perform better for Folding@home, at least when it comes to PPD / watt) than newer 16 core Opterons from the 6300 series (=64 cores total). Is this still true with current FAH-cores and for the currently sold Opterons? The important part for me to mention here is that I'd rather buy two, say, 6100 series 4P-systems (or one 4P and one 2P) at a higher initial price than buy one 6300 series 4P system if the 6100 series has a better performance per watt and thus hopefully creates more scientific progress at a lower energy consumption. Also, I then need to get more info on the performance of a 85 Watt TDP HE-Opteron vs. a 110 "normal" Opteron vs. a 140 Watt TDP "SE" Opteron. Which one would deliver the best PPD/wat ratio? I currently assume the HE ones will.
Another question is whether or not the whole 4P FAH legend still holds with FAH Core 17 being released. I read that they got up to 110000 PPD on a 7970 and almost as high on NVIDIA graphics cards that consume even less power. So with the new FAH-core, is GPCGPU the better choice over a 4P-system?
I also looked at a XEON Phi coprocessor card, but apparently that is not yet (and is unlikey to be) supported by FAH :(

Any thoughts? :)

Thanks for all you help! :D

[Whaler_99]

Well, couple of thoughts... last I heard the 6100 is still optimized more then the 6300... but, if you can get a good price on 6300, go for that. It is only a mater of time before FAH update with better support.

 

4P is a proven and reliable solution. The whole GPU folding especially with the Beta core is just that - Beta. We have no idea how long it might run, might be pulled, might actually get into production. And when it does, will it be as good? Right now the Beta Core is somewhat limited to what systems can receive it. Once it goes to production, they will need to modify it a bit to be more compatible - read, less PPD. I believe this has happened with some of the previous Beta's that would produce monster numbers because of the specific optimizations, but once done testing, although improvements where seen, not quite as spectacular.

 

I am hedging my bets. :) I have/will 2 x 4P systems and a 5GPU folder. :)

[warmon6]

Hi everyone,

thanks to Linus' and Slick's mentions of Folding@Home ("FAH") in the YouTube live stream archives, I got interested and downloaded the client and am since folding on 2 machines. More will follow. In the past, I had participated in malaria research @ home project, climate prediction @ home, etc etc.

Background info:

Now I want to concentrate on the two projects Folding@home and Asteroids@home. I'm willing to donate a dedicated machine for this. Donating means that there will actually be something like a foundation or a non-profit association receiving money (and saving me some taxes) to buy and run this system. The initial costs of the system(s) may be up to 4000 EUR (for parts that may even be used / from ebay - I will assemble the system(s) myself). But the total cost of ownership over the next 3-4 years should be optimized in that the system should deliver the most scientific progress at a low power consumtion (green it). Here, I assume that scientific progress roughly translates to the points per day (PPD) that the system receives from the FAH-servers. The system will be run in Germany at a current electric energy price of about 0,26 € / kWh (= 0,34 USD / kWh) with an expected average 5% increase per year so energy cost is already a point to take into account from an economic viewpoint. Moreover, besides running all systems with green energy, I try to keep my stuff as energy efficient as possible by principle.

Questions:

Now, the general question is, what components I should get to meet the sweetspot of putting out my PPD while keeping the power consumption as low as possible. I did some research in this direction and the so-called 4P-systems (4P = 4 processors) seem to be a good alternative. Whaler_99 from this community has already built or started building such a system and you can find his thread here: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/10066-building-a-4p-system/

Going into the details of 4P, I read (somewhere, unfortunately I lost the tab in my browser), that older 12 core Opterons from the 6100 series (=48 cores total) perform better for Folding@home, at least when it comes to PPD / watt) than newer 16 core Opterons from the 6300 series (=64 cores total). Is this still true with current FAH-cores and for the currently sold Opterons? The important part for me to mention here is that I'd rather buy two, say, 6100 series 4P-systems (or one 4P and one 2P) at a higher initial price than buy one 6300 series 4P system if the 6100 series has a better performance per watt and thus hopefully creates more scientific progress at a lower energy consumption. Also, I then need to get more info on the performance of a 85 Watt TDP HE-Opteron vs. a 110 "normal" Opteron vs. a 140 Watt TDP "SE" Opteron. Which one would deliver the best PPD/wat ratio? I currently assume the HE ones will.

Another question is whether or not the whole 4P FAH legend still holds with FAH Core 17 being released. I read that they got up to 110000 PPD on a 7970 and almost as high on NVIDIA graphics cards that consume even less power. So with the new FAH-core, is GPCGPU the better choice over a 4P-system?

I also looked at a XEON Phi coprocessor card, but apparently that is not yet (and is unlikey to be) supported by FAH :(

Any thoughts? :)

Thanks for all you help! :D

 

 

Oh boy, were to begin. :D  (In the good way.   B) )

 

It is true that (currently) the 4P servers are have the best PPD per watt vs anything else.

 

Getting high core count cpus (like 12 cores on the 6100) on 4P board's can give you 300k+ PPD (more if you can overclock) and it will only used about 600 to 700 watts from the wall (watts from a friend of mine on Tom's hardware team running 4x AMD Opteron 6172.)

 

. 

 

As for whether it's true that the 6100 is better than 6300, I'll have to look into that.  I know it's true that that the 6200's were slower than the 6100 but i think the 6300's is a little bit faster than the 6100 because of the IPC improvements.

 

Although I haven't looked power consumption at the 6300's. I'll have to look into that more but I dont think they consume any more power than my friends 6172's.

 

 

Well, If you want to look into 4P even more, the best place too look at is at [H]ardforum F@H team. http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=32

 

They're that one team that started the 4P craze. Lot's of tip's, tricks, know-how to getting the most PPD and PPD/Watt out of such systems, and be able to overclock certain cpu's on certain boards.

 

 

 

 

 

 As for how it stacks up against GPU's... Well, because the updated Core_17 is still beta, it's hard to say for certain that what we currently see is what we'll get on full release of the core. (So what we see now like the GTX titan getting 110~120K ppd, that could be reduced to 1/2 at full release of the core if F@H feels like it).

 

 On top of that, because the core is still new, (only been around since May 5th. Which is close to a week) we dont have performance numbers t go along with power consumption from all the card to make a proper assumption on what the PPD/Watt should about be from each card and that it's better or worse than 4P.

 

 

So this question might be best asked when the Core has launched fully and hope the numbers have stayed the same from what were currently seeing. 

 

 

 

 

What I can say is, to maximize the PPD/W out of any system, you'll need to use the highest 80% badge PSU that you can get your hands on (Gold and Platinum). That way you as close to what your system is using as what is being drawn from the wall.

[warmon6]

What are the odd's of that... Whaler and I posting at the exact same time and having a somewhat similar message.  :P

[Whaler_99]

What are the odd's of that... Whaler and I posting at the exact same time and having a somewhat similar message.  :P

 

To funny :)