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900 PPD W/i7... What's going on here...

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low on the cpu process I think, gpu's are idle

-smp 8 -verbosity 9 -bigadv(if you want bigadv points, if you have 10 regular smp's under your passkey)

Are you running 6.34?
 
To see if we can "fix" this, we first need to know what happens if you turn the gpus off. You only need to do it for one full frame. If the SMP TPF goes from 20:00 minutes to something closer to 4:00, we know there is nothing wrong with the i7. Have you run cpu-z to ensure the cpu is really running at what is set in bios?

What is the affinity of the gpu clients? If they are each on a different logical core, then you're slowing down three threads and all the rest wait on them. Try removing the affinity locks from all four clients. Reconfigure the SMP client with the -smp 7 flag. Start all the clients and check the affinity and see what happens to the TPF. If unlocking the gpu clients dosn't cause them to run on all cores, enter the environment variable NV_FAH_CPU_AFFINITY with a value of 255. See how things work. If you want to further experiment, you can try locking the gpus to one logical core by changing the value of the environment variable to 128. If that doesn't quite fix things, reconfigure the SMP client with -smp 6. priority should remain idle for the SMP client and low for the gpu clients.
 
The CPU is running at 3.2Ghz, the reason I have so many graphics cards is because I can't get my processor clock high enough to take good advanage of the bonus so I just decided to go the multi-gpu route...
Also at 3.2GHZ on you OC...forget about bigadv you won't make the deadlines.(Thats if you had nothing else running even) I just think between the 3 GPu's and all your other tasks and useage, "It is what it is"


Oz we have very similar setups I show 79 tasks running. My smp client is at 94% with 2 Fermi GPU's. Your at 88% when you took your screen shot. Your not far off from getting a bonus. Just a little tweaking might do it.
 
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OK...

1. I turned the GPU's off for a full 2 hours and my PPD increased about 10% (but still ridiculously slow) I don't think GPU affinity is a problem here since the GPU's are not affecting things anymore than I would expect them to.

2. looked at the bios to see if C1E or EIST was enabled... they are set to disabled. Checked all the other settings in there, nothing appeared out of the ordinary...

3. Ran an Antivirus, came up with nothing.

4. I upgraded to the 6.34 client and tried to crunch a -BigAdv -smp 8 -verbosity 9. My PPD is even worse and the time between frames is averaging around 4-5 hours.

5. I checked windows power savings... it was set to "balanced" I set it to "max performance"... I have yet to see a difference...

6. verified the math co-processor wasn't disabled in device manager (I've pranked a few of my friends with this back in the day)...

Thanks for all your help and advice guys... Especially the Overclocking tips.. I will go back and re-visit my overclock after this issue gets resolved.

Is there a way for me to verify enhanced instruction sets such as SSE are working in windows?
 
Did you check your TPF. PPD is a nebulous measure from any monitoring program. They have to use the download date and time to calculate ppd with the bonus, so if you've poked along for most of a WU, the PPD isn't going to change much when the TPF decreases. What happened to your TPF?
 
My TBF did not change any noticeable amount...

Decided to try out some benchmarks...

Super PI 1M: 12.67s --
WPrime 32M: 9.237s

Looking at similarly clocked processors on HWBot rankings... These numbers look spot-on

It does not appear that my CPU has any major performance Issues...
 
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You noticed PPD change by 10%. For that to happen using HFM, time per frame would have to speed up a lot more than that.
When HFM calculates ppd, it projects the time to complete using TPF and adds that to time elapsed since download to determine the estimated total completion time. It then uses that total projected time to calculate ppd. So if you've done 90% of a WU at 21:00/frame, doing the last 10 frames at 4:00 isn't going to change the PPD calculation by much. I just want to be sure you don't get fooled by the PPD calc.
 
OK...
2. looked at the bios to see if C1E or EIST was enabled... they are set to disabled. Checked all the other settings in there, nothing appeared out of the ordinary...

I might be wrong here but I was under the impression that with EIST disabled, the CPU is set to the lowest possible speed it can run?!?!?

