Even though I’ve run Folding@Home a few times before, I never did for very long. This time around I started last Monday in the Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists team (182116) with it only running on my file sever. On Tuesday I saw that my score had me at around 150th place. Tuesday night I setup my HTPC again and of course set up the F@H SMP client running at boot as a background damon. Wednesday I started the PS3 client and also installed the SMP client on my desktop. At the time I’m posting this I’m in 86th place and I’m still gaining on a few people each day.
Unfortunately the boot disk on my file server failed on Thursday (they have a tendance to do that after five years of near continuous use), so it’ll be another week before that system is running again (I’m upgrading to a SSD for my boot disk and root partition), but even with only three systems running F@H I’m racking up the points!
I’ve found that the SMP client, designed for multi-core processors, does great when you’re not using the system or using it for light tasks, but at least on Linux with only two cores it has a way of getting in the way of Flash. This isn’t surprising since neither the proprietary nor open source video drivers do a good job of supporting hardware flash accelaration, so it ends up being quite heavily CPU dependant. SMP is recomended for four or more processors and I’m sure it would run flawlessly in that situation.
From what I’ve heard about the performance of the SMP client, I’m sure that its getting more done, even if I have to stop it to watch a video, than it would using the standard client. I would also do a lot better in a quad core system.
As much as racking up the points is nice for my competitive side and as good of a cause this is, it is summer time so having that many systems running at max CPU utilization 24/7 fights with my air conditioning and certainly isn’t good for the power bill. Now, in the winter time this would be a good way to help keep my place warm and save on the gas bill. Once the file server is back up and running I may be turning off F@H on my desktop and PS3 until the weather cools down.