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The PC Gamer Folding@home Team (Team 241865)

Welcome to the PC Gamer Folding@home Team 241865!

It's time for gamers to come together and do our part in the fight against the coronavirus public health crisis. Don't just sit at home and twiddle your thumbs during the quarantine, fold for science! With your help, and enough processing power, we can collectively fold proteins and find a cure for the coronavirus. No this is not science fiction, this is Folding@home!

The PC Gamer Community staff has created a new folding@home team for the PC Gamer Community. We've included detailed instructions on how to join the PC Gamer Folding@home team below. But first, what is folding?

What is Folding@home?
Folding@home is a project started by Stanford University that allows anyone to donate spare processing cycles (from your CPU and GPU) to compute complex calculations in a massive distributed research network. You can learn more about folding@home here.

Among the more well-known diseases that benefit from this research are Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS, many cancers, and most recently, the novel coronavirus, covid-19. If you’ve ever known anybody who has been afflicted by any of those, then you know how devastating it can be for them and their families. This is your chance to help combat these illnesses and all it takes on your part is leaving the program running while you’re asleep or at work! Every contribution will help in advancing treatments and, hopefully, will eventually lead to cures.

How can I join the PC Gamer Folding@home Team?
  1. First head to the official folding@home website and download the correct client based on your OS. Here is a direct link to the download page: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/
  2. Install the client. If you are windows, clicking advanced will allow you to decide when the software will start. We recommend for you to star the software at login.
  3. Start folding@home!
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  4. A browser window should automatically open with the client running. Make sure to click the "Set up an identity" bubble before clicking start folding
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  5. On the next screen set your name and team number. Make sure to join team 241865. Your name can be anything you wish, but we recommend for you to use your forum username if available. At the time of this writing the passkey generator was not working. The servers are really busy and there are not enough work unit's for all current participants. Some user's have had to wait a day or more for passkeys. To learn more about passkeys, click here.
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With this set up in place your computer will provide work units to the team. Keep in mind, closing the browser does not stop folding. Folding is a background process. To stop folding navigate to client.foldingathome.org and click "Stop Folding".
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FAQ
TO check the team's current stats, and your own, head to http://folding.stanford.edu/Stats.

What do all these crazy letters like “WU” and “PPD” mean?
All these letters are just short type for a full words:

WU = Work Units
PPD = Points per Day
PPW = Point per Watt or Points per Week.
TPF = Time per Frame
WTF! = Way to fold!

What is Bonus Points and Qualified WU's?
  • Bonus point is when you turned in WU earlier than what the deadline says and you earn extra points because it.
  • Qualified WU's mean certain WU's that can be turned in early for bonus points.
  • Except for some older Single core CPU WU's and older GPU WU's, All WU are qualified for bonuses.
What about overclocking?
While the F@H group doesn't "officially support nor oppose overclocking", you can overclock and gain more points.

The catch is however that F@H is more sensitive to instability than most other stress programs will detect. Even if your computer is "Prime 95 stable" for a week straight, it isn't 100% fool-proof on the cpu when it comes to folding.

F@H recommend using these stress programs that closely mimic how F@H run for both your GPU and CPU.

Conclusion
Wow you made it this far?! Kudos to you! Be sure to sign up now for the team. If we work together we can help find a cures for tons of maladies and diseases. It might seem like much, but every little bit counts. Thanks for joining hte team.

Happy folding :giggle:
 
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Was doing this today for pretty well the first time - probably not much of a coincidence.

For anyone else new to it and who is particularly motivated by Covid 19, NB you can't choose to do exclusively Covid 19 workloads (as per the FAQ: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=104&t=32463)

But I got part of project 11742 earlier, which is one of the Covid 19 projects, so there is definitely work on it to be had out there and it didn't take long to be given some. And ofc the other projects are (or sound - all well above my head) very cool as well!

Also, even with Folding set to Full, and to use the PC's resources "While I'm working" and using the CPU and GPU heavily, light gaming was still very playable (King's Bounty - The Legend).

I've resumed folding and added the PC Gamer team number to the profile.
 
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Looks like they fixed the stats server: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/241865

Been saying Bad Gateway for days. First prio was getting work units out (needless to say!) but it's great that as well as keeping all those hungry PCs fed, they also squeezed in the time to make the metrics available again.

The PC Master Race loves a good benchmark. Or any numbers, in lieu of actual benchmarks :D

Folding@Home did an AMA on reddit earlier:
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/flgm7q/ama_with_the_team_behind_foldinghome_coronavirus/

If anyone's interested. And if anyone understands half of it...

Some interesting tidbits though like a forthcoming open-source client for FAH, and:

We estimated we had upwards of about 100 petaFLOPS before the pandemic started, and since then we've expanded by about 10X so....a lot!
... so they're potentially up to an exaFLOP of computing power?
 

TLDR: Folding at home currently has around 400k users, making it currently twice as powerful as the IBM Summit supercomputer.

I haven't folded myself in a few years, currently have an AMD GPU (5700XT) and not sure what sort of PPD that will do. I had about 8 million points IIRC, a 2080TI probably does that in a day now I guess.

AMD cards didnt used to be very good in the GCN days, but I'll see if I can find my old details and leave it running overnight when I can. It's a great cause at any time!
 

JSimenhoff

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Nov 25, 2019
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Is anyone else struggling to get WU's? Seems to take a while.

I've also had one complete and not register for points at all. Guess the systems creaking a little under the strain.
From what I've heard the folding servers are under extreme load due to all the participants from this community and others. From my own experience, accessing the stats page has been unreliable. While it may be frustrating I'd say keep folding! We're currently just over 5,900 WUs. Amazing stuff, especially considering how new the team is.
 
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I've been struggling to get work units, and what GPU units I do get over the last 2-3 days have all gone to the GTX 670 in this system rather than the RTX 2060...

Edit: Though having that my 2060 has finally got a WU.
 
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Indeed, and it would complete work units in 1.5-3 hours rather than ~10+

If there is a way to configure it, I can't find it. I've tried changing the 2060 to 0 and 670 to 1 rather than default values of -1 in the configuration. Will see if that has any effect. Tbh I may well just take the 670 out as if FAH - I'm happy to loan it to FAH as well as my more powerful and much more power efficient GPU, if it can make use of it, not instead of. :)
 

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