Alright Coronavirus, this has gone on long enough. It's time to kick your arse. Want to help? We've made a team on Folding@home for you to spare your unused CPU/GPU cycles for research.
Hold on, what is this Folding stuff? It's a distributed computing project that simulates protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It does this using your hardware and then sends all the data back to them—for science! It can help people working on diseases to better understand them. A good time to remind people on this, with everything going on right now and they have special simulations setup for Coronavirus.
How to get involved: Head to the official site to download it for Debian /Ubuntu/ Mint and Redhat / Centos / Fedora. If you're on Arch/Manjaro, you can see a guide on the Arch Wiki. If you're on NVIDIA, and it won't use your GPU, ensure you have OpenCL installed.
When you're setting it up and it asks you for a team ID, enter "245680" (stats page) which is the GamingOnLinux ID and we can work together to make a better world. Right now, my GPU is purring away working on Folding, come and join me.
You might see errors and delays, as they've been a little overwhelmed. Eventually though, it should assign your PC some work to do to help. They did a little FAQ thread recently on Twitter.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: scaineI had the same problem on default settings, so I set the GPU slot’s opencl-index to 0 manually instead of -1:Quoting: SalvatosQuoting: scaineJoined the team - great idea, Liam!There should be one, it’s called FAHControl but I don’t remember the steps involved in installing it. Should be explained somewhere on their website :)
I wish there was an actual client/shortcut as part of this build though. I had to visit the Arch WIKI to realise that you have to visit http://localhost:7396/ to see your progress and turn Folding on/off.
I downloaded the client only, which has no interface. I've now downloaded control and viewer, both of which are fat-clients. Strange approach, but it's all working now, although FAHcontrol doesn't recognise my GPU (Nvidia GTX 1080, running 440 driver). I'm looking into it now, appears I'm not the only one to have this issue.
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
It the configuration windows, there's an expert tab and there was a GPU 'False' variable. Switching it to off and a reboot later solved my issue.
It's a mystery. I can still contribute via CPU though, but it's a shame I'm not taking advantage of my beefy GPU.
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
Quoting: scaineNo joy getting my GPU recognised. I have the OpenCL libs installed, I've tried manually over-riding the OpenCL-Index in FAcontrol, and I've tried editing /etc/faconfig/config.xml to both include a GPU slot AND to make "gpu v" true instead of false. When I reboot, all the config.xml changes reverted.
It's a mystery. I can still contribute via CPU though, but it's a shame I'm not taking advantage of my beefy GPU.
I don't know if my experience can help, but in the configuration window of fahcontrol, there is an Expert tab. Check for a variable GPU 'False' or similar to that. When I changed it to 'True' and saved it, it downloaded a GPUs.txt file in /var/lib/fahclient. After that, the web control showed me the GPU beside the CPU with a "unsupported GPU" entry. At this point, a reboot made it get detected and I could start folding with it.
Hope it helps!
Last edited by Mohandevir on 21 March 2020 at 11:13 pm UTC
ElectricPrism Mar 21, 2020
Remember @everyone to check your $sensors and those of us on AMD to setup fan curvature to keep our equipment in good health. It gets a bit toasty.
Right now, I mainly run it between bedtime to around morning or noon.
AMD fan control
https://github.com/cyring/CoreFreq
Resources
apps.foldingathome.org
(Jesus the spam filter wont let me post 2 links)
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 21 March 2020 at 11:34 pm UTC
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
Quoting: scaineThanks. I've done that, I see the GPUs.txt in the /var/lib/faclient folder. I'm just going to finish the CPU job that's running before trying a reboot. Fingers crossed, but not very hopeful, as the web interface didn't update in the way you describe! I've also installed the ocl-opencl libraries for dev too, which required quite a few other libraries to download. We'll see.
I installed nvidia-cuda-toolkit too.
Thanks for the help everyone!
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