26 March 2020

Folding@Home

The corona virus and COVID-19 are at the top of everyone’s mind right now. The whole world is trying to deal with this pandemic. States are issuing stay-at-home orders and just about every company is trying to figure out how to allow their staff to work from home. The least that a tech nerd like me can do is contribute a few clock cycles towards the research that will hopefully help to bring about an end to all this madness.

Folding@Home (F@H) is a project focused on disease research thru distributed computing power. They get folks like you and I to share our otherwise unused computer power (when our PCs sit idle) to solve calculations that help them get answers to their medical questions about proteins and disease. The more people that set-up the Folding@Home client in their Home-Labs or on that spare laptops/PCs laying around their house to contribute towards their project, the bigger the distributed supercomputer we create. How cool is that!

Before the global COVID-19 outbreak F@H had roughly 30,000 users globally that contributed their spare compute power. In the past couple weeks, that number has surged. They have over 400,000 users that are now contributing and that number keeps growing daily. The F@H project is now at over 470 PetaFLOPs (FLOPs = floating point operations per second) of raw compute power. That makes it over twice as fast as the fastest supercomputer in the world (2019). Not only that, but it is faster the the top seven supercomputers combined. Combined! That’s equivalent to the horsepower of 27,433,824 CPU/GPU cores. I can’t even fathom that. They are predicting that F@H will soon reach exaFLOP levels. That’s a billion billion operations per second. Totally crazy!

Here are a couple links to news articles about the recent explosion in growth around the Folding@Home project:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/03/24/the-new-supercomputer-researching-coronavirus-is-powered-by-400000-ordinary-pc-users/

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-pushes-foldinghomes-crowdsourced-molecular-science-to-exaflop-levels/

While F@H 1,200%+ increase in contributors and associated surge in demand has temporarily lead to a shortage of work units, the F@H team is working to expand and increase their capacity to serve units. In F@H terms, work units are the smaller bits of a larger workload, and are what is actually sent to each user.

It takes just minutes to setup. They have clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as support for both CPUs and GPUs. Once it is setup, it’s effortless on your part and just runs in the background.

Now that you are ready to contribute, the first step is to create a passkey. The passkey will identify you and will allow FAH to assign you work units. To create your passkey, use the link below.

https://apps.foldingathome.org/getpasskey

Just to let you know, when I signed up this week, it took a few hours for me to receive my passkey from F@H. So don’t get upset if you don’t hear from them immediately after clicking “Get Passkey”.

Once you have your Passkey, follow one of my posts (coming soon!) below to install and deploy the Folding@Home client on your system.

Category: Containers, Software | LEAVE A COMMENT
26 March 2020

Howto: Folding@Home – VMware Fling

VMware is doing their part to help make it easy for folks to contribute to the Folding@Home (F@H) project. They have packaged together an appliance as an OVA file on VMware Flings that you can deploy on any of their virtualization products either on your hardware or in a cloud, using Workstation or Fusion, or ESXi hosts. That means that with just a few clicks you can download and deploy a VM running on the super light-weight PhotonOS that has the F@H client pre-installed and is ready-to-go.

You might be asking why this is so great, I mean the client isn’t exactly difficult to setup on other operating systems. Well you are correct. This fling is geared towards VMware virtualization enthusiasts and professionals that already have homelabs or datacenters, with idle compute power they want to contribute. By using those idle resources and dedicating an VM appliance towards contributing, it basically becomes a set-it-and-forget-it deal that will always be chugging along in the background.

If you are new to virtualization, then deploying this appliance can serve as a great way to learn about flings, appliances, and deploying a VM in general while contributing to a cause.

Note: If you intent to deploy this in your company’s data center, or your work pc/laptop, you should make sure to have permission to allow for it from the appropriate people in your organization before deploying, just to cover your ass.

Step 1: Create your Passkey

If you don’t already have a username and passkey, then the first thing you’ll need to do is create your user and get your passkey. You’ll use this later as you deploy the appliance. If you already have yours, then proceed to the next step.

https://apps.foldingathome.org/getpasskey

Just to let you know, when I signed up earlier this week, it took a few hours for me to receive my passkey from F@H. So don’t get upset if you don’t hear from them immediately after clicking “Get Passkey”.

Step 2: Download the Fling

The first thing we need to do is download the OVA from the WMware Flings website.
https://flings.vmware.com/vmware-appliance-for-folding-home

Step 3: Deploy

Workstation

1. Double-click on the OVA file you download to launch VMware Workstation. It will present you a wizard to “Import Virtual Machine”.
Enter a name and file path for your F@H appliance, then click ‘Next’.

2. Now to work down the options from the left pane…

-Enter a hostname
-Enter an IP address (leave blank if DHCP)
-Gateway
-DNS

-Enter password for the appliance; VMware1!
*This is the root password for the appliance

-Enter you F@H username
-Enter your F@H team (Leave as 52737 to contribute as part of VMware’s team)
-Enter your Passkey
-GPU (If using a GPU change to TRUE, if you are using a virtual machine with a GPU, this must be in passthrough mode)
-Enter F@H management networks info (can probably leave alone)
-F@H password defaults to the OS password (VMware1!)

Then click ‘Import’.

Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to fold as me… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.

3. Once the import is complete, it should automatically power on. Go ahead and power it off. The first thing I recommend to do is upgrade the VM.

