Folding at Home

[Nick Name]

Since GPUGrid work has been in such short supply lately I've been looking at starting to fold. I don't have any experience with it. I do know it's not really compatible with BOINC, so most likely would need to have a dedicated machine - well, technically that's not required but I'd rather keep my BOINC efforts intact. I also see there's a USA team there but it's pretty small and basically irrelevant in terms of impact.

Quite a few BOINC teams also have a presence on FAH. Does anyone have experience with Folding, and with the USA team? What is your opinion?

 

[doneske]

I participated about 5 to 7 years ago. Assuming things work the same (big assumption), they were multi-threaded tasks (one task would use all cores). IIRC, there were small, medium, and large WUs depending on the number of cores in the machine. At the time, they were phasing out the "big" due to complaints from participants about inequality (never did grasp the whole basis for the complaint). Overall, the work executed reasonably well but it is outside BOINC so things like BoincTasks won't work. I did find another utility that works similar to BoincTasks but it took some getting used to.

 

[Nick Name]

Thanks for the reply. I'd be running GPU. It should be pretty easy in theory to roll one over since they're all on separate clients. I'll give it a shot at some point.

 

[Nick Name]

I spent about an hour tonight getting an FAH client running. Installation was pretty straightforward, although I installed the date *data* directory to the drive I use for BOINC instead of the default location. After working through some expected problems trying to get it working on the correct GPU, I have a job running. A couple things stand out right away:

1. While GPU use isn't particularly high, ~70-75%, and power usage is about the same range, voltage is much higher than any other application I've seen to this point under BOINC. I don't know if it's this particular job or characteristic of FAH work in general. For comparison Amicable Numbers uses almost 100% of the card but voltage tops out ~0.98 volts. This FAH job is pushing ~1.07! I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with voltage that high over an extended period. This is with a power cap set to 85%.
2. I'm detecting a definite case of unwelcome coil whine, which has never been a problem with any of my GPUs up to now. I expect this is due to the higher voltage being drawn.
3. Both system and GPU memory footprint is pretty small. As it's OpenCL work on Nvidia it takes a full CPU thread for support, nothing unexpected there.

I'll let this run overnight but I couldn't tolerate this noise on a daily basis. I'm interested to see if this is par for the course. If anyone else tries this, run out or suspend your BOINC work so you'll be able to get the client figured out. When it first starts it will use every CPU and GPU resource it finds. I expected that so I was prepared, but it could have been ugly if I hadn't been.

I'd like to make some effort to increase the USA team presence there but the team functions don't seem to be very well developed compared to BOINC. There doesn't seem to be a way to communicate other than the forum, which doesn't even have a team section.

 

[Nick Name]

After almost 24 hours, my only real complaint so far is I have no control over the work that I get. Certain tasks are definitely causing coil whine, which I'm not willing to put up with. I could block the server IPs but that seems kind of drastic and I'm not sure of the overall effect. If I pursue this long term and can't find a way to keep from getting those tasks I'll have to limit folding to the basement. I also miss the granular task history that BOINC has, where I can look on the project site and see exactly what I've returned. That doesn't really seem to be an option with FAH. Otherwise, I think it's a worthwhile effort, not too difficult to get started and I'll probably continue at some point.

You can check my stats here if you like. Let's fold / crunch on!

 

[Nick Name]

I either forgot, misread or things have changed because this latest GPUGrid work is also pushing higher voltage than I remember seeing. The range is usually 1.03 - 1.05 but I have seen a few jobs pushing 1.07 as well. Apparently protein folding is the most demanding work you can run. I guess I won't worry about that after all although I'd definitely like to see it lower just to save on power.