beta projects

[teoparas]

Hey guys, i was wondering what is the purpose of BETA PROJECTS for cpu or gpu. I mean, obviously its a simulation of something but how does a workunit in beta " help "? are they being prepared to be sent as a workunit to be folded again, or serves as a different way of investigating science>? for instance i run gpu beta and i get a lot of " 17640" workunits but i never encountered them when i am not in beta

[muziqaz]

You are not supposed to run Beta, unless you are ready to report issues or findings in Beta sub forum, which is invite only.
Beta is projects are projects which need to be checked by testers if they are working fine and are not broken

[arisu]

It's exactly as muziqaz says (and you should also read the FAQ about beta projects: viewtopic.php?t=8, although some of the FAQ is outdated i.e there is no -bigadv or -advmethods anymore). I'll elaborate on why exactly beta testing matters, in case you're curious for deeper details.

A work unit is a data file that specifies all the atoms' positions and starting velocities and settings for the simulation (like what forces will be used and how many steps of the simulation that are to be done). Once your computer finishes the WU, the final positions of atoms and their last velocities will become the starting positions and velocities for the next generation of the WU, to be sent out to someone else.

The researcher can do some alpha testing on their own and that will find the simple mistakes like placing two atoms in the same position or specifying invalid forces, but eventually they will need to run the simulation for a prolonged period, which takes more computers to do in a reasonable amount of time than the researcher personally has access to. That's where beta projects come in: The early stages of the simulation are sent out to people who are able to recognize and report bugs, and who know the system well enough to distinguish mistakes on their end from mistakes in the simulation.

Eventually, non-beta folders will receive work units from project 17640 where the beta testers left off (perhaps with some tweaks to fix issues discovered during beta testing). It's technically possible for a non-beta tester to enable the beta option to receive beta WUs as you've seen, and it's not disallowed or a violation of the terms of service, but it's not a good idea. The best way you can help the project is to run normal WUs that are out of beta.

Here's the technical reason if you'd like:

Folding works by taking the positions of each atom and their velocities, calculating the forces applied on each atom by the other nearby atoms and by external forces, and then moving the atoms by one "step" according to this information. This process is repeated over and over. If the step length is very short, simulation accuracy improves but it becomes too slow. But if the step length is too long, then atoms can clip into each and the simulation will "blow up". Here is how the GROMACS manual describes blowing up (GROMACS is the simulation software that FAH uses for CPUs and although they use different simulation software called OpenMM for GPUs, the general concept is identical):

To give a bit more background, it is important to remember that molecular dynamics numerically integrates Newton’s equations of motion by taking small, discrete timesteps, and using these timesteps to determine new velocities and positions from velocities, positions, and forces at the previous timestep. If forces become too large at one timestep, this can result in extremely large changes in velocity/position when going to the next timestep. Typically, this will result in a cascade of errors: one atom experiences a very large force one timestep, and thus goes shooting across the system in an uncontrolled way in the next timestep, overshooting its preferred location or landing on top of another atom or something similar. This then results in even larger forces the next timestep, more uncontrolled motions, and so on. Ultimately, this will cause the simulation package to crash in some way, since it cannot cope with such situations.

The researchers who are designing the work units can't just put together the atoms and starting velocities and click start and expect it to work every time. They have to carefully tune everything so that it runs as fast as it can and calculates only the necessary forces, but still gives results that accurately model reality. This means walking a delicate line between creating a WU that is fast but unstable/inaccurate and a WU that is stable/accurate but too slow, and sometimes they won't be able to tell until later in the simulation. If it doesn't blow up after the first few billion steps, they can conclude that it probably won't blow up at all, and they can bring the WU out of beta and let everyone else resume folding from where the beta testers left off.

This isn't the only thing that can go wrong with a WU, but it's one of the most common reasons. Beta team members have to keep a close eye on the folding progress to make sure that they can report problems caused by bad WUs so the researchers can fix them.

[toTOW]

Hey guys, i was wondering what is the purpose of BETA PROJECTS for cpu or gpu. I mean, obviously its a simulation of something but how does a workunit in beta " help "? are they being prepared to be sent as a workunit to be folded again, or serves as a different way of investigating science>? for instance i run gpu beta and i get a lot of " 17640" workunits but i never encountered them when i am not in beta

Did you even read the stickified post on this forum : Brief Overview Of F@h Beta Team Membership ?

[BobWilliams757]

In all fairness, when you have a simple box to check in the user interface, people are going to use it. And it's not like the same thing didn't happen with earlier versions regardless.

Being that the majority of points/stablity/core issues/etc take place within the internal testers now there really isn't much for beta testers to do.... in theory those issues are already worked out. The idea that "what happens in beta stays in beta" is great if it's followed and access is limited. But in reality I've seen more in open discussion on Discord than what goes in the beta forum.

[arisu]

It is behind an "advanced" button but a lot of people who use FAH fashion themselves power users who are used to clicking on "advanced" to see the options under it.

Maybe it shouldn't be possible to activate via the web client, and only via the config file or something, if so many random users select beta that it becomes an issue for the project.

[jackal]

It is behind an "advanced" button but a lot of people who use FAH fashion themselves power users who are used to clicking on "advanced" to see the options under it.

Maybe it shouldn't be possible to activate via the web client, and only via the config file or something, if so many random users select beta that it becomes an issue for the project.

I agree. It's also not obvious what it is, and I had to do quite a bit of Googling to stumble upon this thread.

I thought it would enable access to beta cores, like the 0x26 core, which apparently (maybe) has support for AMD HIP compute and should be much faster on my 7800XT. I didn't realize I'd be possibly impeding the science being done on a project, and while I do keep a reasonably close eye on my WUs and would likely notice if one failed, I didn't have the knowledge of what I was supposed to do with that information until I read arisu's post in this thread. (And no, I didn't see the 15-year-old thread on what the beta program is until I saw it linked from this thread.)

If the documentation of what it is inside the client is lacking and regular users aren't supposed to use it, it probably shouldn't be in such an easily-accessible place. (And yes, I'm one of those who fashion myself a power user and always dig into the "advanced" settings of any program I run... )

[muziqaz]

Regarding HIP, the world will know when it is released. We would not just release such an improvement low key and not tell anyone
There is no HIP in the wild yet

[Joe_H]

I would have to check, but I don't recall any current projects released to public or beta to test Core_26 before today. One project has moved to Beta using that core just today, the announcement is in that group. There was a brief test of Core_26 released to all a few weeks ago by the researcher to get error reports from a wider range of hardware and OS setups than available to internal testers.

And no, HIP is not yet ready for release even to Beta.

[arisu]

I would have to check, but I don't recall any current projects released to public or beta to test Core_26 before today. One project has moved to Beta using that core just today, the announcement is in that group. There was a brief test of Core_26 released to all a few weeks ago by the researcher to get error reports from a wider range of hardware and OS setups than available to internal testers.

And no, HIP is not yet ready for release even to Beta.

There have been core26 releases in beta for weeks now like project 17650. Maybe that's the brief test, and the test just got extended or something? But core26 won't use HIP until client 8.4.10 is out because it needs that to enable it: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-cl ... t/pull/328

[Joe_H]

That is for a feature to toggle use of HIP on or off, needed for internal testing just as they also toggle CUDA on or off to use OpenCL instead. It is not needed to use a core with HIP available. For it to make any difference, first they have to have HIP implemented in a working core, that has not yet happened.

[muziqaz]

Fahclient still needs to be aware of the platform, when it starts, the way it currently knows if GPU supports OpenCL or CUDA