What does a program like CPU-Z display your actual CPU speed at while folding smp?
 
Good news!

So apparently I've been a bad kid and havn't run windows update in quite a long time...
40+ updates installed
Service Pack 1 Installed


Time between frames has dropped down to 50-60 minutes/frame and that's with me doing some light gaming...

Will monitor for a day or two and report back.
 
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Good news!

So apparently I've been a bad kid and havn't run windows update in quite a long time...
40+ updates installed
Service Pack 1 Installed


Time between frames has dropped down to 50-60 minutes/frame and that's with me doing some light gaming...

Will monitor for a day or two and report back.


You won't make the deadline for -bigadv like that.

you need at least a 3.6 clock on the i7 to meet the deadline i think(which you are at 4.5 so why are your frames 50-60 minutes? Weird)
 
You won't make the deadline for -bigadv like that.

you need at least a 3.6 clock on the i7 to meet the deadline i think(which you are at 4.5 so why are your frames 50-60 minutes? Weird)

I'm running -bigadv on a stock i7 870 (45min frames) and it meets the deadlines but obviously that doesn't leave a lot of room for downtime.
 
I am folding a 6900 Workunit.

according to http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html

The final deadline is 6 days... I am more than positive I can make this... Like I said, I don't care about the bonus points right now... I need to complete 10 workunits anyways... I'm just happy to get my PPD up.

My last couple frames have been 38 and 40 minutes...
 
What is wierd is when an i7 is running correctly, a -bigadv Wu take almost 10 times as long per frame as a non-bigadv Wu.. You're now running < 3 times as long as the normal WU posted in your log. What changed? I assume the 50 to 60 minutes/frame is with the gpus running?
 
Could this have anything to do with system clock?(not windows) I'm talking Bios clock setting.

Long shot but it's all that was popping in my head at this moment.


Please forgive me I just woke up from a 4 hour nap after a 19 hour XBOX Black Ops Zombie session(YES YOU HEARD CORRECTLY 19 HOURS STRAIGHT with only a 1/2 hour break for dinner)
 
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ok this is really bizzare... here is another copy of my log... The frame times appear to vary quite a bit... I will try my best to remember what I was doing or not doing during each frame...



Here's how I got this notated...
Code:
[00:41:29] Completed 8075 out of 250000 steps  (3%) [COLOR=Yellow]Playing Starcraft 2.[/COLOR]
[03:50:32] Completed 10000 out of 250000 steps  (4%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
This means that between 00:41:29 and 03:50:32 I was playing starcraft 2 Though the game only runs on one core so the other 7 should be available for folding :confused:



Code:
--- Opening Log file [March 10 00:40:56 UTC] 


# Windows SMP Console Edition #################################################
###############################################################################

                       Folding@Home Client Version 6.34

                          http://folding.stanford.edu

###############################################################################
###############################################################################

Launch directory: C:\Users\Jeremy\FAH
Executable: C:\Users\Jeremy\FAH\FAH6.34-win32-SMP.exe
Arguments: -smp -bigadv -verbosity 9 

[00:40:56] - Ask before connecting: No
[00:40:56] - User name: Ozzlo (Team 32)
[00:40:56] - User ID: 5E4C854D2E712B11
[00:40:56] - Machine ID: 9
[00:40:56] 
[00:40:56] Loaded queue successfully.
[00:40:56] 
[00:40:56] - Autosending finished units... [March 10 00:40:56 UTC]
[00:40:56] Trying to send all finished work units
[00:40:56] + Processing work unit
[00:40:56] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[00:40:56] Core required: FahCore_a5.exe
[00:40:56] - Autosend completed
[00:40:56] Core found.
[00:40:56] Working on queue slot 01 [March 10 00:40:56 UTC]
[00:40:56] + Working ...
[00:40:56] - Calling '.\FahCore_a5.exe -dir work/ -nice 19 -suffix 01 -np 8 -checkpoint 15 -verbose -lifeline 1576 -version 634'

