Folding Forum

The problem with hybrid core support is that it's beyond the scope of FAH. The FAH software uses pre-made software libraries for folding. For CPUs, it uses a software suite called GROMACS.

It's possible that FAH could set up separate MPI ranks for E cores and P cores, but by default it only uses a single rank, and the load balancer can't do much to balance loads within a rank, and the performance difference between P cores and E cores is so vast that the load balancer has no chance. It's much better at balancing loads between ranks. I could give this a test and see how well GROMACS performs on a hybrid system using separate MPI ranks and suggest that internally, but there are a few reasons why I wouldn't expect fast results:

• Detection of hybrid systems is fragile and the code to do it reliably isn't in any of FAH's libraries yet
• FAH has extensively tested single-rank folding and has little experience with multi-rank folding
• Developer time is stretched very thin and not many people are working on the GROMACS FAH cores

I'm sure there will be a solution eventually as hybrid cores get more common, but until then the best thing you can do is just fold entirely on P cores, or E cores if you have too few P cores.