Folding@Home Use BOINC Exclusive Apps for FAH Not Sending Work

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I've made a few posts about this but decided to start a new thread with instructions, and so we can discuss and solve any problems.

This issue will eventually go away, either by new FAH servers etc. coming online or the demand for work dropping over time. Right now though getting consistent work is impossible. You can use the exclusive app option in your cc_config if you want to fall back to BOINC when you run out of FAH work. I'm only running GPU work, if you're running only CPU or both CPU and GPU you may need to tweak this.

The easiest way to do this is in the manager. Go to Options -> Exclusive Applications. You should see two options:
  1. Suspend processor and network usage
  2. Suspend GPU usage
The first one will stop all BOINC work. The second will just stop GPU work. If you're running FAH on CPU and GPU, use #1; GPU-only, use #2. The app names are:
  • FahCore_a7.exe (CPU)
  • FahCore_21.exe (GPU)
  • FahCore_22.exe (GPU)
Upper / lowercase shouldn't matter, and .exe isn't needed in Linux. You should restart BOINC to make sure this parameter is read.
This will work best if you set your BOINC projects to a resource share of zero and select tasks with relatively short run times. This will make sure BOINC downloads only one task per processor/thread and it gets returned before the deadline.

You can also do this manually in a plain text editor if the above doesn't work or your manager doesn't have the option. Exclusive apps are set in your Client Configuration file, aka cc_confg.xml. This file is located in your BOINC data folder. In Windows this is typically C:\ProgramData\BOINC, in Linux I think it's \var\lib\boinc-client, at least in Ubuntu. Enter your exclusions within the <options> </options> brackets.
  • <exclusive_app>FahCore_21.exe</exclusive_app>
  • <exclusive_app>FahCore_22.exe</exclusive_app>
  • <exclusive_app>FahCore_a7.exe</exclusive_app>
Save the file as cc_config.xml and save. In Windows, make sure to save it as type All Files and NOT as a text file.

This will work best if you are only running CPU or GPU work. You could run into a situation where you have CPU work, but no GPU work, and you'd want BOINC to use the GPU. Setting <exclusive_app> will stop all BOINC activity. If you want to keep everything running you can set up separate clients for your CPU and GPU. I can go into more detail on that if there's demand for it.
 

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Administrator
USA team member
I noticed last night that Einstein was running at the same time as the F@H client. This is the first time I'd seen that happen and it turns out I only put in the exclusion for FahCore_22. I haven't seen 21 run in months if ever, so that was surprise.
 
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