Please note the official web site for folding@home is https://foldingathome.org. As a free service, folding.extremeoverclocking.com (FEO) provides a variety of reports based on data it gathers from the official site. This story is from an announcement made on FEO.
Basically, folding@home is a distributed computing system whereby volunteer's machines are issued "work units" to process and, when they have completed their processing, upload their results back tofolding@home. See the excellent write-up at Wikipedia for more details.
tl;dr: When F@H announced they were working on SARS-CoV-19 (COVID-19), the outpouring of support has overwhelmed their infrastructure; their servers are having trouble keeping up with the demand for work units and the subsequent upload of results. Don't give up!
Where did the day go? (03.18.20, 9:32pm CDT)
Important news first! I've noticed this and I know many others have too, yes the official Folding@Home stats seem to be loading slow for people, or it might timeout with an error. Same goes for getting your passkey and work units! There have been so many new people signing up these past few days that you guys are overloading their system!
With that said, one of the guys over at Linus Tech Tips let me know they have created a special folding Emergency Response Thread to Covid-19 that has some up-to-date info on registration / server issues, and are offering direct troubleshooting and support to help people get their clients up and running!
Also, before sending me an email, please check out the EOC Folding Stats FAQ as it answers a lot of the common questions I've been getting!
With so many people emailing me asking where their stats are, and the loading issues with the official site, I'm going to try to expand processing to additional teams & users. My initial goal is to increase processing of Team data from 6,000 to 12,000 teams. Individual data I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle quite yet, I'm going to get the team data going first and see how many are active and what kind of movement there is.
I was looking over my server's performance charts this morning, and I noticed a considerable peak in the mysql query-per-second. Did some digging through the logs and it looks like the French "Z Event" plea to join folding went gangbusters on Twitter and their team is moving up fast. I noticed PC Master Race has added over 20,000 new users in the past week too!
So, if you have been experiencing problems with your F@H client, this may be the reason why! And, if you were unaware, we have our own folding@home team: "SoylentNews.org", and currently ranked 210th in the world. Go Team! Come join us!
Follow along at home!
- https://apps.foldingathome.org//teamstats/team230319.html
- https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=230319
- https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_overtake.php?s=&t=230319
- https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/extra_page.php?s=&t=230319
- https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=230319
Previously:
Folding@Home Joins Fight Against SARS-CoV-2; New Folders Prompty Drain Work Unit Queue
Related Stories
Don't worry; they'll make more.
[Editor's preface: SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team (#230319) As of this writing, SoylentNews.org is ranked at number 210 in the entire world! My current Core 2 Duo laptop would do little to support the effort compute-wise, so I assist as best I can by cheerleading, communicating our team's progress, and similar activities. We have a channel on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server "#folding" where there is sporadic discussion about progress. Check out the list of previous stories at the bottom of this story... to get involved, just mention it in the comments and come join our team!
If you are wondering what in the world F@H is, Wikipedia has a nice summary of Folding@Home . And, of course, there is F@H's "About" page, too. --martyb]
Intro:
If you are a Folding@Home (F@H) contributor, you may have noticed that you aren't getting your normal allotment of work units. It appears to have started some time Friday, March 13. The root cause? Schools shutting down around the United States.
Looking for Work [Units]:
Kids are scared (some more, some less) of the Coronavirus, they read something somewhere about efforts such as F@H that are working on curing various diseases. Those kid's gaming rigs are exactly what F@H and other similar research groups need. And, some of these kids have machines that most of us would envy! A well-built gaming machine is simply awesome!
https://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=61
That forum is filled with "newbs" trying to figure out how to set up F@H on their machines, and then complaining that they can't get a work unit.
This post, specifically, explains that the huge influx of volunteers has depleted the available work units. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32424 Apparently, on Friday, the staff filled the WU servers' caches with the normal weekend's amount of WU's and they were gone by early Saturday morning. Someone volunteered to work on Saturday to refill the caches, which were promptly emptied out again.
One of the posts on the F@H forum suggests that F@H has about 4 times the number of folders that it had a week ago.
What to do?
If you find yourself unable to download a WU, take a look at the log. You will probably find complaints,
"No WUs available for this configuration" and/or "Port 8080 unreachable, trying port 80" and/or "no http service available".
Those and more are all related to the fact that the servers are being hammered by half a zillion school kids who are looking for something useful to do with their time, and their computers.
Be patient, and just let your client work through it. It will eventually download a work unit, crunch it, and return it.
