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.
Note that F@H have received something like 6x their normal amount of volunteers requesting work from their project in the last week, so they are a little overwhelmed trying to scale up quickly to handle it.
If you notice idle time waiting for work units, I recommend also checking out rosetta@home, which runs on the BOINC platform. They do very similar work to folding@home, and also have lots of work units modelling SARS-COV-2 proteins looking for possible treatments.
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
R@H is a CPU only project, so I generally have them running for my CPUs, and have folding@home configured to only use my GPU.
Either way, it's great to see the community get behind these projects!
To "spend unused cycles" means here "use computation power which would not have been used otherwise". This means though that the CPU/GPU are using more electrical power than they would have used without the additional computation. In most countries this is coming from fossil fuels: coal, oil and so on.
So for me, this is not a "let's run this soft, it can't hurt" thing, but if one runs it, it means "I am so confident that this leads to something usable, that the confidence outweights the damage to the environment".
On the good side, there is at least a chance here that the computations might lead to something, not as clearly waste as bitcoin mining.
Last edited by chorn on 21 March 2020 at 12:28 pm UTC
Have the correct OPenCL packages as well; any ideas?
EDIT:Works after installing CUDA package and then rebooting!
Last edited by Cmdr_Iras on 21 March 2020 at 2:08 pm UTC
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
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.
Quoting: 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.
The 245680 team must be freshly out of the oven because I don't see any stats populated at extremeoverclocking yet.
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
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.
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.
Yeah, but it's dependent on python-gnome2 and my spare rig's Pop_OS! refuses to install it.
Is there a way to use my gpu? It seems to run on my CPU only...
Last edited by Mohandevir on 21 March 2020 at 3:27 pm UTC
on_en_a_gros Mar 21, 2020
Quoting: 14The 245680 team must be freshly out of the oven because I don't see any stats populated at extremeoverclocking yet.Really, they need to clean up the Team system. I can see no reason for it not to show up. It's listed on my PC for my own folding quite clearly and using the ID I can go back and edit the Team details but it doesn't currently show in public lists.
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