Folding Forum

Came across this in an RSS feed I follow:

"Clustercorp and its partners have joined to provide free EC2 instances to run Folding@Home in the cloud with Rocks+ during Supercomputing 2010 (SC10)..."
http://www.hpcwire.com/topic/systems/Cl ... 85929.html

Too bad they don't allow us to configure the clients running in the instances, I looked at their stats, and they're only running one SMP WU under the username you provide and their team ... no bonus to expect in these conditions (but I don't know if they're even aware of the bonus ...)

Are they aware of the Final Deadline?

There's no doubt that the free processing will be lower priority than everything that they'll be able to sell to a paying customer so the speed isn't going to be something to write home about but at least some of the completed WUs will be a benefit to FAH.

The Queue of work that hasn't started yet seems to be growing faster than the list of WUs that have been completed. I guess that's good.

So are they actually running F@H in a cluster configuration? or do they just have a bunch of linux boxes running F@H?

nitrobass24 wrote:So are they actually running F@H in a cluster configuration? or do they just have a bunch of linux boxes running F@H?

It is nothing more than EC2 instances like you can buy via Amazon.com.. it is not a cluster setup at all. Additionally, this is only occurring while the conference is running so it's pretty useless.

So, dumb question. Can an individual sign up for the free Amazon Web Services, and run F@H under their Free Usage Tier? If so, how would you do that?

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Hi All -- the demo for SC10 was managed as a Rocks cluster (i.e. one frontend node was used to coordinate the provisioning of compute nodes and the job queue). When a username was submitted, a new compute node was created on the fly and provisioned with Rocks+ -- the work unit was then delivered to that individual node for processing. Upon completion, the node was terminated, and a new node was provisioned to run the next job in the queue (part of our goal was to demonstrate the automatic provisioning of a cluster in EC2 using Rocks+).

If you're interested in setting up Folding@Home to run on an individual instance, I'd recommend just starting with a reference Amazon Linux AMI and installing/launching FAH by hand -- very simple if you are just running one instance. The latest version of FAH will run on CC1 instances, but on the less expensive Micros, I'd recommend FAH504-Linux.exe (note: these take a very long time to complete, as these instances aren't designed for heavy processing).

-Tim

Thanks for the info. What do you mean by a "very long time to complete"? Would a classic client be completed by its deadline?