Folding Forum

Howdy,

Is there something I can add to the config.xml file so that F@H will only work on the COVID-19 tasks?


Thanks

Welcome to the folding@home support forum.

The short answer to your question is "Not at this time".

When the coronavirus projects are released to the public (soon) they will be given a higher than normal prority so that, in itself, should ensure you working on those projects. Other possibilities incude a new Cause category such as Infectious Diseases, for example, may be added when possible and that will give folders more choice as to which type of project they would rather support but that could involve a new client and development is fairly busy lately making sure there's enough resources for the new folders.

Also, consider if you really do not wish to fold for any other cause. Would helping to treat cancer really be that bad an idea rather than going idle when there are no move COVID-19 WUs?

No. Would be fine to work on other jobs, if corona is prioritized

The only thing you can do on your side at the moment is to make sure that you selected "Any" for the Cause parameter.

Hello - same question on Windows.

As for other diseases, the health effects of covid-19 are awful particularly to a percentage of elders / grandparents.
It is believed that +70% of the population will get it; for the moment here in France the local health agencies are doing a great job tracking the contamination chains and organizing clusters.
But the # of contamined people gets multiplied by 10 every week.
It's thus important and urgent to organize a citizens movement and convert computers to fight coronavirus with your Folding @ Home.
Also use our various social networks to advertise.

I'd like to provide my humble computing resources during the night, in priority against this virus.

There is no coronavirus category in the user interface, could you please add it also on Windows?

We'll followup with other diseases later.
Many thanks
Olivier

Unfortunately there is currently no specific option to select only a specific virus. Adding such an option requires the construction of a new FAHClient and changes to the assignment logic on the servers, neither of which can be accomplished quickly.

Specific FAH projects and their priority are established by the scientists at FAH, not by donor demand. Nevertheless, considering the importance of this research, I have little doubt that they'll make COVID19 a high priority. Other active projects will continue to be intermixed at some (unknown to me) priority. Further information may be available at any time.

Specific projects are distributed to both Windows and Linux using the same logic.

I'll summarize in one sentence : if you want to run COVID-19 projects in priority, you need an AMD or NV GPU with up to date drivers downloaded from AMD or NV website, and a FAH client set up to "Any" setting for Cause Preference.

At this time all the projects for combatting COVID-19 are GPU projects, your CPU will work on other diseases if you let it.

Is there any info on what diseases are CPU vs GPU? It's really not helpful to just list "any disease" and have no idea what you're actually contributing to. theres a blog post saying that COVID has been added but doesnt say you HAVE to be running a GPU to be any value, etc.


Folks should be able to select, or at least KNOW what they are working on in a rational manner

Assuming you have your prefernece seto to ANY:
If you fold with your GPU, you're most likely to get COVID19 assignments based on the priorirty set at the server.
If you fold with your CPU you will certainly get a non-COVID19 project.
If you fold with both, you'll get both types of projects.

If you choose to run both, will use more power and generate more heat. You'll also complete more science but they shouldn't interfere with each other unless you exceed the capably of your power supply and/or your computer's heat dissipation characteristics.

I understand that, I mean from a UI/UX perspective, people should know what the app is doing

And with the recent pandemic, people should be able to opt in to COVID exclusively. All my opinion ofc

dbr wrote:I understand that, I mean from a UI/UX perspective, people should know what the app is doing

And with the recent pandemic, people should be able to opt in to COVID exclusively. All my opinion ofc

We could wait until Joseph Coffland re-writes the user interface to show COVID-19 as a choice, but we will waste a lot of time waiting for that. He writes the Client, the Control and the CPU Cores on the PC, (Win, Linux, and Mac) plus the Assignment server code the Collection server code and the Stats server code. He is also the web master at Folding@Home, so if you are waiting for any one thing, he seems slow. He would need to co-ordinate 6 client user interfaces with at least 2 server code bases.

Or today, you can run GPU WUs and look at the Project number, This afternoon when I checked, I was running a 11742 and a 11743 on my PCs with GPUs. (Plus 8 unrelated CPU projects because I am in several high risk groups for COVID-19 and I want to do the most good while I am here)

https://apps.foldingathome.org/project?p=11742
https://apps.foldingathome.org/project?p=11743

We're simply going to do it this way: for as long as needed, pretty much all GPU jobs that will be served, will be coronavirus. So just run with 'Any', you will always contribute to that. Update on that for the CPU coming.

Also to clarify on choosing diseases to work on: you can do that in F@h, unfortunately at some point someone decided to hard code those options, which wasn't a problem until this emergency came along -- it was fine because we have a known variety of research groups in the Consortium that work always on their diseases, no one unfortunately predicted that we'll suddenly be running a virus because of an epidemic, rather than a research group interest. We should, for the future, add a 'outbreaks' or 'urgent' categories, but there's no time now, sorry about that.

I am using the following config file, however only one of my GPUs works on Corona Project 11742, what am I doing wrong?