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Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home

By - | Views: 58,174

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
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About the author -
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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
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101 comments
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michaldybczak Mar 31, 2020
Thanks, I installed the software, added gamingonlinux team ID and the process is running :).

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 fah

systemctl 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/fah


cd /opt/fah
./FAHClient --configure


ser 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.xml


cp /opt/fah/config.xml /var/lib/fah/config.xml
systemctl start foldingathome.service


You can check status with:

systemctl status foldingathome.service

and 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
Slackdog Apr 10, 2020
Signed up! :)
pete910 Apr 10, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
WU have dried up for me not had owt since yesterday afternoon.
Boldos Apr 10, 2020
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  • Supporter
Yay - I had a couple of CPU-only projects to fold today :)
pete910 Apr 12, 2020
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  • Supporter Plus
Well, I've stopped mine for the time being, not a lot of point with only a few tasks a day .

Interesting stats!
I see the Mac guys are few, probably because it shows how slow there expensive systems actually are :P
scaine Apr 12, 2020
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  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
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:

QuoteCompute
Linux 78792 34.00%
Win 134252 57.93%
Mac 18709 8.07%

Total Compute: 231,753
Very impressive!
doctorx Apr 21, 2020
I have mine running... but on Manjaro, i cannot get idle detection working. I run xscreensaver btw. Anyone have luck getting idle detection working?
scaine Apr 21, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
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!
dubigrasu May 3, 2020
So you guys still folding? I still do, but while the electric bill didn't deterred me, the heat might.
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.
dubigrasu May 3, 2020
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.
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