Every article tag can be clicked to get a list of all articles in that category. Every article tag also has an RSS feed! You can customize an RSS feed too!
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home

By -
Last updated: 22 Mar 2020 at 9:24 am UTC

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.


Image Credit

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.
Tags: Misc
34 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
101 comments Subscribe
Page: «5/6»
  Go to:

pete910 3 May 2020
  • Supporter Plus
So you guys still folding? I still do, but while the electric bill didn't deterred me, the heat might.
I fold with my RX 590 (which outputs very little heat and noise) but also with an old mining rig that I used 10 years ago, and that one is extremely noisy, hot, and consumes a lot of power.

Also, I had to install the proprietary driver for my RX 590 and I really don't like that one. For Vulkan gaming, is somewhat serviceable, but with OpenGL and overall, I have all kind of issues. Can't wait to get back to Mesa to be honest. The only thing that keeps me in the game (actual gaming and folding) is Stadia. I haven't basically touched Steam since.
But like I said, here is getting pretty hot, and while I'll feel bad about it, I'm afraid that sooner or later I will need to pull the plug.

You dont need the prop stack for it only AMD opencl bit, just remove the mesa opencl bit.

I am still doing it when comp is on still but get very little work/tasks unfortunately.
dubigrasu 3 May 2020
So you guys still folding? I still do, but while the electric bill didn't deterred me, the heat might.
I fold with my RX 590 (which outputs very little heat and noise) but also with an old mining rig that I used 10 years ago, and that one is extremely noisy, hot, and consumes a lot of power.

Also, I had to install the proprietary driver for my RX 590 and I really don't like that one. For Vulkan gaming, is somewhat serviceable, but with OpenGL and overall, I have all kind of issues. Can't wait to get back to Mesa to be honest. The only thing that keeps me in the game (actual gaming and folding) is Stadia. I haven't basically touched Steam since.
But like I said, here is getting pretty hot, and while I'll feel bad about it, I'm afraid that sooner or later I will need to pull the plug.

You dont need the prop stack for it only AMD opencl bit, just remove the mesa opencl bit.

I am still doing it when comp is on still but get very little work/tasks unfortunately.
Tried it, didn't worked though. Well, it did worked for other apps, but for folding it kept sending corrupted work (or something along these lines). Tried also other CL implementations, with similar results, basically all was fine until doing or sending work with the fahclient.
pete910 3 May 2020
  • Supporter Plus
Makes no sense, only time i've had corrupt work is if the GPU had been clocked, The prop OpenCL driver is the same even if you're using it with the open or stack.
dubigrasu 3 May 2020
Makes no sense, only time i've had corrupt work is if the GPU had been clocked, The prop OpenCL driver is the same even if you're using it with the open or stack.
Like I said, "along these lines", I don't remember the exact wording, could've been "faulty work" or "bad work" or similar. I went through various configurations and at best the GPU would start doing work for few seconds and abruptly stop.
Mohandevir 4 May 2020
Still do on a dedicated machine. i7-3770 with 2 GPU... GTX 650 and GTX 960.
scaine 4 May 2020
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
I have to say, Dubigrasu, you've really knocked this out of the park:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

You're the fourth top contributor overall and I see that GOL has moved up to rank "558 of 252994". Insane. Especially when you view the top contributors and many have literally only contributed to GOL!!

Incredible and nothing to feel guilty about if you need to reign it in a little. I went for two or three weeks without any GPU jobs for the same reason, but without GPU, you're only really scoring about 10K a night, whereas you can easily top 200K a night if you use your GPU (I'm on a GTX 1080). But wow, does the PC get hot!
Mohandevir 4 May 2020
I have to say, Dubigrasu, you've really knocked this out of the park:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

You're the fourth top contributor overall and I see that GOL has moved up to rank "558 of 252994". Insane. Especially when you view the top contributors and many have literally only contributed to GOL!!

Incredible and nothing to feel guilty about if you need to reign it in a little. I went for two or three weeks without any GPU jobs for the same reason, but without GPU, you're only really scoring about 10K a night, whereas you can easily top 200K a night if you use your GPU (I'm on a GTX 1080). But wow, does the PC get hot!

Wow! Impressive! My setup is running at about 90k per day, (CPU + 2 GPU, full load)... May we deduce that AMD is better than Nvidia for this kind of stuff too (like bitcoin mining)?
dubigrasu 5 May 2020
I have to say, Dubigrasu, you've really knocked this out of the park:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

You're the fourth top contributor overall and I see that GOL has moved up to rank "558 of 252994". Insane. Especially when you view the top contributors and many have literally only contributed to GOL!!

