
Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - partingshots
https://unraid.net/blog/help-take-the-fight-to-covid-19-with-boinc-or-folding-home
======
timboslice
Folding at home is running out of work because of the overwhelming response.
I've found that sometimes restarting the FAH client/container will trigger a
new job even after being stuck in a loop for hours

~~~
rarecoil
Rosetta@home (BOINC) still has a ton of work items and is CPU based, so it's
easy to run on most anything. Some are COVID-19, some are MERS, some are
things that have nothing to do with coronaviruses.

~~~
washadjeffmad
I've been running BOINC, and since none of the tasks required GPU, as you
mentioned, I was able to scale to a number of devices that the client could be
compiled on.

If you have 5-8 hours to devote to a round, put everything you have into it.
It's quick to set up and is certainly worth the cycles.

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beautifulfreak
Here's a Google doc showing the performance of various GPUs when folding:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6l_Uo3pZpQYogn6gVlxRPnz0/edit#gid=0)

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floatingatoll
Mac users, note that Folding@Home can't use GPUs at all. I considered Boot
Camp but their docs (and Boinc's) seem focused on Nvidia and don't appear to
have kept up on "ATI" (AMD) video card instructions.

~~~
hornetblack
Folding@Home is runnign GPU stuff on Windows without any configuration on my
AMD RX 580. Although it's not using much of it. Presuably because OpenCL only
runs of the Compute units which are relatively small part of the GPU.

~~~
floatboth
No, all GPUs released in the last 10 years have a unified shader architecture.
Vertex, fragment, and compute shaders all run on the same units, and they are
the _big_ part of the GPU.

"Compute units" is AMD terminology for a grouping of ALUs and stuff. Nvidia
calls them "stream multiprocessors".

Example: Vega 64 has 64 CUs, each CU has 64 "shader processors", so there's
64*64 == 4096 "shader processors" total. This is the big part.

~~~
hornetblack
Yea I install the Asus GPU-Z and i was better and gave that it was using 90%
of the whole GPU. Windows just doesn't know how to count GPU usage apperntly.

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0mp
There is a FreeBSD port of the FAH client:
[http://freshports.org/biology/linux-
foldingathome](http://freshports.org/biology/linux-foldingathome)

The installation is as simple as "cd /usr/ports/biology/linux-foldingathome &&
make install".

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generationP
Is there a way to have some more fine-grained control about how Rosetta and
Folding use resources? For example, I want them not to run in sleep mode, and
certainly not when the laptop's lid is closed. Or, better perhaps, to throttle
above certain temperatures.

~~~
timClicks
Yes, those knobs can be controlled by the BOINC client. You retain full
control over how/when your computer uses its resources.

~~~
generationP
Where exactly? I haven't been able to find it.

~~~
generationP
Oh, I see: Options / Computing Preferences.

Would still like to have a "suspend when lid is closed" or "suspend when
temperature is > 70°C" option, but I guess that would require a lot more
hardware specialization than the authors of the tool could reasonably be
expected to do.

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gorgoiler
I can’t understand the statistics for Folding@Home.

If there are X million PCs donating Y% of their time to the project, and they
cost $Z each, I was wondering what X _Y_ Z was.

That is to say, if discovering protein structures is a critical problem needed
to solve Covid19, how much would it cost to just replace this distributed
computation with some dedicated machinery?

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pmoriarty
I wonder why Amazon, Rackspace, and other major hosting providers that are
sitting on a ton of hardware haven't contributed resources to efforts like
this.

Or have they?

~~~
ramraj07
Because a legitimate scrutiny of FAH projects would probably just get them
rejected

~~~
Infinitesimus
Could you expand a bit? Are you suggesting that F@H projects are perhaps not
as beneficial?

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JamesBarney
Gwern's article on folding @home [https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about-
helping](https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about-helping)

TLDR - As of 2015 it's been pretty useless for the amount of electricity and
computing power it burns through.

Nothing particularly noteworthy listed on wikipedia either.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home)

Seems like if you have a huge cluster of computing and free electricity and
want to help out it might be more useful to mine bitcoins and donate them to
covid-19 charities.

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butz
If we could throw all computing power that was used for mining bitcoins, how
long would it take to produce required results?

~~~
r3drock
This would probably not work since bitcoin miners are all ASICs these days.

~~~
mehrdadn
I feel like the question was just trying to see how much computation would
help, rather than whether the chips are actually capable of doing it.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's a reasonable question, but it's hard to evaluate the processing power of
those chips because of how very specific those circuits are.

