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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 SomeGuy on Monday March 16 2020, @05:29PM (7 children)
It's only Monday, and I've already had enough of this virus paranoia.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @05:36PM
One of the symptoms of COVID-19 is spelling confusion.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by ikanreed on Monday March 16 2020, @06:39PM (3 children)
Move to the UK. Their government promised to not do anything, and I think that's one of the few things that the Johnson cabinet can actually manage.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday March 16 2020, @11:08PM (1 child)
Johnson looks like that guy on Airplane: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue"
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1) by danuk on Wednesday March 18 2020, @11:44AM
This comment has made me laugh sooo much. Brilliant. Thank you
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @11:56PM
That honestly sounds like a marvellous plan. Politicians futzing around are causing more crisis than the virus.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @07:25PM (1 child)
I'm concerned that this crisis is an opportunity to implement unnecessary authoritarian policies. I understand the need to temporarily close schools and place restrictions on some businesses to encourage social distancing. However, I'm concerned about curfews being imposed in places like New Jersey and Puerto Rico. They're authoritarian and are almost certainly counterproductive. If people need to take a walk for exercise or to go to the grocery store, it's probably a good thing if some people choose to do so late at night. If some people voluntarily shift their schedules, it reduces the amount of people in stores and out on the streets at any particular time. That will actually reduce the spreading of this virus. Curfews are counterproductive, but are certainly authoritarian. We need to be wary of restrictions that are implemented due to this virus but don't have a clear public health benefit. To be clear, I support policies that will actually help to reduce the spread of this virus. A curfew will actually make things worse.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @09:50AM
Indeed, in Bavaria due to Corona grocery shops now are allowed to be open longer so that you now can also shop in the later evening.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday March 16 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
Fantastic - not only school kids getting geeky, but also doing something useful with their geekery! Awesome!
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday March 16 2020, @07:40PM (1 child)
So let me extend my thanks to the contributors to the soylentnews team, and consider yourself cheerled. Nope, sorry, I'm not joining in, I don't even have a "gaming GPU", and all my RasPis together would amount to even less grunt than martyb's core 2 duo.
[* or awful, I always get the two confused, anyway, there will be awe, and frequently shock.]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @07:02AM
It doesn't appear that F@H supports ARM processors anyway. There are plenty of BOINC projects that do support ARM. They also hand out small enough units so less power is needed to meet the deadline. The real problem is wear and tear, as Raspberry Pis have crappy cooling and the work units will beat through your SD card.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 16 2020, @06:11PM (3 children)
Slip in some bogus SETI work units, see if anybody notices.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by FatPhil on Monday March 16 2020, @06:18PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday March 16 2020, @08:26PM (1 child)
Several SETI scientists were harmed in the making of this project.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 17 2020, @12:53AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 16 2020, @08:14PM
I got back in the house, and checked my clients. I have 3 GPU clients, and on CPU client all running at the same time. The CPU returned a result, and failed twice to download a new WU, but got one on the third attempt.
Gotta get some sleep now, but this is first time since Friday night that all four clients have been busy at the same time. They're doing something right at their server farm!
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Informative) by el_oscuro on Tuesday March 17 2020, @01:06AM (12 children)
If you want to help but F@H can't process it (or the client doesn't work), there is always BOINC:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu]
Rosetta@home is also working on COVID and there are numerous other projects.
I tried to install the F@H client on Ubuntu 18.04 but ran into dependencies hell. F@H really needs to get their shit together and make sure their client is in all of the major repos. The Venn diagram overlap of Linux users and F@A is pretty large.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @03:27AM (8 children)
Been trying F@H but several issues, too many to list. Not sure if there's a way to give them feedback, but what's the use- the installer is more than 2 years old. Doesn't look like a lot of development effort.
Thanks for the info on BOINC. I had not heard of it before. I tried it but installer asks for name and email. Not interested in giving that.
Any thoughts or advice?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @05:26AM (7 children)
fake name and e-mail?
by the way, I told microsoft teams I'm 10 and I then had to click a whole three or four times to change that to 20 (so that I can actually use the damn thing).
I miss IRC...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:35AM (6 children)
Yeah, I used to do that a lot, now it's just tiring. I'd bet if the entire nation or world was polled, 90% would vote for it to be illegal to require personally identifying information. Except where it's obviously necessary, like buying online. I mean, I'm offering to help them (BOINC), for free, and they have the gall to require my name and email? Not someone I want to help. So I reinstalled F@H, but again, problems, and the computer seems to freeze up. No idea what's going on. Nothing that tells me what's doing what. Just non-responsive. Can barely get Task Manager to run, and nothing useful there. I ran F@H a few years ago and it seems like it ran much better then.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @09:57AM
Depends on who does the poll. I'm sure if the poll designers want it, they can formulate it so that the majority of people will agree. Probably polling about something something involving security and children, but carefully formulated that the answer to this specific question isn't actually restricted to those contexts.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @11:44AM (4 children)
You must provide a valid name, email address, and phone number to vote in this poll.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @12:32PM
Syntactically valid ;)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)
Yet I vote in the local, state, and federal elections and they don't have my phone # nor email address.
Point is: US political voting system is an established and accepted governmental voting mechanism. My poll would be a referendum on voting ballots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @08:01PM (1 child)
Instead they have the PII of your name, address, proof of citizenship, and DOB.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @12:32AM
You're a master of the obvious! Wow! Yes, of course they do, it's part of the US Govt. I'm a US citizen. That's how it works if you want to vote in US elections.
What I do NOT want is some random website having that info, to do whatever they feel like doing with it. And I think we've all read enough about how "private" our data and identities are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:03AM (2 children)
I don't do F@H due to philosophical objections. The fact that they don't seem to care about the software doesn't help either. BOINC doesn't seem to have the same sort of technical problems with their overall software and the workers seem higher quality too, since each project can base themselves on the open source implementations. Plus, it has things like cluster orchestration tools and the ability to do multiple projects, so you don't have the situation here where you computer is ready and waiting, but there is no work.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @02:42PM (1 child)
> Plus, it has things like cluster orchestration tools
Okay, that's a big plus for BOINC.
> and the ability to do multiple projects
That's great. One of my many gripes about F@H, and I may be missing something, is that it will NOT do only 1 project combining all CPU and GPU cores. Each core gets a different project. I'd prefer to put all cores on 1 project and get it done as fast as possible. Clustering several computers together would be even better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @08:00AM
Grid computing like this already relies on the "embarrassingly parallel" nature of the calculations to distribute work. The thing is, once you distribute the work that way, throwing more cores doesn't necessarily improve things (theoretically, in some situations it can even make it worse). F@H or any other project that can be sped up by using multiple threads or processes on a single unit of work vs having the cores work on different units independently is doing something wrong.
(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.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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. :^)
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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. :)