Any development news?
//Aboy68
Nothing too exciting right now, we've been working on (and finished, minus the few things we'll have to do just before it goes live) everything for backend ocore (F@H's next-generation folding software) support on our end, and we're also moving along with the stuff for the conference, we'll be posting conference materials in the next week or two.
Did find some info about the new "Ocore" -
"Another advantage of the streaming core is that deadlines are easier to handle and it's more efficient. Under traditional cores if I drop out of F@h then it takes weeks for my workunit to timeout and get reassigned. A stream core gains efficiency by synchronizing much more frequently. Now the results are returned to Stanford at every frame. This means that they get the results in a more continuous fashion. Also, every hour or so the Stanford servers are also sent "checkpoints", which are larger and more precise than frames but allow a stream to be resumed from that point. So now, if I go offline someone else can quickly pick up my stream where I left off, and there's less than an hour of downtime. Then I come back to the project I'd get a different stream to push forward."
"This is a totally different core and uses a totally different backend. It is designed for 24x7x356 folding."
"We actually want to encourage people to hold onto a single "WU" for as long as possible. We can probably make a contest of sorts down the road to see who can fold for the longest."
"We're working on unity, so that a single project can be completed by CPU cores, OpenCL cores, and possibly CUDA cores down the road. "
"Yes OCore supports AVX"
"In the past a project was hosted by one work server, if the server was down, project was down. With ocores, a single target can be processed by multiple servers, allowing for more redundancy and better load balancing."
This looks great!
Question: When are we shedualed to switch to the new core? Do we have a date?
Question: Are windows folding supported?
Question: Is it ok to stay in the "old" way of folding in parallel with the new?
Question: Vorksholk - how is your new folding working out, did see you where running the new Ocore?!
Now we can have multiple payout per day! True?
Calling ChasingTheDream - Now your "bad" hardware might work again!!!
//Aboy68
Yup, ocore's pretty awesome!
We don't have a date yet for when ocore transitions will occur for Curecoin payouts. As it stands, ocore is doing 'production' work, but is not currently scrabbling to the standard Stanford point system, and the way in which points will be assigned for ocore is still up in the air. As it stands, we could easily benchmark existing hardware to provide similar performance, but that's not the most elegant solution, for sure. It is really up to Stanford as to when they wish the transition to occur.
Windows ocores will be available
Yeah, as long as Stanford continues to support the old cores, Curecoin will still do payouts for them! However, ocores will likely have a slight point advantage, so it'd likely be in a person's best interest to fold ocore-style. Additionally, ocore may be pushed as an updated core to client v7, in which case those systems would switch over automatically.
Folding on ocore is working great, EC2 servers @ around 7 or 8 cents per hour can compute along the same performance as a Nvidia 760, which is pretty awesome.
At least things will be much more stable going forward!