Folding Forum

Hi

I am just about to buy 4 x Raspberry Pi 4's as a project to set up a cluster.

Could I run folding@home on the cluster and get the benefits of the cluster?

Would make a good first cluster project if I could,

Many thanks, Simon

Welcome to the F@H Forum jockster,

Please note that F@H doesn't support Raspberry Pi architecture

For a list of supported systems, please review the post 4 - Getting Started With F@H (Basic) here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=26036

I would look at Rosetta@Home running 64 bit Ubuntu

"Rosetta at Home has a Pi client now. You'll need a 64-bit kernel, at least, to run the tasks. It's far easier to just put a 64-bit clean Ubuntu on it than to mess with it in Raspbian, though you could do that if you wanted.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/fig ... spberry-pi

If you've got a good heatsink/fan for it, you can probably overvolt by "4" and push clocks to 2GHz too, but that won't gain you much without a big heatsink as it runs a lot hotter.

You need a 64-bit kernel for the BOINC stuff, and I think you need at least some 64-bit userspace libraries as well. Raspbian is a 32-bit userspace and while it ships with a 64-bit kernel now, it's not used by default. It's harder to get all of that working than to just put a 64-bit OS/kernel on in the first place.

I wouldn't say I like it more or less, just that if you want the Pi to do nothing but run Rosetta tasks, Ubuntu is easier to get going." - https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=38854679

I would do raspbian over Ubuntu as it’s lighter weight and easier to do things like turn off HDMI. There is a long thread on the Rosetta forums about setting up a pi 4:

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/foru ... p?id=13732

You might get to fold on them as a early client exists for ARM. No idea when it will sow up in beta form.

https://www.neocortix.com/coronablog

FAH has strictly limited itself to the x86 instruction set and extensions of it. In the past there have been excursions onto other platforms inducing the Apple's PowerPC, the X-Box's PowerPC and the Sony ARM client. Each of those excursions was terminated ... most likely because of the support costing more than the net benefit of adding a relatively small number of additional processors to FAH's research. Raspberry Pi would probably be in the same category.

I recommend you use your cluster for BOINC.

Many thanks for the replies, much appreciated, Simon