Incredible and nothing to feel guilty about if you need to reign it in a little. I went for two or three weeks without any GPU jobs for the same reason, but without GPU, you're only really scoring about 10K a night, whereas you can easily top 200K a night if you use your GPU (I'm on a GTX 1080). But wow, does the PC get hot!

Wow! Impressive! My setup is running at about 90k per day, (CPU + 2 GPU, full load)... May we deduce that AMD is better than Nvidia for this kind of stuff too (like bitcoin mining)?
Mining with GPUs had two peak periods (AFAIK), one about ten years ago, and another more recent craze (the one that caused a GPU shortage/price increase). No idea what people use these days for mining, but during the first peak everybody used AMD. There was practically no Nvidia rig whatsoever. And as a side note, AMD+Linux was the preferred method, especially for bigger rigs/farms. Is likely that GPU mining introduced many people to Linux back then.

As for folding, today, if you look at the stats you'll see Nvidia as the preferred hardware, whatever the reason might be.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
Eike 5 May 2020
  • Supporter Plus
I have to say, Dubigrasu, you've really knocked this out of the park:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

You're the fourth top contributor overall and I see that GOL has moved up to rank "558 of 252994". Insane. Especially when you view the top contributors and many have literally only contributed to GOL!!

Incredible and nothing to feel guilty about if you need to reign it in a little. I went for two or three weeks without any GPU jobs for the same reason, but without GPU, you're only really scoring about 10K a night, whereas you can easily top 200K a night if you use your GPU (I'm on a GTX 1080). But wow, does the PC get hot!

Wow! Impressive! My setup is running at about 90k per day, (CPU + 2 GPU, full load)... May we deduce that AMD is better than Nvidia for this kind of stuff too (like bitcoin mining)?
Mining with GPUs had two peak periods (AFAIK), one about ten years ago, and another more recent craze (the one that caused a GPU shortage/price increase). No idea what people use these days for mining, but during the first peak everybody used AMD. There was practically no Nvidia rig whatsoever. And as a side note, AMD+Linux was the preferred method, especially for bigger rigs/farms. Is likely that GPU mining introduced many people to Linux back then.

As for folding, today, if you look at the stats you'll see Nvidia as the preferred hardware, whatever the reason might be.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/os

Folding is something different, I guess. People are building machines for mining, but I guess they are mostly using existing rigs for folding. And most fast GPUs sold are from Nivida...

How comes you can contribute that big? You're admin somewhere? :)
pete910 5 May 2020
  • Supporter Plus
Don't take a massive setup to get to them numbers depending how long he's been doing it.

Am only doing GPU whilst computer is on a few hours in a day and a few in evening and am 5th.

I would leave it on but just don't get the tasks to do.
dubigrasu 5 May 2020
I have to say, Dubigrasu, you've really knocked this out of the park:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

You're the fourth top contributor overall and I see that GOL has moved up to rank "558 of 252994". Insane. Especially when you view the top contributors and many have literally only contributed to GOL!!

Incredible and nothing to feel guilty about if you need to reign it in a little. I went for two or three weeks without any GPU jobs for the same reason, but without GPU, you're only really scoring about 10K a night, whereas you can easily top 200K a night if you use your GPU (I'm on a GTX 1080). But wow, does the PC get hot!

Wow! Impressive! My setup is running at about 90k per day, (CPU + 2 GPU, full load)... May we deduce that AMD is better than Nvidia for this kind of stuff too (like bitcoin mining)?
Mining with GPUs had two peak periods (AFAIK), one about ten years ago, and another more recent craze (the one that caused a GPU shortage/price increase). No idea what people use these days for mining, but during the first peak everybody used AMD. There was practically no Nvidia rig whatsoever. And as a side note, AMD+Linux was the preferred method, especially for bigger rigs/farms. Is likely that GPU mining introduced many people to Linux back then.
As for folding, today, if you look at the stats you'll see Nvidia as the preferred hardware, whatever the reason might be.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/os

Folding is something different, I guess. People are building machines for mining, but I guess they are mostly using existing rigs for folding. And most fast GPUs sold are from Nivida...

How comes you can contribute that big? You're admin somewhere? :)

No, I only use three cards, one is my RX 590 and two HD 7970 on another setup.
The setup in question is one of my old mining rigs, which had at the time 6 cards on it. However I cannibalized it since, and it was complicated to fully restore.

