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Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

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Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#31
post #11

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something. Edit: I’d be…

I had to run $ sudo apt install nvidia-opencl-dev and than manually add a GPU slot to F@H.

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#32

There was a recent HN discussion on whether this kind of approach has ever produced an effective treatment for anything. I believe the answer was Never, but lots of papers have been published . Assuming that's the case, I don't put much stock in this giving us a means of fighting the pandemic.

That's science though. You have to just try and learn as much as you can, from as many different directions as possible, because we have no idea which approach will lead to useful discoveries until it does.

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#33
post #4

Viral Research Firm? I thought F@H was run out of Stanford University. Edit: it's run out of Washington University (St. Louis School of Medicine) so it's definitely neither a firm nor viral. Mods should change the title.

Fixed now. Submitted title was "Viral research firm 'Folding at Home' has 400K users fighting C19 with CPU power".

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#34
post #11

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something. Edit: I’d be…

As mentioned, you'll need to ensure your /etc/fahclient/client.xml includes:

  
    
    
    
  
If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like:

  CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
         OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':
                 libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
                 directory
Take that missing library over to the Ubuntu Package Search[0] and it will lead you to ocl-icd-opencl-dev

  apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev
Restart fahclient and you should see something like:

   CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
  OpenCL Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:1.2 Driver:440.64
[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=bionic&arch=amd64&m...

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#35
My gas furnace supplies a baseline of heat, and my basement gets topped up with electric heat. What are the mechanics of energy usage for me?

I feel like all energy is converted to heat in my laptop. That would mean free computing power?

Am I missing something? Can energy be converted to a form I am overlooking with computational work?

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#36
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could. It only uses CPU on my machine, saying there are no work items for the GPU slot.

That happened to me initially too, but I left it running (on idle config) and it had obtained work by the next day when I looked.

Thanks, I've tried again after reading your reply and, indeed, it managed to pick up a GPU job rather quickly. I did disable the CPU slot, don't know if it's a coincidence but a couple days ago when I tried this first it spent several hours only running CPU work w/o any GPU.

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#37
post #35

My gas furnace supplies a baseline of heat, and my basement gets topped up with electric heat. What are the mechanics of energy usage for me? I feel like all energy is converted to heat in my laptop. That would mean free computing power? Am I missing something? Can energy be converted to a form I am overlooking with computational work?

All heat from your electronics (CPUs&GPUs) are waste heat, you could replace your electric heater with a computer to get "free computing power".

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#39
post #11

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something. Edit: I’d be…

You have to symlink from libOpenCL.so.1 to libOpenCL.so, then restart and it should find your GPU.

Re: Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

#40
post #34
post #11

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something. Edit: I’d be…

As mentioned, you'll need to ensure your /etc/fahclient/client.xml includes: If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like: CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2 OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so': libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Take that missing library over to the Ubun…

This doesn't fix the problem, since ocl-icd* and nvidia-libopencl* provide libOpenCL.so.1 and FAHClient looks for libOpenCL.so, so you need to add a symlink, in the same directory.
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