Folding@Peer1

April 4th, 2011

GPU Folding ServersA colleague of mine started running Folding@Home on a few PCs in his office last summer. When a load of powerful servers were freed up after a cancellation at the end of last year, I figured that since we now had a lot of spares in the datacentre doing nothing, why not see what kind of PPD we could squeeze out of them.

Originally we started out with a little over sixty dual-5420/5520 Xeon servers (8-12GB RAM each) running one instance of the regular CPU client for each CPU core. This gave a big boost to our rankings, going from… a very low number to the mid-2000s pretty quickly.

As the 5420/5520 servers were used up by new orders (and as we bought more powerful servers), I started running the SMP client (with the -bigadv option to increase the PPD) on a few Dell PowerEdge R810 servers (each with four quad-core HT-capable Xeons – a staggering 32 logical cores per server), which resulted in an enormous PPD increase.

We later had a bunch of GPU Cloud servers sent over from another datacentre, each with two 5620 Xeons, between 12 and 48GB RAM and two nVidia Fermi GPUs (pictured). With sixteen of these servers running two GPU Folding clients and the CPU SMP client (again with the -bigadv option), we shot up the team rankings, going from the low 1000s in early January to our current position of 232nd worldwide! And we’re still climbing… :D (Update: 168th as of 7 Dec 2011)

Some stats, graphs and point/ranking predictions can be seen on the official Folding@Home stats page, the Extreme Overclocking stats tool or the Kakao Stats tool.

The power usage of these servers is also pretty phenomenal; each GPU servers uses a little over 2amps (at ~240VAC) when running at 100% CPU/GPU load, which equates to just under 40 amps for all sixteen. Each R810 uses about 4amps at full load (2amps per PSU) while the dual-5420/5520 servers only use approximately 1amp each.

And of course, with big power usage comes big heat output: each GPU server throws out an epic amount of hot air at over 50°C (122°F). You could heat a pretty big room with a single one of these GPU servers… as long as the occupants didn’t mind the horrendous noise the fans make at full speed.

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Automated Telnet Login with PuTTY and VBScript

April 3rd, 2011

I was getting tired of typing my username and password tens of times a day to login to various network devices, so after a bit of Googling, I found this post, which shows how to automate the login for a Cisco router.

After adapting the code a bit, I had a script I could integrate into my existing Launchy setup to let me specify the switch/router IP address on the command line:

Dim sHostname
sHostname = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)
set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "C:\Windows\ssh.exe -telnet " & sHostname
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.AppActivate sHostname & " - PuTTY"
WshShell.SendKeys "username{ENTER}"
WScript.Sleep 250
WshShell.SendKeys "password{ENTER}"
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys "en{ENTER}"
WScript.Sleep 250
WshShell.SendKeys "enablepassword{ENTER}"
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys "conf t{ENTER}"

The commands in the code above work with the Foundry, Brocade and Cisco switches/routers where I work, so may require some modification to make it work with other devices.

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iTunes Shift+Click Update/Restore Not Working

September 7th, 2010

After trying on multiple computers, with various versions of iTunes (all on Windows 7 though), I started to think that Apple had removed the Shift+Click Update/Restore functionality from iTunes.

However, running iTunes as an Administrator “fixes” the Shift+Click function, allowing you to update or restore a new/custom firmware to your iOS device.

You need to find the actual iTunes.exe (in C:\Program Files\iTunes\ or C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\ for 64-bit Windows), as all the normal shortcuts (Start menu, desktop, taskbar, etc) are shell links rather than normal shortcuts and don’t allow you to start as an administrator.

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ActionFTP 1.1.0.1

August 29th, 2010

I’ve uploaded a new version of of ActionFTP, my add-in for WindowClippings.

This is mainly a bug-fix release, though I did include two new features:

  • Added the imgftw.net image upload service
  • The bit.ly URL shortening service can now be used, though it requires a (free) API key from their website

See the ActionFTP page for the download link and the full list of changes and fixes.

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Exchange 2010 Installation – Management Shell Error

August 8th, 2010

I was installing Exchange 2010 on a new Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine, but could not get past the installer’s system checks, receiving the follow error message:

[server.mydomain.local] Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The client cannot connect to the destination specified in the request. Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting requests. Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and configure the WinRM service: “winrm quickconfig”. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
+ CategoryInfo : OpenError: (System.Manageme….RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [], PSRemotingTransportException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PSSessionOpenFailed

The error message itself has almost nothing to do with the actual cause of the problem. After a lot of Googling I found a post on the TechNet forums from someone who had the same error message, albeit caused by a different problem.

Eventually I figured out that the Server Manager feature installer wizard hadn’t installed the full selection of .NET 3.5.1 Features. After installing the entire sub-tree, the Exchange 2010 installation proceeded without any further problems.

Microsoft have now been kind enough to add automatic feature installation to the installer for Exchange Server 2010 SP1, which should help alleviate this kind of problem in future :)

Server Manager -> Features -> “.NET 3.5.1 Features”

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