by tear » Mon May 21, 2012 3:22 am
I'm happy to announce that, thanks to extensive research and work of firedfly of [H], The Kraken now features novel approach to making FahCores engage DLB (Dynamic Load Balancing).
Instead of restarting the FahCore, it now creates synthetic load on every other CPU; said load "comes and goes" (with certain duty cycle) until DLB is engaged or until deadline is reached (5 minutes by default).
Such approach is much more effective at making FahCores enable DLB than autorestarting. 100% success rates have been observed.
The Kraken 0.7-pre11 is available (download).
It's a prerelease version that has been successfully tested on 4P AMD systems (12-core 6100 and 16-CU 6200 series) and 2P intel system (12-thread 5600 series) and is meant for brave souls seeking excitement and more reliable DLB engagement.
4. Run 'thekraken -w'; it should give output similar to the following:
$ thekraken -i
thekraken: The Kraken 0.7-pre11 (compiled Sun May 20 19:36:47 MDT 2012 by fah@tentacle)
thekraken: Processor affinity wrapper for Folding@Home
thekraken: The Kraken comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; licensed under GPLv2
thekraken: performing installation to .
thekraken: /home/fah/fah-6.34/FahCore_a3.exe: wrapper succesfully installed
thekraken: /home/fah/fah-6.34/FahCore_a5.exe: wrapper succesfully installed
thekraken: finished installation, 2 out of 2 files processed
$
Dynamic load balancing is set with the option -dlb,
which can give a significant performance improvement,
especially for inhomogeneous systems. The only disadvantage of,
dynamic load balancing is that runs are no longer binary reproducible,
but in most cases this is not important.
By default the dynamic load balancing is automatically turned on
when the measured performance loss due to load imbalance is 5% or more.