Folding Forum

Nowadays tons of AMD GPUs are used woldwide in Scrypt altcoins mining rigs. Petawatts of power are consumed and tons of CO2 are therefore emitted in the selfish hope to get richer if someday the coin will skyrocket.

The idea would be to add to CGMINER/GUIMINER mining softwares your folding module that could be used for a fraction of the computing time and to add a command line parameter like "--generosity x" where x is the percent of the computing power allowed to folding (the rest being used for mining).

1-5% of the rig's computing power / time dedicated to folding would certainly be an acceptable loss for many miners and would make them feel good about doing something useful for the mankind with the electricity used. It would just need some advertisement on altcoins forums about the availability of mixed mining/folding software.

Why not contact Con Kolivas, the author of cgminer, and talk with him about that? Besides being a great programmer he is an anaesthetist so he has medical background and could understand the interest of the idea.

Moreover since in less than one year Scrypt ASICs are going to scrap all the GPU-based rigs for mining, generous miners could continue to use their GPU rigs for folding simply by setting x=100% ...

Welcome to the F@H Forum jh256,

There was a discussion from a third party about combining F@H and mining to form CureCoin. You can read the discussion about it here (viewtopic.php?f=16&t=25254) and the official response from Dr. Vijay is here (viewtopic.php?p=253464#p253464).

I didn't know about CureCoin...

However the problem I see with CureCoin is: How many people are going to mine the CC? Today people mine mostly the most profitable coins at present time...

With the F@H module into CGMINER, F@H would get "folding megaflops" whatever coin people mine!

jh256 wrote:Nowadays tons of AMD GPUs are used woldwide in Scrypt altcoins mining rigs. Petawatts of power are consumed and tons of CO2 are therefore emitted in the selfish hope to get richer if someday the coin will skyrocket.

The idea would be to add to CGMINER/GUIMINER mining softwares your folding module that could be used for a fraction of the computing time and to add a command line parameter like "--generosity x" where x is the percent of the computing power allowed to folding (the rest being used for mining).

1-5% of the rig's computing power / time dedicated to folding would certainly be an acceptable loss for many miners and would make them feel good about doing something useful for the mankind with the electricity used. It would just need some advertisement on altcoins forums about the availability of mixed mining/folding software.

Why not contact Con Kolivas, the author of cgminer, and talk with him about that? Besides being a great programmer he is an anaesthetist so he has medical background and could understand the interest of the idea.

Moreover in less than one year ASIC-based Scrypt miners are going to scrap all the GPU-based rigs. Generous miners could continue to use their rigs for folding...

Cgminer is simply not equipped to do any folding... rebuilding something like you propose would probably be more 1000x more difficult then building the curecoin infrastructure. Plus the SCRYPT ASIC will never work with folding. The people that spent all the money developing that scrypt asic should have looked into building a folding asic.... complete waste of money time and electricity. I used to mine coins with gpus... never again will i touch that. My gpus are now for folding only. You would be better off pointing one card at mining and another to fold. If you have 1 card than take turns where you use that power.

Cgminer is simply not equipped to do any folding... rebuilding something like you propose would probably be more 1000x more difficult then building the curecoin infrastructure.

I think you underestimate the skills of Cgminer & F@H developpers
Moreover I don't look for the easiest solution but for the most effective one for the purpose of gathering MFlops for folding...

Plus the SCRYPT ASIC will never work with folding.

Of course not. But since ASICs rigs will scrap GPU-based rigs, those GPU rigs could be used for folding after ASICs are realeased.

You would be better off pointing one card at mining and another to fold.

Yes that would be the easiest but how many coin miners are ready to give away 33% of their potential profit (in a 3-GPU rig) for folding?
Most humans are selfish... 1% to 5% might be OK but 33%...

And don't forget that most miners have nerver heard about F@H! If Cgminer would display on start something like "Please consider setting the --generosity parameter to help finding a cancer cure" that would help making F@H known.

One possible issue is that how to define 1% to 5% on a GPU? Unlike the CPU which have an advanced scheduler, GPUs don't have any such advanced scheduling features now. Currently, when the GPU is folding a WU, it uses 100% of it and the time taken to fold varies on the GPU Model, Assigned WU and Drivers installed. Do note that for F@H research, speed (how quickly a WU folds) is very critical and given preference over quantity (how many WUs can you fold).

Having a mature GPU scheduler lies in the domain of OS manufactures and hardware vendors who develop the GPUs. Something that it out-of-scope for F@H Developers and possibly mine developers too.

Maybe if Cgminer could organize a cancer awareness event (http://www.cancer.org/aboutus/whoweare/ ... s-calendar) and within that event, an entry could be for F@H where you fold on the GPUs and/or CPUs, for a predetermined time, it would help spread the word. While it isn't want you wanted, it certainly is doable with the current resources of F@H and miners.