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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 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.