Official Statement:
Straight from the F@H project: Coronavirus – What we're doing and how you can help in simple terms – Folding@home
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 20 2020, @02:35PM
I got a whole week in, of well over a million PPD, with my newfangled vidya card. Well, if you have any genuine interest in the trials and tribulations of a folder, just look at this - https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=699545 [extremeoverclocking.com]
To add insult to injury, electricity went out last night. *sigh*
Maybe things will stabilize soon.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Friday March 20 2020, @03:29PM (4 children)
Looks like they've mostly been handing out CPU work, as both CPUs (a Ryzen 7 3800X in one machine and an A10-7700K in the other) have been kept more or less busy, but the GPUs (both Radeons...an RX460 and an HD6800) have been idle. The RX460 was getting work for a little bit, once I had the driver and permissions situation sorted.
I have a mining rig with four GeForce GTX 1070s sitting idle...raided it for a processor and RAM a while back. Maybe I'll get it up and running again...but if I do, will there be work for it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @06:28PM (2 children)
according to the covid page, there are no CPU units for covid
from https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/ [foldingathome.org]
"All projects are using the new GPU-accelerated Core22 based on the open source OpenMM biomolecular simulation engine."
The the covid work units should be GPU (core22) based with project numbers starting at 11741 and currently go up to 11476
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @06:42PM (1 child)
I'm currently crunching for project 14578 and 14329, both being coronavirus projects, on CPU. Got a spare ESXi with dual EPYC 7401. I wasn't able to get many workunits until I split the 48 core slot into 3 slots with 16 cores each. Even now there are times when one of the slot idles, not really sure why. Turning on the hyperthreading, 96 cores in single slot throws hostile error in your face in log.txt. What is your experience? Do you run with HT on? (the workload seemed to be thrashing on caches ...) How many slots and how many cores in each do you use? I'd like to help, but it really makes no sense if the box just sits there half idle ...
Thanks
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:48AM
Are you sure that's COVID work and not processing bitcoins for some Uzbekistani?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:49AM
I turned it back on a few days ago. Got work for the first day, then no more work units available for any project. I'm on satellite internet, so maybe they just don't want to wast their server time on me.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:22AM (1 child)
Why do we have to pay to access the publications?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32134250?dopt=Abstract [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:30AM
Sorry, I should have posted the link to the paid article
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.accounts.9b00613 [acs.org]
So people volunteer their CPU/GPU and electricity towards using this and they have to pay for the results?
I would think that at least those that dedicated their computers towards helping should have free access to the publications.
As someone pointed out
Re:Folding results? (Score:4, Interesting)
by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday March 07, 2020 @07:27PM (#59806804)
"The interesting thing is, way back when I was doing stuff like Seti/F@H, computer power efficiency was so dismal that it didn't matter much if my system was idle or 100%.
Now with my Rizen7 system, there is a HUGE difference between the power consumed when it is idle vs. busy. So there is much, much more "cost" with it being loaded. I just tested, and at load, it doubles my power usage- another 81 watts for just one box! That is 2KWh/day x 12 cents = $7.20/month. (Excludes dealing with wear or heat).
Not saying it isn't worth doing something like this (especially compared to something stupid, like bitcoin mining). Just pointing out that it isn't almost "free" like it used to be."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/03/07/1733254/after-seti-foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19 [slashdot.org]
Also worth reading the comments here
https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/06/15/1240252/the-science-of-foldinghome [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:31PM
A good way to heat the basement ;-)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 22 2020, @08:14PM
The official folding at home stats pages are loading nicely now. Every hour on the hour, your stats are updated, if you care to look that often.
The WU servers are mostly working well, for GPU work units. One of mine got vapor locked today, for some weird reason, but that was on the machine rather than the servers. I still have a WU that has been trying to upload to collection server 155.247.164.214 for days now. For whatever reason, that server is down, and they don't seem to be doing anything with it.
CPU work units seem to be running short. At a guess, there are probably a lot of people who don't have GPU's, but everyone has a CPU. From where I'm sitting, it appears that if you are only doing CPU work units, you may wait a long time between work units. That fact shouldn't discourage you, every WU counts for something. Just be aware that you may be idle half the time, while trying to download a WU.
Overall, things are improving from the dismal state of affairs we saw a week ago. But, there's still room for improvement.
Team stats are near where they started out a week ago. We've gained some team mates, while the long-time crunchers have lost some points, which nearly balances out.
Hopefully, in the next week or so, FAH will iron out some more problems, and we'll all get on track to advancing our team position! We're still in 210th place, with 200 about 3 months away. One of those teams we need to beat is a moving target, but the rest are stationary, and not producing anything.