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Hello, fellow Tempers! Some of you might not know this, but our website started a Folding@Home team whole 13 years ago. What is Folding@Home, you ask? Let me explain.
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Folding what?

Folding@Home, or F@H, is a distributed computing system which allows everyday users to participate in research by Stanford University, lending their computing power to help with the process of protein folding. By running simulations on your computer you help better understand many diseases, including cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and more. This includes simulations related to COVID-19, and we believe that if we come together as a community, our combined computational power can help.

How do I join?

It's actually extremely simple - all you need to do is download the client, set it up on your PC and... start folding! You can either do so anonymously, or you can set up a nickname and join our team - our ID is 53596. COVID-19 is a fairly new virus, so it does not have a separate category just yet. In order to be assigned simulations related to it, you must select "Any Disease" in the client. The client is currently compatible with Windows, macOS, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Centos and Fedora so you can easily find the most suitable version for your setup.

Joining our team is as simple as typing in your desired nickname,
our Team ID and requesting a Passkey to verify your registration​

I bet you're asking yourself "do I have to run this thing at full blast". The answer is no, F@H will not interrupt your valuable game time if you don't want it to. If you prefer, you can limit F@H to only using your resources when idle, or to minimise the amount of resources used by the client to a desired amount so that your game time remains uninterrupted. F@H will use your remaining CPU/GPU cycles up to saturation without otherwise affecting other tasks. You don't even need a particularly beastly computer - in the picture below I'm actually running it on a laptop - it's folding!

F@H gives you the option to only fold when idle, both in the Web and Desktop clients​

Once your identity is set up and you've adjusted your settings to your liking, all you have to do is press "Start Folding" - you will be assigned a Work Unit your hardware is capable of handling in a reasonable amount of time and the client does all the rest. Your computer will continue to fold until the Work Unit is complete or you manually stop the workload. It's easy!

Start Folding!
Our team

I'm a developer, what can I do?

Up until recently, Folding@Home was also possible on Android devices and the PS3. Sadly, the PS3 application and the Android application are no longer maintained, however Sony has graciously released the source code on GitHub and the project continues as open source. This is particularly relevant to users who would like to contribute their mobile processing power, or perhaps with enough work, contribute the processing power of their consoles via Switchroot/LineageOS or other means. The GitHub repositories for the Android branch and the Main branch can be found here:

Main Source Code
Android Source Code

With a little work, these applications could possibly be ported to devices that were never intended to run them - that's where scene developers come in. If you think you can help, try your hands at some real anti-virus software - we can hack this thing.

We live in trying times, but we're not powerless - we're all the strongest when we come together. If you want to help, consider joining the team today!

 

[6adget]

That's an interesting twist on "the healing power of the sun", I like it.

I would be running a wind turbine, but they are illegal to setup and operate where I live in Sacramento, Ca. of all the states in USA, you would think Ca would want everyone to be as green as possible.

 

[Sicklyboy]

@Lacius I see you trying to come up and overtake me

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Prepare for a major headache when trying to get this running on another OS than the ones officially supported on https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

Was pretty hard to set up (my main computer is running openSUSE Leap 15.1). No rpm packages for openSUSE and the ones for Redhat based distros caused unmet dependencies. While FAHClient works under Wine this was not the most ideal solution – GPU not usable.

So back to the Linux version: I downloaded FAHClient as tar.bz2 (https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahclient/centos-6.7-64bit/v7.5/) and extracted it.

./FAHClient gives
error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Same with libcrypto.so.10

Both are not provided by any official openSUSE package and symlinks to the libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libcrypto.so.1 did not help (“solution” suggested for a different application depending on those files)

Seriously, I had to extract the libraries from some CentOS RPM package and I put them into the same directory as FAHClient. An export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD" did the trick and now the Linux version works and uses the GPU addionally.

While only using CPU everything is fine. When using the GPU the graphical desktop becomes unresponsive. → Can only use/add GPU power when not actively using the computer

 

[Foxi4]

Prepare for a major headache when trying to get this running on another OS then the ones officially supported on https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

Was pretty hard to set up (my main computer is running openSUSE Leap 15.1). No rpm packages for openSUSE and the ones for Redhat based distros caused unmet dependencies. While FAHClient works under Wine this was not the most ideal solution – GPU not usable.

