Folding Forum

Sorry if this isn't the right thread.
I'm new to folding@home and i really must ask some questions.
On web control it says that my cpu and gpu are working on 2 different projects at the same time, but in protein viewer I can only see the project my cpu is working on?
Also, what's the difference between cpu and gpu folding?
I have i7-4720hq and gtx 980m.
Btw, wouldn't it be better to have both cpu and gpu working on the same project?
Thanks in advance!

Ilijas_Sahinovic,

Welcome to FAH. Folding at Home projects are broken into many work units that are specifically dedicated to either a GPU or a CPU. The core for each type of project is different. I believe that to get a work unit to work on both the GPU and CPU at the same time would require synchronization and much more traffic on the bus between the CPU and the GPU. This additional overhead would probably reduce overall productivity. Each donor's machines would have a considerable variance of available CPU power to the size of GPU computational power. It is much simpler to have the to resources to be handled separately.

As it is, there is some work for the GPU work units that is done on the CPU. This is storage of periodic check points and sanity checks. When FAH is setup, the default is to dedicate one thread of the CPU for this purpose.

Ilijas_Sahinovic wrote:Also, what's the difference between cpu and gpu folding?

The CPU and GPU are different components in your computer. The FAH project has spent considerable time and money to get the maximum performance out of each one. Unfortunately, they require different types of software so (as was stated above) they work best when working on separate projects. That software comes in a form called a "core."

Occasionally, new scientific capabilities are rolled out as a new core but it's the scientists who develop and manage both the cores and the projects assigned to each one. (It's not something you really need to worry about.) You can decide whether to run both the CPU and the GPU or either one independently but the total amount of work completed will be higher if you run both.

Alright, thanks for the explanation!
Just one more question, why can't i see the gpu project on protein viewer?

The GPU folding cores do not currently provide the image information needed by the viewer to display the protein. Whether this might be provided in a future version of the folding cores, or the FAHViewer app might be rewritten to do this is not known. But as I understand it, this is a lower priority item compared to getting server code updated to handle supporting a greater range of assignment parameters and doing the same for the client app.

One of the major reasons why the Viewer doesn't work with GPUs has been identified and a fix is planned. I can't promise which beta FAHClient will incorporate that change or whether it will work in the first iteration, but there's hope.... "soon"