VMware releases Folding@home appliance

[saintdle]

Hi,

A number of us at VMware have become involved with helping out Folding@home and driving adoption within our company for our staff to run the software on their devices.

As part of this, we also packaged the client (with permission from Greg Bowman) into an easy to deploy virtual machine for our virtualisation community.

You can download the OVA package here to deploy to your VMware estate, we support, vCenter, ESXi host without vCenter, Workstation and Fusion. Please read the documents that are available on the fling page below for setup instructions.
* https://flings.vmware.com/vmware-applia ... lding-home

And you can read out blog post as to why we are getting involved here;
* https://octo.vmware.com/vmware-appliance-fah/

If you have any questions, queries or need help with our appliance, please comment below.

[GamithUK]

Quick comment
I am running the FAH appliance using VMware player 15.
I configured it initially in 'light' mode and it started up fine and is folding away.
I stopped the VM and gave it 4CPUs and 4GB Ram (my PC has 8 cores and I'm also running BOINC/Rosetta) and restarted it.
'top' is showing that only one CPU is being used at any one time - the one in use is at 100% but the other 3 are working at around 1% or so.

So - how can I stop 'top' (I have tried 'q' and 'Ctrl+C') and change FAH on the VM to use the other 3 CPUS please?

I couldn't see a forum post relevant to this so I thought I would add to this one - knowing forums I expect I will be corrected about that before anything else

Cheers

[Joe_H]

If q or Ctrl-C don't work for you, no idea how to stop 'top'. That may depend on the linux installed and command shell used.

As for the WU, if it was downloaded at the setting to use just one CPU thread, then you will have to wait until it finishes and downloads a new WU with the client set to use 4.

[JimboPalmer]

I would like to mention a known bug in the 7.5.1 F@H client, the first Work Unit only uses one CPU, after the first WU, they use the number you specify.

[PantherX]

...If you have any questions, queries or need help with our appliance, please comment below.

Welcome to the F@H Forum saintdle,

That's pretty awesome of you and your team! I do have a question as it was asked by the Donor... is the team value that's configured in the VM modifiable or not? Since there wasn't any clear instructions, I asked them to contact the team directly as I couldn't see any guidance about that.

[PantherX]

I would like to mention a known bug in the 7.5.1 F@H client, the first Work Unit only uses one CPU, after the first WU, they use the number you specify.

It was once a feature and AFAIK, it still is but might be now considered a "bug" by some donors because the behavior might not be well described.

[History]
V7 while being a complete re-write of the client so that it can support lots of new features, still had to meet the feature set for v6 client. The v6 client had two flavors:
Uniprocesor - The CPU WU can only fold on 1 CPU
SMP - The CPU WU can fold on X CPUs which you defined

There were three slots options initially with V7:
Uniprocessor - 1 CPU
SMP - X CPUs
GPU

As V7 developed, the uniprocessor and SMP were merged into a CPU Slot where you can define X which can start from 1 until Y (Y in Windows is 32 but unknown on Linux/macOS). So, in most cases, the donors gets to configure the CPU Slot to use Y CPUs before the client makes a decision to use the lowest setting which is 1 CPU by default. Over the last several years, CPUs have gotten more cores and threads and over the last few years (thanks to AMD), the "normal" desktop CPU has 6 or 8 CPUs which is a lot more than imagined several years ago. It was better that the client started of using less resources and it can always be increased depending on the donor.
[/History]

[GamithUK]

I would like to mention a known bug in the 7.5.1 F@H client, the first Work Unit only uses one CPU, after the first WU, they use the number you specify.

Is that the number of CPUs specified on the virtual machine, or is there a config in the Photon VM? I guess I can wait and find out.

[GamithUK]

Ah - Ok, so running v1.0.3 of the FAH appliance helps! 3 of the 4 allocated CPUs are going flat out whilst 1 is not doing much, so some improvement there.

Also the idea is to SSH into it, so I did that instead of trying to stop top. Strangely I didn't tick the 'enable SSH' tickbox in the setup stage, but I can SSH into it - which is handy.

So I'm all good now - thanks for the comments and the welcome.