So back to the Linux version: I downloaded FAHClient as tar.bz2 (https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahclient/centos-6.7-64bit/v7.5/) and extracted it.

./FAHClient gives
error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Same with libcrypto.so.10

Both are not provided by any official openSUSE package and symlinks to the libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libcrypto.so.1 did not help (“solution” suggested for a different application depending on those files)

Seriously, I had to extract the libraries from some CentOS RPM package and I put them into the same directory as FAHClient. An export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD" did the trick and now the Linux version works and uses the GPU addionally.

While only using CPU everything is fine. When using the GPU the graphical desktop becomes unresponsive. → Can only use add GPU power when not actively using the computer

The GPU behaviour is odd, it's the opposite of it should do. The older version of the software was split into a CPU and GPU clients, and the latter would only fold when the screen was inactive to prevent tearing. There must be some kind of conflict there, or the OS doesn't quite understand the client's screen state-checking routine. Sorry to hear about your trouble, I hope you find a way to fix it. I would suggest contacting support, but I have a weird feeling they're rather busy at the moment with so many new users connecting to their servers.

 

[Flame]

@Sicklyboy is number one now.... that was quick.

but seriously its not about number one or number 69 its about helping mankind with our community with our resources

 

[FAST6191]

so, the house that my wife and i own was built in 1903. houses back then were not built with driveways or garages. wanting a place to work on my projects i built a decent size wooden shed. i didn't want to pull permits to run electrical out to it, so i ended up installing solar panels and all the other bullshit that goes along with it.

Fair play and all that and nice solution but is this not the sort of thing you don't commit a notifiable act (as it would be known around here as) but rather run an extension lead or three to it instead?

 

[RupeeClock]

@Sicklyboy is number one now.... that was quick.

but seriously its not about number one or number 69 its about helping mankind with our community with our resources

Yeah, I noticed that. Me being first place was just through virtue of keeping at it for so long, but I've only been doing light processing this whole time.
The GPU intensive folding tasks though clearly weigh a lot more though, the ones that I haven't been doing with my dated GTX 770.

But it really does put into perspective that my years of contributes seem paltry compared to dedicated GPU processing efforts.
I know that Folding@Home splits workloads between easier and more complex tasks though, as in, some tasks specifically for their CPU only users. Every little truly helps.

Now this makes me wonder if we could get Folding@Home running on other consoles. It originally made headlines for being run on PS3 farms, why not bring it to more consoles, like Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, Wii U, Switch etc? These devices have GPUs that can be leveraged.

 

[Sicklyboy]

I've enjoyed running this as a means of a non-scientific benchmark (which is funny considering it's all in the name of science!) just to see how fast my computer can rip through it. For comparison's sake, I threw 26 (out of 28) threads of my aforementioned Broadwell-based Xeon at it too and WOW does it just chug. I think thermals are a little bit of an issue for me there, preventing me from getting to max boost clock on it, but at the same time its max stock boost block is the base clock of my Ryzen 9, which also has 4 more threads...

Gonna keep running it on my desktop for the foreseeable future but it's so frequently getting into a bad state where it's not picking up any GPU jobs and few, if any CPU jobs, until I reboot my computer.

Fun fact, had a GPU job running full-tilt on it and was able to still run Halo MCC at max graphics at around 110fps still. It slowed down the folding fairly considerably, but was still nice to see it handle everything like that. RTX 2080 Super is an absolute beast. Wallet still hurts, but I'm pretty sure I made the right choice on this build lol.

 

[gamesquest1]

yeah I don't think I run it as much as required, I tend not to leave my PC on unless i'm using it, so I had to adjust it so it runs whenever it wants even if im currently using the computer so it actually gets something out of it, I guess it helps when my vive controllers go flat and need charging and I forget to go back to it for a few hours

certainly won't be gunning for the top spots, but doesn't seem to be doing too bad

 

[supersega]

Wow! Didn't know we had a F@H team here. I typically run it in the winter to generate some heat so right now isn't a good time, but I may hop in if I feel like I want to catch on fire in the name of SCIENCE!

 

[djinc91]

When this thread was started the entire team had 7 million points in total, we are now over 40 million.

 

[Flame]

When this thread was started the entire team had 7 million points in total, we are now over 40 million.

now we are over 73 million.

the client update now supports Covid-19 too.