GPUs only

[dcorbit]

I would like to join in the effort and I have two 2080 TI Super GPUs in my machine.
There is also an AMD 3970x which I do NOT want you to use.
If it uses a couple threads, that would be OK, but I am running 24x7x365 doing my own calculations at about 85-90% CPU utilization and I find that if it goes much above that, it will cause sporadic failures and even an occasional reboot.

For now, I am not using my GPUs at all on this machine.
But when I started the "Any Disease" process, it used CPU only and ignored my GPUs, which is the exact opposite of what I want.
If this software cannot be configured in a way that is acceptable to me, I will simply remove it. I want to help, I am especially interested in aiding the Corona virus efforts. But the method of utilization of your software is not acceptable to me.

Is there a way it can be reconfigured to make CPU use minimal and GPU use maximal?

[Joe_H]

Your CPU folding slot can either be paused or removed completely.

As for the CPU usage for a GPU folding slot, part of the time the CPU thread is just in a spin wait. That is how nVidia wrote their drivers to handle moving OpenCL programming to and its results from the GPU.

[JimboPalmer]

Welcome to Folding@Home!

I am assuming you have Windows, if not the rest of this is useless.

In the lower right in the task bar is an icon of the F@H molecule. (You may have to click an up arrow icon to see it)

When you click on that icon the second choice is Advanced Control. Click on that

Now to the left is an icon saying Configure, click that
One of the tabs will say Slots, click that
Now there is a white area that may have a gpu and a cpu line. click on cpu and then click Remove.
You are done and it won't try to run CPU projects. It will still use some CPU time for GPU projects.

[bruce]

I would like to join in the effort and I have two 2080 TI Super GPUs in my machine.
There is also an AMD 3970x which I do NOT want you to use.

You'll need to manually install the drivers from NVidia.com if you haven't done so recently.

Nevermind: When you add slots for the GPUs FAH may or may not create a slot for the AMD but if it does, you can remove it just like you removed the CPU slot. (I wish I had a strike-through font)

Setting pause-on-start = true will prevent the new slots from starting before you get them configured the way you want them.

[JimboPalmer]

bruce has been typing here for 20 hours straight, I am taking naps!

bruce the AMD 3970x is his CPU, it is not a different graphics card he does not want to use. That simplifies his problem. All he need to is remove his cpu slot.

[bruce]

Opps. Sorry. I'll edit my comment.

[Paragon]

First off dcorbit, thanks for joining! Sounds like you've got a great setup for folding and this will help a bunch.

What the others have said is correct. Folding@Home uses things called slots to configure the different bits of hardware in your computer. Since you have two GPUs, you'll need to make sure you have two GPU slots, and remove the default CPU slots. On Windows, you will see nearly 100% core usage on one core per GPU in order to "feed" these GPUs with information. So, with two high-end GPUs in your machine, you will see a lot of activity on two of your CPU cores to keep these cards going. Note that a lot of this is not real work, but the driver constantly checking the card to see if it needs more work (as mentioned above, this is a peculiarity of how Nvidia wrote their Windows drivers. I don't think AMD drivers do this). It actually doesn't matter that much in terms of slowing those cores down.

The thing is, this CPU workload is set to low priority by default, so if those cores are needed for other tasks by processes you are actively interacting with or running on the machine, the GPU feeding tasks will be back-burnered while your CPU does the things you want it to do, and then go back to feeding the GPUs when free.

Note that at the moment, there is not a specific drop-down menu in the folding@home client to select only COVID-19 work units. However, we've been advised that these WUs are getting prioritized by the distribution servers, so all of the F@H network should push those out before the rest of the "general population" work units. I also expect a ramping up of COVID-19 molecules for us to solve, due to the immediate emergency need.