Why Im Quitting Folding@Home

My Past

I got involved with Folding@Home (FAH) in October 2010 when I read it in Custom PC magazine. I saw that people were using it on their PCs when not being used to support medical research by Stanford University (among others). Whilst initially conceived as something your typical user would install as a screensaver it quickly became a benchmarking tool and just like most benchmarking tools, there becomes a race to see who is the best.

For me FAH served a multitude of purposes, firstly, it fed my inner geek. For me there was a personal reason to it too - FAH was attempting research into deadly diseases such as cancer - I've already lost two members of my family to it, a third is diagnosed with it too, so it's been a massive motivator for me.

Setting up Windows XP and running an installer is easy and you then start to reap the rewards of your efforts when you see your hard work . But then you realise that there are several steps you can do to get more points out of your PC. Using Linux is probably the biggest boost, followed by over-clocking. So I quickly started to learn about Ubuntu and networking the computers together more efficiently. During this process I would consult the forums of the Custom PC magazine for help and guidance.

The Bit-Tech and Custom PC folding team is a very friendly group, all competitiveness is very light-hearted and the community is very supportive. At my peak when I had my own farm of computers (a total of 13 I believe) I was putting out 140,000 points per month. 

To do that I had built my own farm of folding PCs and even ended up buying a monstrous 7' server cabinet! In the picture below you can see a vertical panorama of the server cabinet - it's a little warped, but from top to bottom you can see: computer monitor, 8-way KVM switch, 8-port Ethernet switch, PDU bar, a workstation PC with dual Xeon processors, the two grey PCs are core2quad based PCs, the black PC is also a core2quad based PC, a 2U Dual Processor AMD Opteron workstation (also serves as a game server dual to the RAID-ed 10,000 RPM drives), finally the PC on the floor with the screwdriver on is a 1U Core2Duo PC.

Vertical panorama

To help grasp the size of the cabinet better here it is again

The thing is - there were still 5 PCs outside the rack as well!

Then things changed ...

By the middle of 2012 my employer transferred me from the site in the south of England to the one in Scotland. This meant a massive lifestyle change and moving out of shared accommodation and taking my own first step onto the property ladder. Despite having massive support from my employer, that first step is still challenging - especially since I was doing alone and at just 24 I was the youngest of all my friends to do it.

Upon moving in and getting settled into a new lifestyle with both bigger and more bills meant that running a folding farm was now prohibitively expensive because the total power draw of the system was approaching 4 kW, this became a hobby I could no longer justify.

Then Stanford changed things ... again ...

Stanford are regularly adjusting the Work Units (WUs) based on the research that they need. The processing power required for WUs generally increases over time. My hardware is still based on Core2Duo and Core2Quad era hardware which makes it very slow relative to the powerful i7s we have now. Earlier in 2015 Stanford withdrew WUs for GTX 2-series cards (GTX260s was what all of the PCs had, so losing the ability to fold on them hurt badly).

You can see in the image above that the WUs have a deadline of about 5-6 days, but its going to take about 4 days for my PC to process the data. Given that the PC is only on for about 4-5 hours a day it makes achieving these deadlines impossible and there's no point trying because the data will be wasted. The WU would be better spent being processed by someone who can chew it through in time.

It's been a tough decision to make because I have enjoyed learning about Linux and the perpetual PC maintenance is great fun, but money is the overriding factor, the current hardware is expensive to run and it's struggling to meet deadlines even if I could afford to run them 24/7.

I bid my fellow and future Folders all the luck in their folding career :)

Arduino Ethernet Shield

Becoming more adventurous

Life has been busy, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing a lot of thinking. I've been following a gentleman called Jonathan Oxer for the past year or so because I came across his channel on You Tube all about Home Automation. I think he's absolutely brilliant and making his shows and he certainly inspired me to pick up Arduino.

That was in 2014, for Christmas I persuaded my partner to buy me a starter set (which is a very comprehensive set that I do recommend for anyone) and thus I started learning. I got about halfway through the "manual" before life became a bit hectic and never got a chance to do any more with it. 

The problem I had was that a lot of cool things that were being done using Arduino almost all involved networking to it in some form. The most commonly used way was an Ethernet Shield. So I just had to get one!

Official Arduino Ethernet Shield

Unboxing

Despite owning an Arduino for a year now, I still get shocked at how small it really is! I got home tonight to find the infamous RS bag on the dining room table so I knew what it was (to be truthful I knew what I was coming home to because I had been tracking the parcel all day!)

