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.
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Quoting: EikeQuoting: dubigrasuQuoting: MohandevirMining 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.Quoting: scaineI 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)?
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
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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.
It's been fun watching the GoL team climb. Looking forward to the boost I can give it now with a passkey.
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Mohandevir Jul 2, 2020
Quoting: GuestLe 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 July 2020 at 3:16 pm UTC
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Mohandevir Jul 2, 2020
Quoting: GuestAaand ! 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 July 2020 at 4:11 pm UTC
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I’ve stopped folding due to the hot weather and lack of A/C, but I should rejoin in the fall :)
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Quoting: GuestI 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!
4 Likes, Who?
Quoting: scaineI 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?
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Quoting: AppelsinQuoting: scaineI 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.
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Quoting: pete910Quoting: AppelsinQuoting: scaineI 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 😇
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: AppelsinQuoting: pete910Quoting: AppelsinQuoting: scaineI 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.
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