folding@home in Amazon's cloud

[jordanps]

We just published a blog post about our experiments running folding@home on AWS:
http://blog.mapleavenuelabs.com/folding ... azons-aws/

It's mostly written for a general audience (we hope it might bring more people to the folding@home project), but we've systematically studied the efficiency of the different AWS machine types and present our results. In addition, we give step-by-step instructions so that anyone with a working familiarity with AWS can fold in the cloud. Hopefully some of your might find it useful, or at least interesting!

[jason403]

Any idea if taking their offer for 12 month free trial would work for folding on the Chrome(NACL) client?

[jordanps]

Hm, that's a good question. My guess is no - we found that the low-powered instances (like t2.micro, the instance type provided in the free usage tier) couldn't finish work units before they expired (I think our t2.micro instance was on track to finish its work unit in about two months, haha). However, I don't know much about the NaCL client - I've used it a handful of times, and it seemed like it used especially small work units. Does it have access to work units smaller than those that would be allocated to FAHClient?

[Nathan_P]

Yes they are much smaller, NaCL client WU take about 3 minutes each on my machine - the fastest SMP WU takes about 4 hours

[jordanps]

Oh, interesting - I'd love to do some more investigation into this. I know NaCL's WUs come from a different assignment server than "traditional" work units - does anyone know if it's possible to have the normal fah client use this assignment server (via config options)? Or if it's easy to set up a NaCL client that runs outside of a browser?

[7im]

Chrome Browser only at this time. Not available in the full fah client.

[jordanps]

Okay, good to know! Thanks.