Check out our Monthly Survey Page to see what our users are running.
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: 58,145

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: «5/11»
  Go to:

dude Mar 22, 2020
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: dudeThere's also a game to help discover an antiviral, programmed by the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design in Seattle: fold.it
I must be missing something obvious, but how do you run the executable?

Just unpack "Foldit-linux_x64.tar.gz" and run the "Foldit" executable, works without problems on Manjaro.
Kuduzkehpan Mar 22, 2020
Meanwhile my pc

[url=https://hizliresim.com/ZuV0zL][/url]
Kuduzkehpan Mar 22, 2020
Before reading check fahclient viever control packages' dependencies first from folding website

sudo update-rc.d FAHControl defaults
sudo dpkg -i --force-depends FAHControl_7.5.1_amd64.deb


solves installing problems

sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

solves GPU related problems


Last edited by Kuduzkehpan on 22 March 2020 at 8:16 pm UTC
CatKiller Mar 23, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
This is quite interesting:

pete910 Mar 23, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Joined myself today, Only problem I have seems to be lack of work units .

Cpu has had the one whilst GPU is still crunching.
Plintslîcho Mar 23, 2020
Quoting: chornI would like to provide an additional view.
[...]

Good point.
Pangaea Mar 24, 2020
10% Linux <3

https://stats.foldingathome.org/os


(Oh, it was posted on the last page. Cool stats tho!)


Last edited by Pangaea on 24 March 2020 at 1:42 am UTC
UnixOutlaw Mar 24, 2020
Quoting: ajgpWell Im trying but I keep getting an OPenCL error in the log and my GPU is doing sod all work. CPU is pumping along fine!

Have the correct OPenCL packages as well; any ideas?

EDIT:Works after installing CUDA package and then rebooting!
Same here... but which CUDA package? I'm running it on two NVidia GPU hosts, but it's not using any GPU... I'm running proprietary 390 series drivers...
Installed libopencl :
ocl-icd-libopencl1

There's a bunch of libcuda1 packages, but they all seem to be for NVidia drivers pre 390 - e.g. libcuda1-384, libcuda1-331...

Will libcuda1-384 work with 390?

Trying it anyway...

Also - it's a PITA (i.e. never got it to work), despite allowing 0/0 and/or 0.0.0.0/0 in "allow" and "web-allow"... Ended up just running firefox over X, to view http://localhost:7396/ - they don't make it easy, do they?

Anyway - I'm running it on three nodes, but only two have GPU's - and all going to the credit of team : 245680

Note - if you apply for a "key" expect to wait 24 hours for it to arrive in your inbox...
---
Update - rebooted one machine after installing libcuda1-384, after restarting FAHClient service didn't make any difference, and it's still not using GPU (according to http://localhost:7396/). It's running a Quadro 2000, not the best / fastest... but it should be working with this...
---
Update 2 - also found suggestion to install ocl-icd-opencl-dev, and rebooted (probably shouldn't need to but why not?) -and still seeing no GPU usage, but : no longer got OpenCL errors and shows GPU and CUDA available... so maybe won't use CUDA / GPU until it loads another data set to fold?

Summary (on my Ubuntu 18.04.4) :
sudo apt install ocl-icd-libopencl1 libcuda1-384 ocl-icd-opencl-dev


Last edited by UnixOutlaw on 24 March 2020 at 3:38 am UTC
scaine Mar 24, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Liam DaweOur team now actually shows up. We're ranked currently 12,516 of 238,810.

I left my GPU running last night, only to wake up this morning to a jump from 600 points (two jobs on my CPU) to 137k!!

The team is now visible with detailed stats too: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

My GPU runs at 82 degrees when it's folding - roughly the equivalent of playing a AAA game. But the loads it takes are worth much, much more than the loads my CPU is assigned. Very impressive!

Just to note - we're at 3799 of 241330!
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.