That makes the usefulness of CPUs for this purpose questionable—you might be contributing more to that other disaster facing humanity than alleviating the current one.
20-200x is simply not true. Typically, such numbers are a result of comparing unoptimized CPU code to moderately or well-optimized GPU code which is often misleading. (Such differences are however perfectly reasonable when comparing hardware-accelerated workloads like ML/DL). If you compare actually well-optimized codes, you'll see more like ~4-5x difference in performance for FLOP/instrction-bound code as it is the case for well-optimized molecular dynamics.
Case in point, I recently pointed out the huge difference in CPU performance of two of the top molecular simulation codes, one of which is 8-10x faster on CPUs than the other, solving the same problem [2].
F@H relies on GROMACS as a CPU engine [1] which happens to be the same code as I quoted above as the fast one. The trouble is that F@H has not updated their CPU engine for many years and distribute CPU binaries which lack crucial SIMD optimizations to allow making use of AVX2/AVX512 on modern x86 CPUs as well as the years of algorithmic improvement and code optimization we made. These two factors combined lead to _significantly_ lower F@H CPU performance compared to what they had we're they using a recent GROMACS engine.
Consequently, due to the combination of an inherent performance advantage of GPUs and the severely outdated CPU engine, it is indeed not worth wasting energy with running F@H on CPUs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Folding@home_cores#GRO...
[2] https://twitter.com/twilard/status/1235142089156984832?s=20
Edit 1: adjusted wording to reflect that the performance difference between running outdated GROMACS version and subotimal SIMD optimizations on modern hw can have a range of performance difference, depending on hardware and inputs. Edit 2: fixed typo + formatting.
"For people worried about electricity usage:
My 3900x/2070s system, if using both cpu+gpu for folding full, uses 430w at the wall plug. Even at 21cents per kw/h this is about 9 cents/h.
When setting up your machine, it's best to go to slots and remove your cpu. GPU tends to make all the points, especially if you have a newer GPU. I removed my 12 core 3900x from slots and barely noticed a drop in points while my system was running much cooler and with even less power usage. Leave it to default disease and you'll likely get covid-19 projects.
I use both my 2070s cards and I get estimated 3.2M ppd for $2/24hrs of electricity.
TLDR: PC's don't use much power. Get folding@home and just use your GPU(s) at full. Leave it to default to get covid-19 projects."
I applied this strategy when bitcoin mining on my 1080ti which I got shortly after release. I was aiming for sub 60c temps. The results paid for the GPU, and I didn't fry it either - still my daily driver today.
(The 1080TI is / was such a beast, with exceptional value for money.)
GPUs are faster.
https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32339 https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32341
> No WUs available for this configuration
https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
and started running the client, but...
* The fahcontrol DEB package is not compatible with Debian 10 / Devuan 3.
* There is no APT repository.
I'm willing to do folding@home, but not take-care-of-their-devops-issues@home.
Edit: Apparently, indeed, the folding@home work I would be doing doesn't have much in particular to do with covid-19. I feel a bit cheated here.
kubernetes: https://github.com/richstokes/k8s-fah
[1] https://www.top500.org/system/179691 [2] https://www.top500.org/system/178928
Nothing prevents running the fah client on nodes of a compute cluster -- in fact my colleagues did that (while running a local F@H server), though that was a number of years ago just because they wanted take advantage of the distributed computing facilities provided by the client-server setup and built-in algorithms.
> crowd sourcing has the potential to scale to many orders of magnitude larger than what can be done in a data center.
Potential it does have, but I am skeptical of the "many orders of magnitude" claim ever having a chance to materialize. I'd love to see a cost / benefit analysis on the effective amount of useful work contributed vs the cost of the same in a data center.
The vaccine(s) are already in phase one clinical trial testing, as are some important anti-viral treatments which are in phase three clinical trial testing.
There is no potential output from this folding project that can accelerate those timelines.
That does however not take away from my main point, if anything it is in support of what I was trying to emphasize: such computational research is better suited for a compute cluster.
Its like driving through some burger joint where they ask you to spare change for the needy... since you know, you have so much money, and the burger joint can not possibly afford it.
The F@H team COVID19@REDDIT[2] has ID 236269, if you are interested to join.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19
[2] https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&...
Also the web client shows information about the executing tasks (e.g. [3][4]). The COVID19 tasks are prioritized and will be executed when you keep the target settings of the client at default ("Any").
[1] https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update
[2] https://twitter.com/foldingathome/status/1238568504200253442
---- original post ------
I was just trying to get it running on Ubuntu 18.04 in response to this post but I'm just getting a lot of errors with not very useful error messages. Any ideas?
When I run FAHClient manually I get, 21:04:10:WARNING:WU01:FS01:Failed to get assignment from 'X.X.X.X:8080': No WUs available for this configuration
(I replaced the IP address with Xs)
When I try starting the service I get an error and journalctl -xe gives me, e.g., (unedited, it actually says "result is RESULT")
-- Unit FAHClient.service has begun starting up.
Mar 14 22:02:27 poole FAHClient[17956]: Starting fahclient ... FAIL
Mar 14 22:02:27 poole systemd[1]: FAHClient.service: Control process exited, code=exited st
Mar 14 22:02:27 poole systemd[1]: FAHClient.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 14 22:02:27 poole systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Folding@home Client.
-- Subject: Unit FAHClient.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://www.ubuntu.com/support
--
-- Unit FAHClient.service has failed.
--
-- The result is RESULT.
For a more user-friendly UI, you can also go to https://client.foldingathome.org/, which will then attempt to communicate with your client on port 7396 and display the project description among other things. (This also lets you change some settings)
For those running on servers, you can telnet 127.0.0.1 36330 to control your client.
If you just want the project numbers quickly, you can do grep project /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt
All of the really big miners are mining Bitcoin using ASICs.
Obviously, I don't have real numbers, and I could be completely wrong.
https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/installation-guides/li...
I installed it few days ago but got so far random assortment of other tasks and nothing about coronavirus so far.
[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/
[2] https://www.ipd.uw.edu/2020/02/rosettas-role-in-fighting-cor...
Thank-you everyone.
The digital solution is stronger: delete Coronavirus RNA. This isn’t dependent on shape of some molecule and how some other molecule docks with that inside a molecular blender. Genome engineering targets sequences directly, works with novel viruses right away, tolerates mutations with wobble base pairs, works in immunocomprimised patients, has potentially zero side effects, etc etc
I applaud these efforts but implore you to consider: why throw a fancy molecular wrench into the virus machine when you can instead set the “virus switch” to “off?”
If anyone’s gonna grok the benefit of digital over analog, it ought to be the Hacker News community. The hardest part is delivery, we need to affordably mass produce nano particles with the CRISPR DNA inside. That’s the number one thing holding back biotech from curing many diseases including this one: AAV is the standard vector but it only works once before you’re immune to the gene therapy.
here’s a link to a repo (WIP) to target nCoV with CRISPR https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus
If you can help mass produce nanoparticles with microfluidics or self assembly please email me bion@bitpharma.com
Folding At Home is cool. Is folding and shape-medicine the best way to cure human disease? How do we know the answer to that unless we try to program cells like we program computers?