[00:40:56] 
[00:40:56] *------------------------------*
[00:40:56] Folding@Home Gromacs SMP Core
[00:40:56] Version 2.27 (Mar 12, 2010)
[00:40:56] 
[00:40:56] Preparing to commence simulation
[00:40:56] - Ensuring status. Please wait.
[00:41:06] - Looking at optimizations...
[00:41:06] - Working with standard loops on this execution.
[00:41:06] - Previous termination of core was improper.
[00:41:06] - Going to use standard loops.
[00:41:06] - Files status OK
[00:41:11] - Expanded 24859195 -> 30796293 (decompressed 123.8 percent)
[00:41:11] Called DecompressByteArray: compressed_data_size=24859195 data_size=30796293, decompressed_data_size=30796293 diff=0
[00:41:11] - Digital signature verified
[00:41:11] 
[00:41:11] Project: 6900 (Run 1, Clone 16, Gen 32)
[00:41:11] 
[00:41:11] Entering M.D.
[00:41:17] Using Gromacs checkpoints
[00:41:19] Mapping NT from 8 to 8 
[00:41:26] Resuming from checkpoint
[00:41:27] Verified work/wudata_01.log
[00:41:27] Verified work/wudata_01.trr
[00:41:27] Verified work/wudata_01.xtc
[00:41:27] Verified work/wudata_01.edr
[00:41:29] Completed 8075 out of 250000 steps  (3%) [COLOR=Yellow]Playing Starcraft 2.[/COLOR]
[03:50:32] Completed 10000 out of 250000 steps  (4%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[04:28:59] Completed 12500 out of 250000 steps  (5%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[05:07:16] Completed 15000 out of 250000 steps  (6%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[05:45:59] Completed 17500 out of 250000 steps  (7%) [COLOR=Yellow]Away From Computer[/COLOR]
[06:40:56] - Autosending finished units... [March 10 06:40:56 UTC]
[06:40:56] Trying to send all finished work units
[06:40:56] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[06:40:56] - Autosend completed
[07:22:02] Completed 20000 out of 250000 steps  (8%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[08:00:46] Completed 22500 out of 250000 steps  (9%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[08:40:39] Completed 25000 out of 250000 steps  (10%) [COLOR=Yellow]Surfin & Typin[/COLOR]
[09:26:23] Completed 27500 out of 250000 steps  (11%) [COLOR=Yellow]Away from Computer[/COLOR]
[12:40:56] - Autosending finished units... [March 10 12:40:56 UTC]
[12:40:56] Trying to send all finished work units
[12:40:56] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[12:40:56] - Autosend completed
[14:52:24] Completed 30000 out of 250000 steps  (12%)[COLOR=Yellow]Away From Computer[/COLOR]
[18:40:56] - Autosending finished units... [March 10 18:40:56 UTC]
[18:40:56] Trying to send all finished work units
[18:40:56] + No unsent completed units remaining.
[18:40:56] - Autosend completed
[19:49:38] Completed 32500 out of 250000 steps  (13%) [COLOR=Yellow]Away From Computer[/COLOR]
The frame times appear to shoot up when I'm not using my computer... I don't really get this... here are my windows power settings...

Power profile: High performance
ScreenSaver: None
Turn off Display: 15 min (I just changed this to never to see if this is the culprit)
Put computer to sleep: Never
Turn off harddisk after: 20 min (I just changed this to never to see if this is the culprit)
Desktop background settings: Slideshow Setting: Available (Why is this even in power settings? I set to paused just in case)
Wireess adapter settings: Power saving Mode: Maximum Performance
Sleep after: Never
Allow Hybrid Sleep: On
Hibernate after: Never
Allow Wake Timers: Enabled
USB selective suspend: Enabled
PCI EXPRESS: Link State Power Management: Off
Processor Power Management: System Cooling Policy: Active







 
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It looks like all progress stops when you quit using the computer. Some power saving is going on somewhere, if not windows, then bios, or you installed the motherboard power saving software.
 
Turn off harddisk after: 20 min (I just changed this to never to see if this is the culprit)
This should have been the problem.

You can set your monitor back to its sleep mode, it won't effect your folding. Save your screen.
 
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