Folding COVID Proteins

[Variety of Cells]

We are basically into the top 1% of teams (1.0024%).

Once my area gets back to going to work every day I won't be leaving my PC on as much so we may drop, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen for at least another month.  Looks like according to the plan my area is going to have to be down to something like 50 new cases in 2 weeks in order to go to the first phase of reopening.

You tweak all those settings in the advanced covid folding program?

Sweet!  Hurray! 

Yeah, I’ve scaled down my folding time. I’ve had a few black screen freezes lately, and that concerns me, as this build hasn’t done that. The freezes were not while I was folding, but after some long periods of folding. Can’t say for sure if folding is the problem, but the black screens point towards a GPU issue I believe. Perhaps I should scale back and not go at max speed when folding.

While I am starting to think about a new GPU, I’m not quite ready to make that purchase.

The profile I have for folding puts the power level of my 2070 to minimum and the 1070 to 80%, this keeps the 2070 below 60°C and the 1070 around 70°C.  I may start turning off the CPU folding since the house is getting warmer on the 2nd floor and the CPU temp is starting to get into the 70s even with only 4 cores folding, those AVX routines really hammer a CPU.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

We are basically into the top 1% of teams (1.0024%).

Once my area gets back to going to work every day I won't be leaving my PC on as much so we may drop, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen for at least another month.  Looks like according to the plan my area is going to have to be down to something like 50 new cases in 2 weeks in order to go to the first phase of reopening.

You tweak all those settings in the advanced covid folding program?

Sweet!  Hurray! 

Yeah, I’ve scaled down my folding time. I’ve had a few black screen freezes lately, and that concerns me, as this build hasn’t done that. The freezes were not while I was folding, but after some long periods of folding. Can’t say for sure if folding is the problem, but the black screens point towards a GPU issue I believe. Perhaps I should scale back and not go at max speed when folding.

While I am starting to think about a new GPU, I’m not quite ready to make that purchase.

The profile I have for folding puts the power level of my 2070 to minimum and the 1070 to 80%, this keeps the 2070 below 60°C and the 1070 around 70°C.  I may start turning off the CPU folding since the house is getting warmer on the 2nd floor and the CPU temp is starting to get into the 70s even with only 4 cores folding, those AVX routines really hammer a CPU.

You can set the number of CPU cores in the advanced control program, but for the GPU power you have to use an overclocking program, I use EVGA Precision X1 since both the cards are EVGA and it controls the RGB on my 2070.  I have 2 profiles saved now, one for folding and one for gaming.  The folding one is like I described above, the gaming one pushes my 2070 to nearly max and leaves the 1070 the same for folding.  Would be nice if there was a way to automate the switchover, to play a game I have to pause folding on the 2070, load the profile for the GPU in the X1 program, then to go back to folding I load the X1 profile and un-pause folding on the 2070.  It's just a few clicks but I have to remember to do them...

I just turned off CPU folding, not only is my CPU getting up into the 70s but at that temperature the fans are running full speed, number of work units will drop but the points per day won't drop much, the work units for CPUs give far fewer points than the ones for GPUs.

[Variety of Cells]

We are basically into the top 1% of teams (1.0024%).

Once my area gets back to going to work every day I won't be leaving my PC on as much so we may drop, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen for at least another month.  Looks like according to the plan my area is going to have to be down to something like 50 new cases in 2 weeks in order to go to the first phase of reopening.

You tweak all those settings in the advanced covid folding program?

Sweet!  Hurray! 

Yeah, I’ve scaled down my folding time. I’ve had a few black screen freezes lately, and that concerns me, as this build hasn’t done that. The freezes were not while I was folding, but after some long periods of folding. Can’t say for sure if folding is the problem, but the black screens point towards a GPU issue I believe. Perhaps I should scale back and not go at max speed when folding.

While I am starting to think about a new GPU, I’m not quite ready to make that purchase.

The profile I have for folding puts the power level of my 2070 to minimum and the 1070 to 80%, this keeps the 2070 below 60°C and the 1070 around 70°C.  I may start turning off the CPU folding since the house is getting warmer on the 2nd floor and the CPU temp is starting to get into the 70s even with only 4 cores folding, those AVX routines really hammer a CPU.

