Folding COVID Proteins

[Variety of Cells]

Saw some people post this and it got my attention:

https://www.gamesradar.com/nvidias-calling-on-gaming-pc-owners-to-put-their-systems-to-work-fighting-covid-19/

I have a gaming PC so I installed the program, and now my GPU and CPU are folding proteins, which will hopefully help in the effort to find a vaccine.  Or something like that.  It's better than the nothing I was doing before hand other than staying home.

You can make teams and you get more points the more you fold, so I figured hell, why not make a Rifftrax team?  I named us The Riffers to be a little more generic in case others want to join.  Just go here to download the program https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/ then create a user name, and type in 244058 for the team number.  If you want to put your computing power specifically toward COVID, then leave it as 'any disease' under 'I support research fighting...'.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Downloaded the client but it seems their servers are overloaded.  They have something like 100X the number of clients to deal with than they did one week ago.

Watching Linux Tech Tips and they are going to try and build a server to help out, as are others, so the project should have extra capacity in the next week or so.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Today I finally got a work unit for my CPU, still nothing available for my GPU.

Since the win10 app doesn't seem to detect idle very well, I used the advanced options and set it to use 5 of my cores all the time, that puts the CPU at about 100 watts and leaves plenty of overhead for normal work and games, I'll just have to disable it manually when playing games like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider.

[Variety of Cells]

Did you join The Riffers?  It doesn't say you did, but I don't exactly trust the website.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I did, it says 1000 points has gone to The Riffers on my client, but I can't even find myself on the website, and the log shows the work unit I did today was sent in but I got no points for it, so I think their entire system is overwhelmed.

[Variety of Cells]

Website seems to be running a bit better now.  I can see you on the team.  And hey, we're doing a lot better than I thought.  Currently our team is ranked 12368 of 242519.  Go us!

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Last 2 days the website has been better, still a shortage of work units, not getting any today so far.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Was wondering why the viewer wasn't working, seems it's a windows issue, if you download the viewer from an older version it works and you can see the protein your computer is currently working on.

Instructions here:
https://gist.github.com/alfanhui/fd69de8354047609fad5ebbef829eb94

[Variety of Cells]

Was wondering why the viewer wasn't working, seems it's a windows issue, if you download the viewer from an older version it works and you can see the protein your computer is currently working on.

Instructions here:
https://gist.github.com/alfanhui/fd69de8354047609fad5ebbef829eb94

Hey nice!  Got it to work.  Also, our team standing has moved up quite a bit.  We're now at 7972 of 244550, from 12368.  Obviously it's not a competition, but the gamefication of something for a good cause doesn't hurt.   

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I've got a laptop sitting in the basement that I only use when working on my 3D printer, so thought I'd see what that could do.

Looks like about 10 hours per work unit, or about 10 times slower than my desktop PC. 

I've also got 2 servers at work that are idle 99% of the time, but I've got Slackware Linux installed on them and can't find a client that would work with that distribution.

[stansimpson]

Looks like I've joined. Updated my name to stansimpson. I'm showing 0.0% folding. The last thing listed in my log is:

No WUs available for this configuration
16:55:58:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment

How am I supposed to start exactly?

[MartyS (Gromit)]

It may take a while to get a work unit, their servers are overloaded with requests. 

If you want more control over how it impacts performance on your PC you can right click on the folding icon in the system tray and choose "advanced control".  You also get a little more info about what the client is doing with that interface vs. the web interface.

[Variety of Cells]

Looks like I've joined. Updated my name to stansimpson. I'm showing 0.0% folding. The last thing listed in my log is:

No WUs available for this configuration
16:55:58:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment

How am I supposed to start exactly?

Welcome aboard!  Did you join the team?  The number is 244058. 

[stansimpson]

Looks like I've joined. Updated my name to stansimpson. I'm showing 0.0% folding. The last thing listed in my log is:

No WUs available for this configuration
16:55:58:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment

How am I supposed to start exactly?

Welcome aboard!  Did you join the team?  The number is 244058. 

Yep! Still unable to find any servers yet (assuming I'm doing everything else right).

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Looks like I've joined. Updated my name to stansimpson. I'm showing 0.0% folding. The last thing listed in my log is:

No WUs available for this configuration
16:55:58:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment

How am I supposed to start exactly?

Welcome aboard!  Did you join the team?  The number is 244058. 

Yep! Still unable to find any servers yet (assuming I'm doing everything else right).

My PC is also unable to get any new work units right now, that's been normal for the afternoon, in the late evening people must start shutting down and units start to become available again.