Folding Forum

I haven't run F@H for literally a decade, but hey, here I am, back. And I have two questions for y'all.

(I see all the info about why F@H isn't giving me any work units. Hopefully most of the researchers can work from home and get some assigned.)

What I'm wondering is this:

1) What is the status of GPUs on the Mac? I found some documentation on the F@H web site that said that they were supported, and some other documentation that said they weren't supported. On my spanky new MBP 16", it doesn't even detect a GPU, and also says that it doesn't detect CUDA or OpenCL libraries. (Which is funny because OpenCL at least is always present on the Mac.) However, on my rather elderly iMac 27" it detects my GPU (but not the libraries) and lets me create a slot for it. I haven't gotten it to actually fetch any work, but I also haven't gotten any work for my CPU, so that's no help. Should this work? The GPU is a Whistler XT (Radeon HD 6970M). I have a couple of other machines I could throw at this, but I haven't checked their GPU status yet.

2) I have seen some documentation that states that prime numbers of threads (greater than 3) are bad for some (most? all?) projects for F@H. But my machines both choose 7 threads for me, no matter what 'folding power' setting I put them on. Is this a real concern? Should I set them to 6 instead? (Or, for the iMac, if the GPU really isn't supported, I can set it to 8.)

1 - GPUs not supported. The intent was to support them, but there was a problem with Apple's OpenCL implementation that took them a couple years to get around to fix. There is more, but that gets long. Some people have set up their Mac's to run Windows or Linux to fold if they had a usable GPU, it looks like the 6970M doesn't support DP calculations, so that is not an option.

2 - The current 7.5.1 client will negotiate with the Assignment Servers to get an available WU with the highest usable CPU thread setting, so in practice you should get CPU:6 for the setting of 7.

Okay. Great.

So for 1, do you know if there is any effort underway to get F@H working on Mac GPUs? If so, could you point me in that direction? I'm handy with XCode, I could probably contribute something.

Also, do you know of any effort to get F@H on iOS? I know there are some restrictions on what can be put up in the app store, but there are probably plenty of people who would be willing to side-load via XCode, and I have literally a dozen iOS test devices sitting around doing nothing. And they have pretty amazing GPU calculation setups: they'd probably be among the most power-efficient contributors around.

As far as I know there is no current development effort to get GPU folding out for OS X.

They currently are not doing anything directly for ARM. There was a client developed by Sony to run on their Android phones, it would work with some other Android devices as well. But that was discontinued over a year ago, and Sony released the code to open source. As for as I understand the situation, the F@h group considered taking that further, but have not due to limited development resources and the limits on processing power available from ARM devices. The Android client required the phone to be plugged into a charger and be at full charge.

They may reevaluate ARM devices at some point in the future as they get more powerful.

However I do know of an app that was created by a participant of this forum to run on iOS. It uses the documented interface API to monitor your folding systems remotely on an iPad and I think can also be used on an iPhone. I have not used it in a while, so am not certain it still works, but it is still on the iTunes App store. I see it as F@h Mobile Monitor.