Click on “Upgrade this virtual machine” and follow the wizard to upgrade it to the highest version that is compatible in your environment. For me, it is Workstation 14.x.

Because this is an OVA file and so easy to re-deploy if I screw something up, I choose to just alter the VM, and not make a clone.

4. Next step is to edit the VM and add more CPUs, if desired. Click on “Edit virtual machine settings”.

Click on ‘Processors’. From the “Number of processors” dropdown you can choose how many processors you want to dedicate to this appliance. Then click ‘Ok’.

5. Go ahead and power on your F@H appliance.

ESXi / vCenter

1. In vCenter or on your ESXi host, right click on your Datacenter/Cluster/Host and select “Deploy OVF Template”.

2. Select the OVA file you downloaded earlier, and click ‘Next’.

3. Give your VM appliance a name, and click ‘Next’.

4. Walk thru the rest of the wizard. Choose your computer resource you wish to deploy it on to. Review the details. Select your storage. Select your network.

5. Customize the F@H template setting for your environment.
-Hostname
-IP address
-Gateway
-DNS
-OS ‘root’ password
-F@H username
-F@H passkey
-GPU
-F@H remote management password

Then click ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’ to deploy your new appliance.

6. Once deployed, make sure the vm is powered off. Right click on the vm and select ‘Edit Settings…”. Select CPU and from the dropdown adjust the CPU to the desired number you wish to dedicate to your appliance, and click ‘Ok’.

7. Power on your F@H vm and you are ready to start contributing.

Step 4: Troubleshooting

Once your appliance is up and running, there are a few command that you will find helpful.

Start and Stop
/etc/init.d/FAHClient start
/etc/init.d/FAHClient stop
Restart
/etc/init.d/FAHClient restart
Status
/etc/init.d/FAHClient status
Check the Logs
/etc/init.d/FAHClient log -v
Check CPU stats
top

With the huge growth of contributors to F@H, it has made getting work units more difficult. If you check your logs and see messages similar the what is in my screenshot below, then your appliance IS working, it is just waiting for work.

Leave it running and you’ll eventually see it start chugging along when it gets a work unit.

Also, on the F@H fling website you can also find two PDFs, one about deployment and another with FAQs. Give those a look if you run into any other issues.

Category: PhotonOS, VMWare, Workstation | LEAVE A COMMENT
26 March 2020

Howto: Folding@Home – Linux

The Folding@Home (F@H) team has released v7 (currently v7.5.1) of their F@H software. It has a newer simpler graphical interface aimed at making it easier for people to install and contribute to the project. Here is how to make it run on your Linux computer. Linux has been growing in popularity as a desktop OS, so it’s great to see projects like this include it as a viable platform for contributing to F@H.

You can find F@H’s official documentation for Linux here – https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/installation-guides/linux/

Install F@H

I’m going to use a 64-bit Ubuntu v19.10 desktop to show you how to install F@H. You can download the latest Ubuntu Desktop versions here.

1. Download the installer from here: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/ (link opens in new tab)

2. Click on the “fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb” installer.

2. Allow the file to open with the default software installer.

3. Click the ‘Install’ button.

4. Enter your password, if asked, to allow the F@H client to get installed.

5. Enter your F@H user and passkey, then click ‘Next’.
*Make sure to check the box to automatically start the FAHClient.

6. The install itself should be really quick.

7. Open a browser on your Linux machine and in the address bar go to: 127.0.0.1:7396

It will open the F@H webgui where you can watch your work progress or adjust settings.

8. Just like that you are contributing to F@H! The client will be running as a service in the background.

I know that I left my F@H username and passkey in my post. Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.

Category: Linux | LEAVE A COMMENT
26 March 2020

Howto: Folding@Home – Windows

The Folding@Home (F@H) team has released v7 (currently v7.5.1) of their F@H software. It has a newer simpler graphical interface aimed at making it easier for people to install and contribute to the project. Here is how to make it run on your Windows computer.

You can find F@H’s official documentation for Windows here – https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/installation-guides/windows/

Install F@H

1. Download the installer from here: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/, or alternatively from here.

2. Double-click the file to start the installation.
If an UAC prompt is displayed, click ‘Yes’ to continue.

3. Click ‘Next’ on the Welcome screen to continue.

4. Read and accept the license agreement by clicking ‘I Agree’.

5. You have two options, do the ‘Express install’ or the ‘Custom install’. I am going to click the ‘Custom install’ to be able to have a bit more control over the installation.

6. Choose the install folder destination. I’m leaving it as the default.

7. Choose the folder for your data. Again, I’m leaving it as the default.

8. You have three choices as to when you want F@H to start; (1) At login, (2) As a service at boot, or (3) manually. You also have the option to enable a F@H screensaver.

9. Click ‘Finish’ to complete the installation.

Running F@H

1. If the F@H client did not launch or is already installed, click on it’s icon on your desktop or in your start menu.

2. The first time F@H runs, you will likely see a popup message from Windows Firewall, asking to grant F@H network access.

3. It will open the F@H in your broswer. Once open, click on the link to ‘Change Identity’.

4. Enter your F@H username, passkey, and team you want to be associated with.

5. After you have entered your user info, you can see your points earned and work units you have been assigned. That’s it! You are now contributing to F@H.

I know that I left my F@H username and passkey in my post. Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.

Category: Windows 10 | LEAVE A COMMENT