How many clients? Frame times?

[Flanagun]

How many clients are you running on a single machine??
i've got 3 running 24/7 on my athlon at 1.3 getting frame time bout 10 mins on a large protien and 6 on the smaller ones

[sifu quoc]

sounds about right, my tbird 1gig@1.47 gets about 5 mins a frame running 2 clients....

[Superman53142]

I get 6 min/frame for two clients with my Tbird 1000.

[SickBoy]

Here's the scoop (I dug out the old calculator to figure this out):

To figure out how many clients a computer can safely run, set as many as you think up and record some folding times with one of the longer proteins (BBAlphaUA or such).

For a protein to finish in exactly 3 days (the limit) it needs 43.2 minutes per frame.

Figure in a eight hour cushion for transfers and down time and 38.4 minutes per frame is what you need.

So basically, on a 1 GHz TBird, if you subscribe to the theory that if a single client does a protein in X minutes and 2 clients on that machine would finish proteins in 2X minutes, you can probably run about 10 clients on a 1.4 GHz TBird and still be way, way on the good side as far as time limits go.

Now, for my personal computer that I use - I won't run more than one client. It just makes things easier, and I'm there to watch it all the time anyway, and I'll still be in the time limit even if I have a task to do and am hogging CPU cycles for myself (hehe, never thought I'd describe using my computer as "hogging CPU cycles for myself :) ).

For computers that sit unattended for a long time (and all they're doing is folding), depending on processor speed, I'll run 4 or 5 clients to ensure it's always working at 100% capacity in case there are down times. It's a good idea to use the Win2K task manager to make sure these multiple clients are sharing CPU time evenly, though.

There's the skinny. For most of us with 1 GHz+ TBirds it's ok to run as many as 10 clients. For those P1's and similar power boxes, stick to 1 client or 2 at most. Don't want to lose any WU's.

SickBoy