Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home

By - | Views: 58,148

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
35 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 came back to check 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. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
101 comments
Page: «3/11»
  Go to:

Salvatos Mar 21, 2020
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: scaineJoined the team - great idea, Liam!

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.
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 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.
I had the same problem on default settings, so I set the GPU slot’s opencl-index to 0 manually instead of -1:
Mohandevir Mar 21, 2020
Did it!

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.
scaine Mar 21, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
No 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.
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
scaine Mar 21, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Thanks. 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.
ElectricPrism Mar 21, 2020
I'm a million points in so far for the week, took some time to figure out to configure it and find all the linux-friendly tooling like fahcontrol.

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.
scaine Mar 21, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Well, it's working. I didn't do the toolkit, but either the GPU = true worked, or the ocl-opencl-dev did the trick. After a reboot, it still didn't detect anything, but when I went to FAcontrol, I could add my GPU (without having to change the OpenCL ID either) and it just popped up. I'm now waiting on two queued downloads - one for CPU, one for GPU. It keeps timing out, but apparently that's fairly normal because they're under a fair bit of load right now. I've run two loads on CPU already, it just takes time to initiate.

Thanks for the help everyone!
Spud13y Mar 22, 2020
In the settings you can set it up to contribute to other projects (like cancer and Alzheimer's). I don't see such an option for covid-19/coronavirus. Can I assume the default is sufficient as long as I'm part of the GoL group?
dude Mar 22, 2020
I've been folding for some weeks now and just switched teams from Archlinux to GOL :)

@Liam: thanks, good idea. There's also a game to help discover an antiviral, programmed by the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design in Seattle: fold.it
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.