You can set the number of CPU cores in the advanced control program, but for the GPU power you have to use an overclocking program, I use EVGA Precision X1 since both the cards are EVGA and it controls the RGB on my 2070.  I have 2 profiles saved now, one for folding and one for gaming.  The folding one is like I described above, the gaming one pushes my 2070 to nearly max and leaves the 1070 the same for folding.  Would be nice if there was a way to automate the switchover, to play a game I have to pause folding on the 2070, load the profile for the GPU in the X1 program, then to go back to folding I load the X1 profile and un-pause folding on the 2070.  It's just a few clicks but I have to remember to do them...

I just turned off CPU folding, not only is my CPU getting up into the 70s but at that temperature the fans are running full speed, number of work units will drop but the points per day won't drop much, the work units for CPUs give far fewer points than the ones for GPUs.

Gotcha.  I'll follow suit.  I use MSI afterburner, so I'll have to set up a profile for folding.  I currently have an overclocked one for gaming which I accidentally left on once while folding.  Things got steamy.

[Variety of Cells]

Would be nice if there was a way to automate the switchover, to play a game I have to pause folding on the 2070, load the profile for the GPU in the X1 program, then to go back to folding I load the X1 profile and un-pause folding on the 2070.  It's just a few clicks but I have to remember to do them...

You got me curious.  I'm really close.  There probably is a way to automatically pause your 2070 when you fire up a game... I think?  But I just figured out how to get telnet to pause and restart the folding.  Now I just need to refresh my memory on how to create a .bat script, assign it to a hotkey, then combine that hotkey with the hotkey I've set for switching my GPU profile onto one of my keyboard's macro keys, and voila, I will have reduced it to one button press.

[Variety of Cells]

Would be nice if there was a way to automate the switchover, to play a game I have to pause folding on the 2070, load the profile for the GPU in the X1 program, then to go back to folding I load the X1 profile and un-pause folding on the 2070.  It's just a few clicks but I have to remember to do them...

You got me curious.  I'm really close.  There probably is a way to automatically pause your 2070 when you fire up a game... I think?  But I just figured out how to get telnet to pause and restart the folding.  Now I just need to refresh my memory on how to create a .bat script, assign it to a hotkey, then combine that hotkey with the hotkey I've set for switching my GPU profile onto one of my keyboard's macro keys, and voila, I will have reduced it to one button press.

Alright, so that was a bit of a rabbit hole, but I finally got it to do what I want it to do.  Had to download autohotkey to do it, but it works. Here's how I have it set up. 

Ended up having to use a visual basic script to open up cmd and punch in some commands to open up telnet, connect to the FAHControl, and pauses the folding.  Then created another script to start folding.  Then, using autohotkey, I assigned each of those scripts a hotkey.  Then, using my keyboard's macro features, I assigns one macro button to press the hotkey that switches my gpu profile to standard and then press the hotkey that pauses folding, and another macro button to use the hotkey for my folding gpu profile and the hotkey to start folding.  And presto!  One button to turn folding on, one to turn it off.

I can even use it while running a windowed game if I forgot to stop folding before playing.  Otherwise it'll minimize a fullscreen game in order to open up cmd, then I just alt tab back to it. 

I'll happily post the code I had to cobble together if you're interested.  But I'm sure there's a bunch of much cleaner ways to do what I just did, as I'm not a programmer. 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Since I have that 2nd graphics card I don't pause folding completely, I leave the 1070 folding, so unless there are advanced controls to pause individual GPUs I'll just keep doing what I've been doing.

I've been in such a weird frame of mind lately that I haven't felt like playing much other than simple stuff like stardew valley, and even then I use mods to basically play that in creative mode and try to build the most awesome setup I can before the first summer.  I've found that new farm layout with the 4 zones is fantastic for that, one corner for animals, one for an orchard, one for farming, and the house corner for fish ponds and crafting.  So I haven't been bothering to pause folding much since the games I've been playing don't need super powerful GPUs.

[Variety of Cells]

Ah yes, stardew valley, my love.

And yes, through telnet it’s very easy to pause an individual GPU. It’s just pause [xx] instead of pause, where xx is the slot number of the GPU you want to pause.

