Folding Forum

Greetings,

I've been folding on and off since the original lockdown, and it's been exclusively for COVID-19. However in, say the last week, all my work units have been for Alzheimer's and Cancer. This is in spite of my setting only to fold for covid. I saw the announcements about a lack of work units... are there really so few covid WU's to be had that compute is being diverted to other researches? Is the setting broken in my client? Or maybe I'm missing something here?

Also, protein viewer isn't working at all, maybe it's related? I was thinking maybe some of the research isn't applicable for this feature, but one of the cancer WU's mentioned protein simulations, though.

Many thanks in advance for your guidance!

Luke

Welcome to the forums,

The cause preference setting is simply that ... a preference ... If there are Covid-19 projects in play with WUs that match your configuration you should get them - if there are non available then you will be assigned other projects.

As to setting broken, missing something and protein viewer questions these are hard to answer without any information about your setup ,,, viewtopic.php?p=327407&f=24#p327412

Thanks for your help. Looks like protein viewer sorted itself out.

After 1 stray omicron unit, f@h reverted back to cancer all night. shame to see that my plebian 2013-2015 build doesn't have the hardware capacity to contribute to covid research regularly any longer. I can only presume this must be due to research becoming more hardware demanding as time goes on/progress moves forward.

I suppose I will invest in a conventional/more efficient space heater until more recent GPUs become more affordable.

Luke_S wrote:Thanks for your help. Looks like protein viewer sorted itself out.

After 1 stray omicron unit, f@h reverted back to cancer all night. shame to see that my plebian 2013-2015 build doesn't have the hardware capacity to contribute to covid research regularly any longer. I can only presume this must be due to research becoming more hardware demanding as time goes on/progress moves forward.

I suppose I will invest in a conventional/more efficient space heater until more recent GPUs become more affordable.

With so many people having really powerful GPU's and CPU's these days, some projects have timeouts and deadlines that keep them from being assigned to slower cards. Though the assignment varies based on GPU type and such, even slower stuff gets some COVID related projects.

I'm in the same boat, with just a little iGPU folding. It may not get as many COVID projects at times, but it's still contributing. You have to also consider that if not for our slower gear, the faster gear might be getting more assignments on non COVID project, so in that sense by helping with the lower priority projects we are still contributing to the current research priorities as well.

Thanks for the words of encouragement - I decided to retire my GPU from folding since it wasn't getting COVID units anymore and just weeklong low-point units for other diseases, over the last week or so my GPU picked up a couple omicron units; I quit folding when it gave me cancer and alzheimer's units - usually by the next day it would pass the unwanted unit elsewhere and in the morning I'd have a fresh one - if it was COVID-related, I'd fold, if not, I quit for the day. Rinse and repeat. Only with the last cancer unit my GPU was assigned, it stubbornly waited for me to resume the unit and I had to resort to waiting for the unit's time limit to elapse.

After that, it gave me a VERY small cancer unit, and my client refuses to fold even if I set it to full power. Is this some punitive measure? I'd just like to get back to fighting omicron.

Unfortunately there isn't always enough work units of the selected preference to go around, especially if you have slower hardware. That's just the way it is, and will probably remain. Though I don't worry about what cause I fold for as I consider them all worthy of my contribution, I can understand your frustration if you want COVID specific work. I just assume that if my slow hardware works on something, it frees up more of the faster and more capable machines to do the high priority work, whatever cause that may be at the time.

It is highly preferred that if you pick up a work unit, finish the work unit. By waiting for the timeout or expiration, that work is essentially stopped and nobody else can do it until the timeout passes. As far as punitive measures, the quick return bonus points are dropped if your completion rate for returns falls below 80%. This is done to encourage people to always fold the work units in a timely manner when they can, and use stable systems that will complete the units within the allocated time. If you allow too many work units to reach the expiration then your overall points will drop once you fall below that 80% threshold. Slowing down the science helps nobody in the end, and we tie up the system resources that are assigning units, tracking points, accepting returns, etc regardless of whether we finish the work unit.

In your case with the recnt cancer unit refusing to fold, that would not be caused by any normal F@H condition. There was a recent issue with the new cores refusing to download as the servers were swamped, and they made some changes to try to get that sorted out.

Luke_S wrote:I quit folding when it gave me cancer and alzheimer's units

Please, no - due to the "relay race" nature of folding, doing that slows down the science computing and causes unnecessary delays and wasted energy. If you want to exclusively contribute to Covid-19 research, consider the World Community Grid's OpenPandemics project: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/rese ... overview.s

what is difference between 'high priority' and 'anything' in science choice? won't they produce same result? if i say anything, you're going to give me the one you want done most urgently, same for high priority

also, there is no option to say ONLY covid and just leave my pcs idle otherwise.