folding at home is nothing new it's a distributed computing project whose goal
is to use the idle computational power of thousands of individual contributors
around the world to run simulations of protein dynamics in layman's terms
whenever you're not using them your CPU or your graphics card can crunch numbers
to help improve our understanding of biology or even develop treatments for
diseases like cancer alzheimer's cystic fibrosis and yes
covid19 which brings us perfectly to the purpose of today's video we actually did
a build guide four years ago showing how to configure a pc for contributing to
projects like this but guys the situation's a little more dire at the
moment and we need more than just the enthusiasts who are building computers
specifically for folding to pitch in so guys
dig through your closets if you can find some compute it's time to put it to work
uh here over here in the corner here my office we found a little machine that
wasn't really doing anything else and we're gonna use this to walk you guys
through a quick guide for how you can be up and running folding at home in what
10 minutes 15 minutes i think this is going to take us a little longer but you
could probably do it in 10 minutes yeah that's fair the video today is brought
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okay look i i get it especially if you guys are new
to the channel i understand that you're wondering right now why exactly do you
guys have a machine of this caliber quite literally lying around collecting
dust in a warehouse it's got dual xeon platinum 8180 so those are 28 core
processors it has six NVIDIA titan v
graphics cards so they were built based on the very short-lived volta
architecture so even though they're not you know rtx or whatever in terms of
compute they're actually very similar to an rtx 2080 ti and yes that is a solid
mass of six of them right there it used to have uh i don't know 204 384 gigs of
RAM right now it's got quite a bit less than that but
we scavenged the RAM out of it because it was just sitting there and that was
easy to get at anyway the original purpose of this machine was to slice up
the hardware resources using virtualization to have six eight core
workstations each with its own graphics card and then have six people editing 8k
video off of one box at the same time and then we were supposed to do a video
showcasing the sheer might of it running just one operating system so we left it
assembled but then we just never did it
well today's that day we do have a couple of issues with it one of the gpus
wasn't showing up so i want to do a quick and
kind of reinstall them also our power supply is hanging out the back and one
of the things that we needed for the original build this is a really really
funky piece of computer equipment it's a it's a pci express 16x2 external adapter
and then it goes out to a daughter board that we used to have usb cards that
could be assigned to each one of our virtual machines we don't need that
anymore super cool not necessary today thank you Jake i'm going to pop these
gpus out and then plonk them back in yeah you gotta just just send her
oh man something about this doesn't seem right
okay seems to be in there is it possible that this will be the most powerful
machine on the folding at-home network no because the liquid guys spun up uh
virtualizing he said like 16 quadrant thousands okay just to flex
mark you better be folding for LTT i mean he must be right we have a quarter
as many members but almost the same output so oh you mean a pcmr yeah okay
guys by the way pcmr has four times the folders that LTT does there's no excuse
for it so let's let's let's get on that just google LTT folding team number and
let's get let's get those numbers juiced up what we just did was add a jumper so
that both power supplies will receive a signal from the motherboard at exactly
the same time and turn on simultaneously the reason we need two power supplies is
twofold number one is that these are evga's 1600 watt 80 plus titanium units
and they simply don't make anything bigger than that the problem is that our
gpus alone are rated at 1500 watts leaving us 100 watts for drives pumps
cpus all that other good stuff so we were going to need two power supplies
anyway two is that here in north america our breakers don't
go any higher than 1600 watts plus inefficiency so we would need to plug
into two separate circuits if we wanted all gpus and cpus firing at once which
we do wow so just firing up doing nothing else
it's drawing 200 and wow almost 300 watts from just one of the power
supplies okay vga connection hey that's not what i was
expecting did we oh god did you disconnect the oh
no you've got to be kidding me did our boot drive come out if we do we
trip a breaker we really do have a way of making things
look a lot harder than they are we spent the last day troubleshooting it we
actually eventually solved it with a motherboard swap which necessitated a
CPU block swap which meant we had to redo all the tubing refill it anyway the
point is it's working and this is the original board we'd actually plan to use
for this project but there was an issue with the pci express lanes but check
this out one two three four five six yeah so now all we need to do is show
you guys how to install folding at home okay so to get folding at home running
it's really simple actually we'll have a link down in the description where you can actually just download the client
straight off their website you don't have to unzip it or anything just download it
double click to start so by default it's actually going to
open up a web interface now this makes it really easy to set up your identity
so we're going to start by doing that and then later on i'm going to open up the actual program that gives you a lot
more control over what's happening so you'll want to pick set up an identity
because now we're going to be folding on the LTT team not for team default both
of which is totally fine but we want you guys on our team so we can bump up those
stats and beat pcmr so click on set up an identity and click
start folding inside the identity tab we're going to see three things username
team number and pass key now all of these things are important we're going
