Folding Forum

I understand that there is an interest to get WUs completed as fast as possible. Bonus points kick in for this MASSIVELY.

However i'm running FAH on an insular solar powered battery supported NUC. So power consumption is very hard to deal with and your point system is completely against me, because with low performance but low energy hardware bonus points are ... *doh*

But the points are not the problem itself. If the sun comes in handy, i can run a 12W system 24/7. I upgraded to a 46W system that delivers four times the perfomance, so computation power per watt stays almost the same. Meanwhile PPD increased by 11 times, just because its faster, just by getting bonus points.
However i get WUs i can calculate within 6 hours and sometimes i get WUs that still take 20h+. 20h+ is a problem for me because afaik there is no place on earth where the sun shines for 20 hours straight besides north an south-pole. May battery capacity is also limitied, that's why i can't run FAH during night limitless. I can stop calculation if there is no power from PV, but that looses me an incredible amount of PPD.

Since i upgraded (cpu) computation power, it seems more likely i get "big" CPU-WUs. That's absolutely counter productive for me.

Is there a way to force getting smaller WUs, which i can complete during sunshine and then stop?

GPU WUs are even worse. I can't use the Iris Xe GPU at all. However a GT1030 with even lower performance is supported. And GPU unites are scaled quite large, so if you don't have a high end GPU it takes ages to complete.

I'm a little bit annoyed, because i'm running FAH on completely green energy and the point system is just completely against me. I'm aware my prodvided computation power is basically "none" against someone running a 4090, but it is computation power. Don't you want this?
It would be very helpful if you make it more accessible by providing smaller WUs and maybe after years also support Intel iGPUs. I don't care for points much, but i would like to be able to select smaller WUs. Even if they come with a point malus.

Imho points should be based on calculation runtime, not on receive and finish date. If i get a WU with a deadline of 3 days and i spend 12h to complete it i get a shitload of bonus points. If i pause it in the meanwhile for 12h and only submit the result 24h ours later, i loose like 80% of the bonus points although it still just ran 12 hours, but with 12 hours pause in between...

A BOINC project like TN-Grid may be a better choice for less powerful hardware. They usually have long timeouts and short running tasks. There is also World Community Grid if it ever returns, Rosetta@Home if they have any tasks that don't require virtualization, and SiDock@home if you don't mind a project based in Russia.

Welcome to Folding@Home!

I'm also running on solar, but am powering my whole house which happens to include PCs. 32 panels and 38kw of batteries

Specifying fewer cores may get you smaller Work Units for your CPU.

F@H currently categorizes GPUs by family, so a GT 1030 is lumped in with a GTX 1080ti.

Fundamentally, F@H is very based on quick returns.

JimboPalmer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:12 am I'm also running on solar, but am powering my whole house which happens to include PCs. 32 panels and 38kw of batteries

I'm not the owner of the house, so i can't build a "big" solar installation.

JimboPalmer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:12 am Specifying fewer cores may get you smaller Work Units for your CPU.

That also lowers computation power.

JimboPalmer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:12 am Fundamentally, F@H is very based on quick returns.

Yes. Previously i used even a weaker cpu, but ran it 24/7. So all night it ran on battery. A WU took 20-48 hours. Even had one single very large one i could just complete in 3,5 days by 4 days timeout. And that was even lucky because if one day would have been bad weather, i'd have run out of power.

Now i upgraded to a bigger cpu. My plan was to stop running 24/7, but start after sunrise and stop before sunset. Bigger cpu also has higher power draw. So more solar power would be used by the computer directly during day and less power wents into the battery, which is also more efficient. Besides that completing a WU in 6 instead of 24 hours gives more points.

So i ran WUs to test the system and for me it looks like on the new system it's more likely i get larger WUs, that even on the new system take ~20 hours to compute (that's basically that kind of WUs that took more then 3 days on the old system). That completely ruins my plan of being able to finish a WU during one sunshine period. This way i still have to pause computation during night, because especially for the new system my battery capacity is way to low.

I also ran FAH on my desktop cpu for a while and there i didn't get even a single small WU. "Small" ones are these with <15k or maybe even 20k base points. Currently it tends i get 50k+ WUs more likely.
Those bigger WUs also seem to reach higher PPD, but they are hard to handle.

The project selection could be used for this. Where you select a disease. There is even a "high priority" setting. A "mall packages" setting would do it. Or even let me select a list which concrete projects i want to participate in.

There is an advanced option called "max-packet-size" which could be set to "small", "normal" or "big" but this controls the size of the download, (for dial up modems) not the length of processing time you want. While there is some correlation, it is not 1 to 1.

JimboPalmer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 2:54 pm There is an advanced option called "max-packet-size" which could be set to "small", "normal" or "big" but this controls the size of the download, (for dial up modems) not the length of processing time you want. While there is some correlation, it is not 1 to 1.

Thank you. I will try this.

Unfortunately, low power hardware and compute intensive tasks are antagonist ...

This is the main reason that running FAH on smartphones is very unlikely to happen.

toTOW wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 9:05 pm Unfortunately, low power hardware and compute intensive tasks are antagonist ...

No, it's just a question of time.

toTOW wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 9:05 pm This is the main reason that running FAH on smartphones is very unlikely to happen.

But there is an ARM client and it runs on a raspberry pi (which i even used in the beginning).

Running on smartphones is pretty pointless, because either you have to leave it connected to a power supply or it will drain the battery within few hours... if it not runs into thermal problems first.