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Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home

By - | Views: 58,141

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.


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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 -
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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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pete910 Mar 24, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: scaine
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!

Am happy as i've passed liam :P

leillo1975 Mar 24, 2020
Only a Question, is necessary to open some port on the router?
pete910 Mar 24, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: leillo1975Only a Question, is necessary to open some port on the router?

No, it uses both port 80 and 8080, 8080 is if you are behind a proxy
leillo1975 Mar 24, 2020
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: leillo1975Only a Question, is necessary to open some port on the router?

No, it uses both port 80 and 8080, 8080 is if you are behind a proxy

Thanks a lot for the explanation

Greetings
Salvatos Mar 24, 2020
The link in FAHControl does nothing for me, but you can type it in on this page:
https://apps.foldingathome.org/project?p=13830
CatKiller Mar 24, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: GuestSilly question from someone not used to F@H: how do we know what a WU is for ? All i have is a project number: 13830

There will be a project description on the web client page for what your computer's currently working on, or you can look up a given project number on the folding@home website.
Appelsin Mar 24, 2020
Is there a GOL team on BOINC / Rosetta? If such a thing exists there.


Last edited by Appelsin on 24 March 2020 at 9:50 pm UTC
dubigrasu Mar 25, 2020
Quoting: CatKillerThis is quite interesting:


It is indeed interesting and puzzling. Why the significant difference between AMD and Nvidia folding machines? Like the Windows numbers, I see far more Nvidia GPUs at work for Linux users. Far more Nvidia users or far more Nvidia users willing to fold...or what? For the GamingOnLinux side of things I see in statistics Nvidia/AMD owners at 60/35%, so I kinda expected roughly the same numbers.

Talking about AMD, I had a hell of a time trying to get my AMD RX 590 to start folding. Tried various CL implementations (and they all seemed to work according to some tests) but none actually worked for FAH until I caved in and installed AMDGPU-PRO. I'm now firing on all cylinders (both CPU and GPU) for a couple of days and I might even keep AMDGPU-PRO installed, since I don't see much difference in performance at least for Vulkan, which I mainly use.
Also, thanks to this folding I discovered that my CPU cooling wasn't as good as I thought, in full load would go up 100 degrees, so I had to reduce the CPU max freq a bit while folding. GPU cooling OTOH is just fine, even at full load.

Appelsin Mar 25, 2020
Quoting: dubigrasuTalking about AMD, I had a hell of a time trying to get my AMD RX 590 to start folding. Tried various CL implementations (and they all seemed to work according to some tests) but none actually worked for FAH until I caved in and installed AMDGPU-PRO. I'm now firing on all cylinders (both CPU and GPU) for a couple of days and I might even keep AMDGPU-PRO installed, since I don't see much difference in performance at least for Vulkan, which I mainly use.
Also, thanks to this folding I discovered that my CPU cooling wasn't as good as I thought, in full load would go up 100 degrees, so I had to reduce the CPU max freq a bit while folding. GPU cooling OTOH is just fine, even at full load.

I (think I) got my GPU to work (or at least show up in F@H webview), on my laptop at least. 2015 Macbook with the AMD M370X GPU. Running latest kernel and the kernel-proivded AMD drivers.

As suggested by herc:

sudo nano /etc/fahclient/config.xml

Line 6: Changed from
<gpu v='false'/>
to
<gpu v='true'/>

Line 18: Added
<slot id='1' type='GPU'/>[/b]



How did you manage to get FAHControl running? I can't, for the life of me, get it working. Even with --force-dependa and --force-all

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



Last edited by Appelsin on 25 March 2020 at 1:26 pm UTC
dubigrasu Mar 25, 2020
Quoting: Appelsin
Quoting: dubigrasuTalking about AMD, I had a hell of a time trying to get my AMD RX 590 to start folding. Tried various CL implementations (and they all seemed to work according to some tests) but none actually worked for FAH until I caved in and installed AMDGPU-PRO. I'm now firing on all cylinders (both CPU and GPU) for a couple of days and I might even keep AMDGPU-PRO installed, since I don't see much difference in performance at least for Vulkan, which I mainly use.
Also, thanks to this folding I discovered that my CPU cooling wasn't as good as I thought, in full load would go up 100 degrees, so I had to reduce the CPU max freq a bit while folding. GPU cooling OTOH is just fine, even at full load.

I (think I) got my GPU to work (or at least show up in F@H webview), on my laptop at least. 2015 Macbook with the AMD M370X GPU. Running latest kernel and the kernel-proivded AMD drivers.

As suggested by herc:

sudo nano /etc/fahclient/config.xml

Line 6: Changed from
<gpu v='false'/>
to
<gpu v='true'/>

Line 18: Added
<slot id='1' type='GPU'/>[/b]



How did you manage to get FAHControl running? I can't, for the life of me, get it working. Even with --force-dependa and --force-all

sudo update-rc.d FAHControl defaults
sudo dpkg -i --force-depends FAHControl_7.5.1_amd64.deb
Yeah I went through all that, but in my case it wasn't a configuration problem (I have now the same config as before), the GPU/CL were recognized and working apparently OK, but only briefly, with the work consistently rejected as faulty. Only with the AMDGPU-PRO the work started to be accepted.

No idea about FAHControl, it worked OK for me.
Does it give any errors in console?
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