to set our name to LMG underscore jakku
and then team number which you can actually get from the link in the description on our forum post here it's
two two three five one eight this will set you up on the LTT team and then you
wanna get a pass key now this is gonna require you to enter your email and
you'll actually get it emailed to you they use it as sort of an authentication
so other people can't steal credit for your points
and it gives you a bonus you'll really want to use it if you want to amp up
those stats so once you've got your username team number and passkey entered
just hit save and it'll start folding right away now because we want a little
bit more control over say what CPU cores are running or when it runs we're
actually going to open up the advanced control so down in the task bar you can
right click on the folding app go to advanced control and it'll open up the
actual Windows app where we can pick and choose individual gpus or what have you
now i'm going to say that maybe i don't want my CPU to fold so we're going to
pause our CPU and all of our gpus will be left running which is perfect and
then i'm going to right click on the little icon down here and set it to on
idle now that means it's only going to go on my computer is not doing other
things i'm also going to turn the client up to full power now this means it's
going to use as much of your CPU and GPU as possible now we paused our CPU so
it's only going to be doing GPU but this means we're gonna get the most performance when we're actually not even
using the computer because it's on idle only and that's basically all there is
to it we're now folding for the LTT team we've got our pass key set up which
means we're gonna get the most points possible and now that's all that's left is just to wait and see what kind of
stats we push out if you want to see your stats you might notice that the
official folding stats page i mean depending on when you watch this video might actually be down because of all
the additional load of all the new users so we're going to actually use something
called extreme overclocking their forum has a really great custom script setup
so you can actually see all your stats even when the official site is down
it will take several hours to update you can see right now our hourly production
at least on my user is still zero but if you check back in a day or maybe 12
hours or something you should see your points start to go up you were telling
me about this so even though we have all these compute resources the folding
project is struggling to issue work units so what we're only
using one sixth of our capacity one right now
so basically what happened is they went from 30 000 users kind of concurrently
over the last couple years to 400 000 in the order of about two weeks so those
servers are getting hit pretty hard and the big problem isn't so much issuing
the work units we can actually see on this one it's stuck on send results
waiting on send results so they actually don't have the bandwidth to take all the
computed models and store them on their own servers right now however
here's something cool that we want to share with you guys we are currently in
the process of working with the folding at home project to use some of our
bandwidth because we happen to have a 10 gigabit connection here at the office to
run a folding at-home work unit server
here on our premises so that's going to be our next video where
basically we'll be able to can we preferentially issue ourselves work
units i don't think so okay well anyway
let's have a look at what the impact is on your system
if you were able to run full tilt here we go this is octane bench our GPU temps
right now are in the low 30s so that's what we would expect for water cooled
graphics cards let's go ahead and click run so this one's only about 350 watts
we're at 463 watts wait that's it i'm
still at 350. so what's that 850 watts that's it on two 1600 watt power
supplies this is great we weren't actually using that much power so i'm installing blender in the background and
we still put up these insane numbers here's a gtx 980 for context that is
over 20 times faster while i was doing
stuff in the background this thing is nuts time to try something a little
heavier oh afterburner is reporting 90 usage so
what's our power consumption look like i've got 400 watts this time i can climb
under though wow it's already at 720 watts what are you at 400 okay so we're
up to 1100 watts now it still hasn't started yet oh wow yeah
that's heavy it's getting really warm in here we literally have a thousand watt
heater just so that's quite a lot more than octane
but my understanding is that folding at home should actually hit it even harder
than that yeah especially because we can use some of the CPU at the same time so
if you were wondering if there's going to be an impact on your
home heating or your power bill the answer is yes but by and large it's for
a good cause so the good news is if you already use electric heating this is
basically the same thing just turn some of it off and also have it not be summer
yeah also good news just because it uses up your CPU and GPU doesn't mean it's going
to interfere when you're trying to actually use your computer there's a setting in the client where you can tell
it look only fold when i'm idle so that it's not going to interfere with my
gaming or my work or whatever the case may be that is an issue that i had had
years back with the client and that i found kind of annoying but they've got that resolved so there's basically no
drawback so check out the link in the video description join the LTT folding
team it's gonna be great yeah we actually even do giveaways and stuff
once in a while should we do one yeah let's let's do one in the next little bit also in the video description link
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Linus we'll have that linked below thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed
seeing this hot machine in action maybe check out the epic saga that was getting
it working in the first place man early BIOS is suck compared to mature ones
right this was just plug and play and it boots up so fast i know right