Folding Forum

Apologies if this has been asked before, is there any plan to make Folding@Home available on Raspberry Pi 2? We already have a port for the Android devices, does that mean porting to Raspberry Pi 2 would be easy?

The Port to Android was by Sony, if you found some company with equally deep pockets who wanted one for the Pi, it would be easy, yes. I can't imagine what company that would be.

Yes, I shouldn't even have posted the thread - it is all answered here: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21688

I guess I will use my Raspberry Pi for Eienstein@Home then. Folding@Home is too classy for Raspberry Pi. haha.

If I would not be so lazy I would try an Odroid with Android ... That could work ... http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php
Not Pie though ...

10 in a stack should push you in the ranking

Yes, but those things are so expensive, might as well invest in a really old machine with a powerful graphics card.

The real target in the Pi would be the GPU -- which would mean a lot more work to implement it. But it could then run on all models, 0, 1, and 2. The contribution from the CPUs even on a Pi2 (4 cores at 1GHz if overclocked, 1GB mem) is not going to be earth shattering, even if there are a lot of them around.

Surely the magic Android port by Sony only uses CPU, right?

fangfufu wrote:Surely the magic Android port by Sony only uses CPU, right?

No one knows, we assume so. It is a closed source project.

Android is irrelevant for the Pi. It doesn't run well enough to be recognised by the Foundation. The "standard" OS is a flavour of Linux, but as it isn't an Intel/AMD platform the FAH code would need to be ported, even for CPU folding.

fangfufu wrote:Yes, I shouldn't even have posted the thread - it is all answered here: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21688

I guess I will use my Raspberry Pi for Eienstein@Home then. Folding@Home is too classy for Raspberry Pi. haha.

Though you apparently intended this as a joke, let me say that "Classy" isn't really the issue here. FAH's development work has always been aimed squarely at popular products. There's little doubt that there are a lot more potential for a client that runs on Android than one that's limited to the Pi.

Perhaps the only real exception was the client aimed at the PlayStation 3. Yes, a lot of them were sold, but not as many as Android phones. I suspect that Sony's "deep pockets" had a lot to do with the development of a PS3 client and maybe it helped them sell enough more of them to recoup their investment. To the best of my knowledge Sony did a very good job of folding with the Cell CPU plus they did an outstanding job of using the GPU for graphics. I'm not sure if that helps us guess what they did with the Android client, but as somebody has already said, a CPU-based client is a lot easier to port to a new environment than something that uses the GPU to do anything other than Graphics.