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from the know-when-to-hold-'em-know-when-to-fold-'em dept.
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
Previously (Newest at the top):
Happy Holidays!
SoylentNews' Anniversary, Site Statistics, and What to do about Journal Spam
Systems Status -- Certs, Developers, and Community, Oh My!
Nearly End-Of-The-Year Summary
SoylentNews Site Update Story Followup -- WOW!
SoylentNews Update 17.05; Backend Changes; Folding@Home News; Accounts Milestone; Funding Shortfall
Three Years In - What Has Happened and How we Got Here
SoylentNews Folders Rocket Past 400
SoylentNews' Folding@Home Team is Now in the Top 500 in the World
Folding@Home - Team SoylentNews About to Reach a Milestone!
Soylent News has a Top 1000 Folding@Home Team!
Official Soylent News Folding@Home Team
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @04:31AM (8 children)
I couldn't for the life of me find out how to add the specific job numbers to the client for COVID.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:42AM (7 children)
I don't think you get to choose that at this point. Stupid. Yeah, I have a list of complaints. Like when you install you have to make several decisions, mainly whether it runs with Windows boot, at login, or on demand. I tried the boot option and it never ran. I uninstalled and reinstalled a couple of times. And you can't change that behavior after install. And even if it would run with boot load option, it won't use the GPU. What???
I never got it to load a GPU workload.
The option I mostly want is to choose the estimated compute time for the project.
I'll give it another try, but like many, I'd prefer to run COVID-19 workloads.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @11:20PM (6 children)
On Windows, you can't really run CUDA stuff as a service. Microsoft made that decision. You are pretty much restricted to running at logon, or on demand. Linux has no such restrictions. I run FAH as a service, and all resources are available. FAH starts up about 1/3 of the way through the startup screen, long before X starts.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @12:39AM (5 children)
Interestingly informative you are. Okay, is CUDA an Nvidia thing? Test computer has AMD/ATI GPU and it has OpenCL, which I checked and tested with a utility.
F@H installer says in fact it will not run GPU if F@H loads at boot time, only if loaded at A) login, or (presumably) B) on demand. I tried all 3 ways. If loaded at boot, I can't seem to get GPU or CPU to work at all. Web interface comes up, then says it can't connect or some such.
Too much time and fiddling. I want to help, but they really need to make their software much more accommodating, flexible, configurable, etc.- kind of what other's are saying about BOINC.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:12AM (4 children)
OpenCL and CUDA seem to be "brand names" for much the same thing, but the implementations differ some. End result is, the same work units will run on both, so for our purposes, we can consider them to be the same.
Windows didn't like the idea of allowing services access to GPU resources. I read through something on the subject, it didn't make much sense to me, but there you have it: Microsoft only permits services to access CPU resources.
I just have to agree with you, that all of these folding applications require too much fiddling. On Linux, FAHControl is a nuisance, because FAH hasn't updated libraries and dependencies in two years. If/when I want to update/upgrade the system, I must first uninstall FAHControl, do my updates, then do a forced install of FAHControl.
It's ironic, that they have umpteen geniuses working on the most basic building blocks of life, but not one of those geniuses can be bothered with updating the software they offer. Ehhh, several of us on SN have commented on geniuses not being very smart sometimes.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @03:16AM
> Windows didn't like the idea of allowing services access to GPU resources. I read through something on the subject, it didn't make much sense to me, but there you have it: Microsoft only permits services to access CPU resources.
Pure speculation, but MS generally likes fast graphics (games too) so they like fairly direct access to display hardware (DirectX and other GPU APIs). If they let too many things have GPU access, they'd have to add layers of contention management that would slow things, maybe just a bit, but something.
I haven't tried FAH on Linux (yet). I'm basically an admin for some servers and workstations that run 24/7 and aren't working much, so I'd love to run FAH, or BOINC, or something and do something useful. Esp. in cooler weather when we pay to heat buildings, so the extra BTUs are useful.
I also found FAH left a bunch of junk behind, including in the registry (which I hate anyway) after uninstalling. Probably need to use one of those utilities that take a snapshot before and after an install and clean it up.
I don't mind a certain amount of fiddling if I have control of things and can make it do what I want. I hate having to fiddle and never get what I want.
Well, there are many kinds of genius. Almost 30 years ago I worked in industrial controls. That company had a very rigorous system for analyzing a client's needs, conditions, parameters, on and on to the nth degree. Initially I thought it was overkill, tedious, overly analytical, etc., but it usually resulted in very good clearly documented designs. The clients were all Fortune-50 companies, so it was important to be very thorough and "professional". The point of all that is: there may be very poor communication between the scientists and the programmers. But, someone is obviously very good at taking molecular / atomic chemical interactions and making algorithms out of them. That is impressive to me. They just need some better overall sw and usability design. Wish it was open-source- maybe I could help. You'd think engineering and CS students would help with it and it'd be updated monthly or so.
Thanks for explaining about CUDA / OpenCL. I don't think I've used either other than FAH. The utility said I have OpenCL, but not CUDA. Someday I might read up on it.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 23 2020, @02:19PM (2 children)
BTW, in spite of my legitimate complaints about F@H client software, thanks to your (possibly unintended) inspiration and encouragement, I've kept it running on 2 computers which have completed several coronavirus work units.
CPU only- perfectly good GPUs sitting idle... but at least I'm helping somehow with coronavirus battle. And SN is getting a few extra points.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 23 2020, @02:54PM (1 child)
LOL, be assured, if I can inspire anyone to contribute to scientific research, I will. Double down on medical research, especially right now. :^)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 23 2020, @04:29PM
It was that subtle hidden blinking font with subliminal messages that mesmerized me into F@H slavedom.
Seeing a COVID-19 work project come in also helped. :)