Can Folding@home be added as a BOINC project?

[jjch]

Due to the recent retirement of the Poem@home BOINC project I have been
looking for another project to keep several of my AMD GPU's busy. I'm
particularly interested in projects that are related to cancer research.

As far as I can tell Folding@home can only be run as a separate application.
I already have a large investment in BOINC, BOINC stats (BAM) and would like
to add Folding@home to my current BOINC projects so it is all contained in
one application. I cannot find any current information to set it up this way.

If someone could provide a response if this is even possible it would be
appreciated. If this is not currently available I would be willing to try it as a
test and work on finding an appropriate solution. I am running BOINC version
7.6.22 but starting to plan upgrades to version 7.6.33.

Thank you,
JJCH

[Joe_H]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

Unfortunately this will not be possible. As I understand it, PG investigated the possibility of distributing folding through BOINC a number of years ago and found it was incompatible with the way F@H is set up.

[jjch]

OK, thank you for the confirmation. If there is a change to this in the future let me know. At this time I will most likely set the AMD GPU's to run the Einstein@home project. At least that seems a bit more beneficial than SETI although I do think the science is interesting.

I am already a big contributor to GPUGRID with several Nvidia Quadro and GTX GPU cards. Also donating quite a bit of CPU time to Rosetta@home and some to World Community Grid when Rosetta runs out of work. If anyone knows of another BOINC based AMD GPU project for Cancer research I would be interested.

[bruce]

There will be no change of that nature.

1) FAH and BOINC do not share CPUs effectively and
2) BOINC doesn't have the same understanding of due date goals as FAH. BOINC's goal is to meet the project goals and provides zero benefits if you complete things earlier. On the other hand, the value of an early return of a FAH WU is substantial and it provides bonus points which increase exponentially the more you beat the published goals.

Using SETI for an example, signals from every piece of the sky are pre-recorded and can be returned in any order. Delaying the return of your work or doesn't matter as long as you complete it (except if the project is approaching completion.

I'm not familiar with cancer projects other than here at FAH, but one possibility is to dedicate your CPU threads to BOINC and your GPU to FAH. That minimizes inherent conflicts for resources and maximizes what you can donate equitably to both families of projects.

Poem@home's primary goal was predicting protein structures and those which cause disease. FAH goals are to understand not only the final structure but the intermediate steps to figure out WHY a protein can missfold. In other words we look at the exceptions to Anfinsen's dogma.

[bossmaniac]

...
2) BOINC doesn't have the same understanding of due date goals as FAH. BOINC's goal is to meet the project goals and provides zero benefits if you complete things earlier. On the other hand, the value of an early return of a FAH WU is substantial and it provides bonus points which increase exponentially the more you beat the published goals.

Aas far i know, gpugrid gives you a bonus when you return the wu within 24 hours, so it is possible.

[Joe_H]

Yes, GPUgrid does have a bonus system of 50% extra points for returns within 24 hours and 25% for within 48 hours. But those are not comparable with the F@H QRB which is calculated by a formula that varies over the entire return period from assignment time to the end of the preferred deadline. Most WU's are returned in times measured in hours, not days.

[bruce]

If you're running more than one BOINC project, do you have to adjust something so that the bonus project(s) finish before your system devotes some of it's resources to the non-bonus project ... or does that happen automatically?

[jjch]

You need to set the Resource share setting higher for the projects you want to have the highest priority. You can also set the Resource share to zero so work will only run when there isn't any work to do from higher priority projects.

[bossmaniac]

It would be great to have folding@home in boinc. I don't want to support only one project and boinc is in this case very versatile. With two diffent clients it is always a pain in the ass to manage the ressouces. You can asign the gpu only to one client at the same time. So for that, boinc is the better choice.
If you don't have a boinc version because of the credit algorithum, gpugrind show that it is possible to reward useres which return workunits fast.
If it's because of the cpu usage effenicy, i don't know how big the differece are, but boinc is the gateway to more cpus, even if it means to use a client that makes not the best use of the computing power.

[bruce]

1) BOINC is a family of many project using a common software base. So is Folding. See http://fah-web.stanford.edu/new/psummary.html. You see many different projects run by different people studying many different things.

2) No, Folding cannot use the same software as BOINC. There are several fundamental differences between the software being used primarily because they are designed to use the hardware in different ways.

[7im]

In my view, BOINC was designed with the "lowest common denominator" in mind, to work with as many types of projects as possible, not really specialized for performance. One size fits as many as we can.

On the other hand, FAH hasn't been saddled with those kinds of restraints, having launched the first true SMP client, first PS3 client, and first GPU client for distributed projects. But FAH does trade a little ease of use for much better performance, and leading edge developments, like the NaCl browser client, and the new smart phone client.

[bossmaniac]

Hmm, i see..

1) But all projects are medicine subjects, no astronomy, physic, chemstry, mathematics, climate subjects...
2) You need to put a lot develoment work into it, to make your algorithms compatible with boinc and in the end you get a less efficent result. When a workunit takes 1 hour in the fah client, the same workunit might take 1 and a half hour in boinc. You don't want to spent time and money on a questionable development, because no body can say if and how many of the boinc user would use folding boinc to justify the effort. Not mention the double maintenace of two clients.

But if people see, that there is a medice subject and might look for something with more sence that calculating primenumbers... then they may see that there is a even more efficent client which create more points . Ifrom the same gpu....
It could be worth it, if the delevopment and maintenace isn't too costly.
Free dc say, that seti@home has 4.116.005 hosts. (dunno how many of them are dead/old not anymore used hardware) Maybe some are sicj of that E.T. doesn't answer

[JimboPalmer]

Boss Maniac, I think you are looking at the donor's point of view. Lets look at the researcher's point of view:
1) you could release a project to run on the nonBOINCed client and a WU gets done every hour, and the project gets done and you publish results. (fame and fortune, in theory)
2) you could release a project that uses the BOINCified client that takes a WU 10 hours, and the project finishes ten times slower. (delayed fame and fortune - publish or perish)

As you can see, even if Cauldron Development writes a BOINC client for Pande Labs, no WUs will ever be released for it as the researchers want results in their lifetime.

[bruce]

BOINC is designed to accommodate working on multiple Work Units concurrently. It will share resources as needed including if one project needs to be temporarily suspended while working on another. This maximizes the total number of WUs completed at the expense of the speed of individual projects. Deadlines are intended as guidelines.

FAH is designed to dedicate either the CPU or a GPU to a SINGLE project. No other projects are allowed to take priority over completing that specific WU and no other projects can be started until that project is completed. This minimizes the time between WU assignment and WU completion, at the expense of potentially sharing some resources with another project. Deadlines are absolute.

Running a BOINC project currently with a FAH project is certain to extend the wall-clock time of that FAH WU. (BAD for FAH's science, and reducing the points awarded).

e.g.- devoting half of your CPU resources to FAH may allow you to meet the deadline, but if all of your CPU resources are devoted to FAH, it will be completed in half the time, earning a significantly bigger bonus.

[schernichkin]

Dear sir, as it been noticed in previous replies, BOINC and FAH are completely different projects with different policies infrastructure and software base. They are not integrated at this point of time and probably will not benifit much from possible integration. But being in the same situation as you, I've discovered that they work side by side perfectly. Since Poem retirement my BOINC projects are WCG, Rosetta and few others. None of them issues any work units suitable for ATI GPU, so I basically disabled GPU in my BOINC application. On the other hand I've configured my FAH client to use GPU only and not to use CPU. Now I have both applications running on same computer and I did not noticed they interfering with each other in any way.