Folding Forum

I'd like to see a version of Folding@Home modified to run partly under BOINC.

It should include a BOINC task that asks BOINC for permission to use a certain number of CPU cores and sometimes a GPU. This task should then tell the Folding@Home system when it has permission so it can start a F@H workunit. It should also be able to tell the F@H system when to pause or abort the workunit.

Modification to BOINC probably required: The ability to ask for a physical CPU core, rather than the usual virtual CPU core.

This would allow me to choose health-related BOINC tasks as the primary use of my GPU, with F@H getting the remaining use of my GPU.

The BOINC task should have a setting to allow this task to get a certain percentage of the CPU and GPU times.

It has been tried, unsuccessfully. I do not think either software has changed enough to make them more compatible.

You can however, see FAH and Boinc stats on extreme overclocking.

I do that without having f@h connected to BOINC. I run World Community on BOINC, with 5 CPU cores. I also run the covid GPU app when it is available, which takes over most of the GPU for short periods of time, with f@h running almost the whole time. I lose about 10% (if that) of my f@h ppd, so barely a hit. f@h on the GPU uses one logical core. wcg uses another. I set affinities and priorities how I want them using a registered copy of Process Lasso (not expensive, and it's a one-off payment). Remaining CPU cores are enough for all my other usage needs (4C8T cpu).

There is a setting in the FAH client to raise the task priority of the FAH core slightly, so that if you run BOINC on the lowest priority, FAH will take prescedence. This made sense at the time because FAH is more time critical, due to its relay race approach to computing, so you could fall back to BOINC tasks whenever FAH is out of tasks. These days however, FAH work units are in good supply, so the complexity of running both BOINC and FAH at the same time is a bit much compared to the benefit.

Boinc WCG works with no problem under Linux Mint 20, both CPU at all available threads and GPU WCGc tasks simultaneously, while FAH 7.6.21 crunched GPU only tasks.
WCG GPU tasks are rare and fast, longing for 3-10 minutes, so when they were crunched - FAH GPU PPD falls for 30-50% for few minutes when short WCG WUs computed and then restored to normal when WCG GPU WUs ended.
Not sure about other distros and other Boinc projects, not tried any of them.

JimboPalmer wrote:It has been tried, unsuccessfully. I do not think either software has changed enough to make them more compatible.

I agree, and it would still require a lot of effort for essentially zero benefit.

Running both concurrently is still possible if you figure out how to get a reasonable balance for you CPU resources (which is what this topic is also discussing).

The Boinc authors are windows-centric. Their attempts at Linux results in runaway memory leaks that lock up the system. When I mentioned this behavior to the authors, they had no idea what a linux swap partition is for; they recommended that I delete it. Since Folding has to work on both Linux and Windows systems, Boinc is a nolle prosequi.