Arduino shield box next to a standard 3.5" hard drive

Inside the tiny package is the Ethernet shield, a small warranty booklet and some cool Arduino stickers. The shield itself comes with the pins secured in some foam. Below you can see the standard RJ45 Ethernet network port. It should be noted however that the chip set only supports 10/100 Ethernet.

Arduino shield, front

Arduino shield, side

Arduino shield, rear

The great feature about this shield is that it also has an SD card slot which means you can do data logging which you can see in the picture above, in the bottom left corner of the board, but also indicated below.

Micro SD Card Slot

Secondly, it also has an expansion feature that allows you to use a PoE chip. A PoE chip allows the extraction of power that has been put into the unused wires of Ethernet (either by a special switch or a PoE injector). This is useful for deploying your devices where they might not necessarily be in a place where you can get a plug to them.

Power over Ethernet Adaptor

What to do?

Well now I've got my Ethernet shield I intend to start using it by creating some data logging projects to see if I can have the Arduino capture data and then publish the data to somewhere like Google Docs. Although in the interim I'll just log to the SD Card and extract the data on an ad hoc basis for doing some analysis.

Making a penny with Google Rewards

Background

There is a new app from Google called Google Opinion Rewards, it's a really simple app where you get paid for answering questions. you get paid in the play store with credit.

The amount you receive varies wildly. on one survey I got 48p, on another I got just 6p and there's no real way of telling, although the more questions you answer the more you get. 

Getting going

Firstly, you'll need to install the Google Opinion Rewards app from the Play Store. There is a small calibration / test quiz for you to do, it doesn't give you any rewards but you do need to do it to get going. It can take a while before you get your first survey, it took about 3-4 days for mine to come through.

Answering your first survey

You'll get a notification whenever a survey is available. All the surveys I've had are valid for 24 hours,  so I don't think you need to live by your phone.

Once you've got a survey, just tap the icon to get started. some surveys are just one question, some are more.

For me, I only got the one question (out of the maximum of 9) so that mean't a small reward for me unfortunately.

It's that simple, for a few seconds work you can get up to 50p credit quite easily to spend on whatever you want in the play store. You can't use the credit to subsidise purchasing an expensive item, you have to be able to completely pay for the item using the credit but other than that there is no real restrictions.

Good luck!

Modifying my home network

In this blog entry, I'm talking about a minor change I made to my network to improve functionality because of the limitations caused by having the BT Home Hub 3 router as the core of my network.

What I used to have

For the last 14 months since I moved into my house I had the ultimate in basic networking. I have BT Infinity feeding my house so I have a lovely 40 Mb internet connection arriving at the door. From there the BT Infinity modem modulates/demodulates the internet traffic which feeds into a BT Home Hub 3 Router. The router is also a wireless access point. The router also provides one (yes ONE!) one gigabit port which I had hooked up to my PC in the living room for watching films. There are two other 100 megabit ethernet ports available too, but the current positioning of the router in the house made it impractical to use the wired connections, so everything was over Wi-Fi.

My original architecture

The problems

One of the many things I do on my network is use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) between computers - this applies in particular to my personal data cluster / folding farm which is in my garage. However, whenever I did this, the connection would fail. After much tracing and head scratching, it was the router.

I put it down to an internal firewall blockage that meant the router would not pass the RDP connection through it. But I couldn't see an easy fix because it's not like a port-forwarding issue where I know which PC/ IP address is the intended recipient. With this, I might use any PC to RDP to any other PC. So I didn't want to have a million RDP rules.

Solutioneering

That's actually a word? No squiggly red line under it! Wow! For a second I thought I made that up, d'oh there goes that ray of sunshine... Come on Chris, focus ...

Anyway, ultimately I want to ditch the BT Home Hub 3 for something that is more powerful, read DD-WRT (http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index) compatable. But thats off in the future yet. 

I wanted to have the home network on its own network and only go to the router for the internet access. So this is what I did : the internet still went from the modem to the router, but then the GigE port on the router went to a switch which is where I would then fan out GigE cables to all my devices. Ultimately I will set up a comms cabinet with a full patch panel, but this is step 0.5 implementation for now (and it cost me nothing because I already had the switch).

Modified network

My new switch

The switch that I'm using for the job is a simple NetGear one :

Conclusion

From now on, all network connections will be going into the switch. That's my basic improvement, there's much left to do such as setting up the comms cabinet and running Ethernet about the house, but its a start to an improved network, I've noticed far fewer packet collisions (when both my girlfriend and I would try to log into Lord of the Rings Online I would be unable to log in due to network problems - helped by using a different port).