[fall]

Is it possible to Fold and SETI at the same time? Say SETI on GPUs and Fold on CPU. or maybe even Fold on one GPU and SETI the other?



The reason i ask is because im building a new machine that will run a Form of Linux or Windows (havent decided yet) and i would like this machine to only be used for SETI, folding or both. This machine will be used if my GF wants to watch youtube or something on the internet but other than that it will be mainly for this.

Also what would be a good CPU GPU combo I currently have an i7 860 and if i get a Sandy Bridge CPU i will have that, a mobo, and 2 460s at my disposal. Will that be optimal enough or should i sell what i got and go bigger? <<Total Noob as you can see

[Sephis]

I can answer your first question with a definite yes. You can set up SETI to do only GPU work and run folding on the processor or vise-versa. I'm not sure about running SETI on one GPU while folding on another. I would imagine it is possible, but you would have to figure out how to assign the tasks to a specific card/processor/logical unit/whatever.

Any modern processor and two 460s are going to put up some very good numbers when crunching SETI. However, if you have the money, bigger is always better.

[fall]

Awesome!

yea i think ill retire the 460s to SETI and the 860 to Fold. And get a SB i7 or i5 and a 580 HC.

Would Hyper-Threading help with folding and or Seti?

[Sephis]

AFAIK hyper threading does help a bit with both programs. I would wait for a more definite answer on that one though. I don't currently own a HT-enable processor to test that on.

[QuietIce]

Originally Posted by fall

Awesome!

yea i think ill retire the 460s to SETI and the 860 to Fold. And get a SB i7 or i5 and a 580 HC.

Would Hyper-Threading help with folding and or Seti?

Can't tell you either way about folding but for SETI hyper-threading doesn't help.

Also, with GPUs like that be sure to not use one core of the CPU so that it can feed the GPUs. Again, not sure about folding but for SETI the increased output from the GPUs by giving them a core to keep them happy will more than make up for the processing the CPU core can do by itself.

[Sephis]

Thanks for clearing that up QuietIce. I honestly wasn't sure. I had seen where hyper-threading led to some significant gains in processor intensive benchmarks, and I kinda guessed that it would do the same for SETI.

[QuietIce]

Maybe I'm wrong. All it takes is one look at my title to know I don't have a CPU like that! LOL!

Seriously, though, hyper-threading isn't magic - there are still only four cores there. I have to assume SETI, especially with optimizers, is using every single bit of processing power available with no time in-between to run that extra code.

[Jmtyra]

For folding, you can designate what card or cards the client should use. As for the CPU cores, yes, folding likes HT as much as it likes cores. When GPU folding, at least on nvidia cards, you do NOT have to leave one core free; it only eats about 1-2% of the CPU cycles. ATI folding may be different, but currently it's very inefficient to fold on ATI.

Hope that helps!

[QuietIce]

Originally Posted by Jmtyra

For folding, you can designate what card or cards the client should use. As for the CPU cores, yes, folding likes HT as much as it likes cores. When GPU folding, at least on nvidia cards, you do NOT have to leave one core free; it only eats about 1-2% of the CPU cycles. ATI folding may be different, but currently it's very inefficient to fold on ATI.

Hope that helps!

So you're saying if you use HT your ppd will be twice as much???

[Jmtyra]

Originally Posted by QuietIce

So you're saying if you use HT your ppd will be twice as much???

LOL, no, HT in it's current iteration certainly doesn't double your PPD from the numbers that I've seen. That would be awesome, though!! However, F@H certainly likes HT as much as it likes cores; as in, it will take full advantage of either option that's available.

Some DC projects don't take advantage of HT; F@H does. I guess that's another way to say it. It's been sooooo long since I've done SETI that I don't recall if it likes HT or not.

Fold/Crunch/Etc on folks!