When I get back from my bike ride I’ll post the Visual Basic code I stole and modified, in case you want to mess around with it.

[Variety of Cells]

Sorry.  We did a 63 mile ride to get a badge in Strava and it wiped me out. 

So, if you're still curious, the first thing you'll have to do to get this to work is to enable telnet in windows.  It's very simple.  Here's a guide.  https://www.technipages.com/windows-10-enable-telnet

Then, create two files in notepad or whatever, and save them as whateveryouwant.vbs.  Here's the code I used to paste into the files.  This one is to pause all folding.

Code: [Select]

Set cloner = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

cloner.run"cmd", true

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"telnet 127.0.0.1 36330"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"pause"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 500

cloner.SendKeys"quit"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 500

cloner.SendKeys"exit"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")
And here's the code for unpausing.

Code: [Select]

Set cloner = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

cloner.run"cmd", true

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"telnet 127.0.0.1 36330"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"unpause"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"quit"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 300

cloner.SendKeys"exit"

cloner.SendKeys("{Enter}")

Like I mentioned before, in your cause you'd just change one line in each script to something like this:

Code: [Select]

cloner.SendKeys"pause 1"
That's an educated guess as to the ID of your main GPU. 

Running the file should work just fine.  Then I used autohotkey to make some hotkeys that run those scripts.  If you want I can help you with that too, but I already feel like I'm explaining addition to a mathematician, as I take it you know quite a bit more about computers and coding than I do.

EDIT: Previous version had wrong syntax for pausing individual slots.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I'm probably not going to set up hotkeys but I was curious what you get when you telnet into the client.

Since I use PuTTy all the time to connect to servers at work I thought I'd use that to telnet into the FAH client, but it kept disconnecting.  So turned on Windows telnet and was able to connect, so it wasn't a firewall or client problem.  Took a while to find the proper combination of settings in PuTTy to get that to stay connected.  I wanted to use PuTTy because you can set that up to do CR/LF and see what is going on.  The FAH client doesn't do carriage returns so it's a mess in the telnet window, but in PuTTy with CR/LF turned on you can get a nice list of all the commands available when you type help.

For some reason FAH picks the GPUs in reverse order, in windows my 2070 is GPU 0 and the 1070 is GPU 1, but in FAH the 1070 is slot 1 and the 2070 is slot 2

[Variety of Cells]

I'm probably not going to set up hotkeys but I was curious what you get when you telnet into the client.

Since I use PuTTy all the time to connect to servers at work I thought I'd use that to telnet into the FAH client, but it kept disconnecting.  So turned on Windows telnet and was able to connect, so it wasn't a firewall or client problem.  Took a while to find the proper combination of settings in PuTTy to get that to stay connected.  I wanted to use PuTTy because you can set that up to do CR/LF and see what is going on.  The FAH client doesn't do carriage returns so it's a mess in the telnet window, but in PuTTy with CR/LF turned on you can get a nice list of all the commands available when you type help.

For some reason FAH picks the GPUs in reverse order, in windows my 2070 is GPU 0 and the 1070 is GPU 1, but in FAH the 1070 is slot 1 and the 2070 is slot 2

Yeahhhh.  Trying to decipher the 'help' in cmd was a mess. 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Looks like the team has plataued around 2350 or so.

I'm taking my 2070 off of folding, getting too warm in the room.  Even with the power on the 2070 set to minimum and the 1070 set to 80% the combination of them is putting several hundred watts of heat into the room.  So now I'm down to just the 1070 doing folding, plus the 2 Linux servers at work but those have wimpy CPUs so don't contribute much.

[Variety of Cells]

Not a bad achievement.  But as you said, it's getting warmer, and I can't leave it folding all night.  And there are some days I don't turn it on.  I don't like to have it on if I'm not here. 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

It has gotten too warm to have the 1070 card in my PC, so I'm down to only running a few low output CPUs on the servers at work.  If the GPU folding didn't also heat up the CPU I would have kept going, but it does push a few cores quite hard.  They must be using AVX instructions as well, only reason I can think of that when GPU folding my CPU gets all cores running faster when only a few are doing work, normally I can run a few cores hard and the rest throttle down to minimum.