You see, you can't easily put more than 3 cards on one board. Well, technically you can but you're faced with two problems, heat and power consumption. If you stick too many cards, the cooling is a big problem (cards are too closed together and the air flow is impeded) and the power flowing through the circuit traces on the motherboard can literally caused a fire. Yeah, that happened enough times, and this is not caused by the GPU power consumption, but by the fans :) Yeah, 6 fans running at full speed are drawing enough power to do that, because they don't get their power from those separated big power connectors, but from the motherboard itself.
So we used to mount the cards away from the board with PCI extenders and those extenders had separated feeds for the fans. We also used sometimes a second power source for the same motherboard. And even with all that, some connectors could get a little hot and make you nervous. Worth noting that this was mining, 6 GPU full load + 6 fans full throttle 24/7. Gaming no matter how intensive doesn't come even remotely close to that.
I still have all the parts somewhere in some boxes, but I'm not going through all that again. So I "revived" only two cards, much safer.

But again, that was back then (and relevant particularly to mining) and stuff might be changed since, and this was only part on topic...too much coffee I guess.


Last edited by dubigrasu on 5 May 2020 at 1:45 pm UTC
drlamb 23 May 2020
I didn't realize adding a passkey would almost 10X the points received...totally haven't been folding for over a month without a passkey. Fixed.

It's been fun watching the GoL team climb. Looking forward to the boost I can give it now with a passkey.
Mohandevir 2 Jul 2020
Le paquet python-gtk2 n'est pas installé.
Le paquet python-gnome2 n'est pas installé.

En français, s'il vous plaît!

Personnellement, j'ai downloadé et installé les .deb de ce lien. Ça a fonctionné sur mon Ubuntu 20.04:
https://github.com/fcole90/fah-control/releases/tag/7.5.1-1_focal_1

J'espère que ça peut t'aider...


Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 Jul 2020 at 3:16 pm UTC
Mohandevir 2 Jul 2020
Aaand ! problem solved ! I just had to install the GTK librairies and i have a nice FAH control ! Thank you very much et mille mercis !

What a community here !

Glad to be of help.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 Jul 2020 at 4:11 pm UTC
Salvatos 2 Jul 2020
I’ve stopped folding due to the hot weather and lack of A/C, but I should rejoin in the fall :)
scaine 24 Aug 2020
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
I just noticed the team had reached the one billion points mark.

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

Not only are you now 7th, but the top contributor accounts for over a quarter of that billion! Some incredible effort here. I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card. Time to start again, I reckon!
Appelsin 2 Sep 2020
I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card.

Do you know if we still need to use the proprietary AMD driver in order to fold using the GPU?
pete910 2 Sep 2020
  • Supporter Plus
I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card.

Do you know if we still need to use the proprietary AMD driver in order to fold using the GPU?

Yes and no

You will need to use AMD's Opencl from the prop driver .

Un-install mesa opencl.
Appelsin 3 Sep 2020
I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card.

Do you know if we still need to use the proprietary AMD driver in order to fold using the GPU?

Yes and no

You will need to use AMD's Opencl from the prop driver .

Un-install mesa opencl.

Any noob-proof guides on how to do this? 😬 It sounds very much like one of those things that I'll try on my own, only to find myself with two hours later reinstalling my system 😅

Do you know what this entails in terms of performance and stability outside of folding? E.g. will the fact that I'm using Mesa via Kisak-PPA bork the system? I really wish F@H and AMD would get this working OOTB with the default/OSS driver 😇
pete910 3 Sep 2020
  • Supporter Plus
I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card.

Do you know if we still need to use the proprietary AMD driver in order to fold using the GPU?

Yes and no

You will need to use AMD's Opencl from the prop driver .

Un-install mesa opencl.

Any noob-proof guides on how to do this? 😬 It sounds very much like one of those things that I'll try on my own, only to find myself with two hours later reinstalling my system 😅

Do you know what this entails in terms of performance and stability outside of folding? E.g. will the fact that I'm using Mesa via Kisak-PPA bork the system? I really wish F@H and AMD would get this working OOTB with the default/OSS driver 😇

No clue on *buntu based , don't use it.

Manjaro here, it's a case of pacman -U opencl-amd (IIRC)

Or go in the package manager and search for opencl-amd then install. Not sure how much easier you could make it tbh.

Stability wise it's solid, perf I have no Idea compared to mesa-opencl , I use the prop driver version as a few things have failed to work on the open stack opencl driver.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.