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.
michaldybczak Mar 31, 2020
Quoting: on_en_a_grosI just tried to install it on manjaro, but the commamd "FAHClient --configure" returned me "command not found". Any idea on what aI'm doing wrong?
I'm also on Manjaro. Here is what I did:
1. I installed from AUR: foldingathome-noroot, fahcontrol (GUI), pygtk (dependency), fahviewer (then your 'Viewer' button will work)
2. Issued those commands:
su
useradd --system -s /sbin/nologin -m -d /var/lib/fah --user-group fahsystemctl edit foldingathome.service
[Service]
User=fah
Group=fah
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/fah
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/opt/fah/FAHClient --config /var/lib/fah/config.xml --exec-directory=/opt/fah --data-directory=/var/lib/fahcd /opt/fah
./FAHClient --configureser name [Anonymous]: name
Team number [0]: 245680
Passkey (can be empty):
Enable SMP [true]: true
Enable GPU [true]: false
Name of configuration file [config.xml]: config.xmlcp /opt/fah/config.xml /var/lib/fah/config.xml
systemctl start foldingathome.serviceYou can check status with:
systemctl status foldingathome.serviceand by running FAHControl GUI app.
So far, I'm not enabling the daemon and start it manually.
I edited and posted this as a guide:
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/guide-how-to-run-fahcontrol-and-contribute-to-model-cures-against-covid-19/132911
Last edited by michaldybczak on 3 April 2020 at 8:13 pm UTC
Interesting stats!
I see the Mac guys are few, probably because it shows how slow there expensive systems actually are :P
Quoting: GuestYou might be interested in these statistics:
On Folding@home: https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
On Rosetta@home: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/apps.php
On Rosetta Linux is particularly well represented. Folding has reached 2,4 exaFLOPS of compute power. All the TOP 500 supercomputers have a total capacity of 1,65 exaFLOPS.
Yep, those folding stats are crazy:
QuoteComputeVery impressive!
Linux 78792 34.00%
Win 134252 57.93%
Mac 18709 8.07%
Total Compute: 231,753
Quoting: doctorxI have mine running... but on Manjaro, i cannot get idle detection working. I run xscreensaver btw. Anyone have luck getting idle detection working?Nope, sorry. I manually turn it on last thing at night and kill it in the morning!
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.
Quoting: GuestI fold but with a much more modest rig. My 4770K and a 970.
There's one thing I noticed on my system, folding with both CPU+GPU seems somewhat slower overall.
Basically I noticed my GPUs (all of them) usage dropping to half when CPU started folding as well. I tried to set the CPU folding to lower priority, but that didn't changed much. Eventually I removed the CPU slot.
Don't know if that stands true for other systems though. I suppose you can watch the GPU usage in Nvidia control panel and put the CPU folding on pause, see if anything happens.
OTOH some folding projects are running only on CPUs.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me