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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
(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]