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clSTophEjUdRanu
I once caught wind that my professor gave extra credit in distributed systems
class for BOINC points. I ran this constantly for years and then he didn't
even give the extra credit.

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ck2
Can you pick which task your resources are being used for? (ie. covid19)
because they have several in progress and I think it selects randomly?

~~~
osamagirl69
At least with folding at home they have set the covid19 research as top
priority for all of the clients (regardless of the clients preference).

Note - as far as I know there are no covid19 CPU based works units, so you
will continue to get normal work units if you have CPU slots available. This
is worth mentioning, because by default the client adds your CPU to the
available slots. On linux you have to go into advanced settings to enable the
GPU at all, so it is something to watch out for.

~~~
rarecoil
The Folding@Home GPU client works way better on Linux with NVIDIA/CUDA than it
does with AMD. I could not get a 4x Radeon VII rig with ROCm to utilise more
than a single GPU at any time due to OpenCL errors. Also, the folding@home
Ubuntu client has three-year-old issues with not installing properly [1] so
you have to workaround that, too.

If you have the time to contribute reliability patches to the Linux clients,
I'm sure it would be appreciated as well.

[1] [https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-
issues/issues/1193#issu...](https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-
issues/issues/1193#issuecomment-340875034)

~~~
rarecoil
Update: Installed Windows 10 Pro on a separate SSD, and I appear to have GPU
slots for all GPUs under Windows.

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KerryJones
I love these projects and have donated time in the past to different projects.
I'll be promoting this to all my friends -- there are so many ways to help and
this feels like one of the easier ones.

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Fire-Dragon-DoL
Folding at home is apparently really hard to install and run on windows
without admin permissions. Big bummer. I tried for 2 hours! (the beefy pc is
for gaming)

~~~
vortico
Why don't you have admin on your gaming computer?

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I have an admin, but it's not the "active" account. It's used only for
installing stuff and general maintenance of your computer.

This is not only the proper way to use an admin account, but it's also
recommended.

The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin
account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem,
I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic.

~~~
gambiting
>>The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin
account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem,
I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic.

Well, no, that's not entirely true. You can run F@H as a service and then it
can run without anyone logged in. The problem then is that it cannot use the
GPU for work, but that's not a problem with F@H but with how Windows manages
access to resources for background services without a user logged in.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I'm confused though. Videogames can use the GPU without being an
administrator, why is administrator needed to run F@H with GPU active?

~~~
gambiting
Now I'm confused. Administrative privilages have nothing to do with using the
GPU. A service process cannot use the GPU, regardless of who owns it, that has
nothing to do with F@H, that's just how Windows is designed.

According to the organisation behind F@H , the application requires
administrative priviladges to make sure you have the permissions to use the
application on the machine. I guess they had enough complaints about people
running it when they don't(students, employees etc), so requiring
administrative priviladges is the easiest way.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Your explanation though makes sense, even though the solution to the problem
it's terrible. I presumed it was for the GPU for weird reasons (bad software,
CUDA, somethng like that), but what you described makes the most sense.

Apparently, I managed to get it running today with some magic using icacls and
file ownership. The web control does not work, but I'm able to run the
Advanced Control Panel and start everything from there.

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aledalgrande
They should really make an Apple TV app, I have an Apple TV 4K sitting there
most of the day, and I'm sure most owners do too.

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justlexi93
Is there a preference with BOINC vs Folding?

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m0zg
Inexplicably F@H is not available as an _official_ docker container, and their
install procedure for Linux compares unfavorably with wisdom tooth extraction.

~~~
JensRex
How so? I just looked, and they have both .deb and .rpm packages available.

I once spent two-and-a-half hours having two wisdom teeth removed, and
afterwards I got an infection in the empty sockets. I'd rather do all of that
again, than having to use Docker for anything.

~~~
05
The debs don't install on Ubuntu 19.10 BTW (obsolete deps).

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MuffinFlavored
I get that F@H does a lot of computation with my CPU/GPU if I am running the
client. What do those cycles do? It tries a bunch of random stuff to
calculate... what? What is it trying? It sounds a lot like Bitcoin mining, but
I'm not sure what it's trying to do.

~~~
Infinitesimus
Their about page and update articles give a good high-level overview of the
project [https://foldingathome.org/about/](https://foldingathome.org/about/)

