Folding Forum

Has Folding@Home ever been promoted to the gaming community?

I am thinking that with their high end CPU and GPUs, the gaming community would through their PCs advance the objectives of solving some of issues of protein mutations.

I am doing my part.

Clive Hunt
Canada

Grammers is spelled with two m's, not one.

Alternatively, gamers is spelled with one r, not two.

Guess it is gamers and there are several gamer forums which promote FAH and even HW manufacturer evga has some valuable promotion for gamers.
But most gamers do not care about FAH or cannot afford power cost 24/7 or noise if PC is in bedroom.
Coin mining is more popular but since curecoin and foldingcoin exist that could attract also users for FAH.
Gamers are the perfect target group as they may only game 2-8 hours a day and the rest of the time the fast and expensive GPU stays idle.

Thank you for your interest Clive,
Yes we've done an AMA together with for example PCMR.
Do you have any ideas of how to increase interest from gamers?

How about running a contest whereby a high end video card and/or games would be awarded as prizes based on either points earned or length of time as a participating member.

A version of F@H that acts as a Wrapper, It runs F@H until you start the game, then suspends F@H until you quit, thus allowing seamless folding and gaming without slowdowns.

@Clive: That looks like the evga promo where you get evga bucks for folding points and can redeem them for evga hardware. https://www.evga.com/folding/promo.asp

@JimboPalmer: The simplest version for that would be that current FAH client supports a blacklist/whitelist of processes. In a blacklist I can add directories like "C:\Programs Files\Steam" and then all games startet from Steam directory would pause FAH. A whitelist would be necessary if some processes in Steam directory always run in background which do not disturb FAH.

I have another idea of how F@H could be expanded. I know that large companies like Microsoft and Google run large 24/7 data centers. Also as I used to work as an I.T. tech at a Canadian university, I am aware that some university departments run their PCs 24/7. What about approaching these universities and companies about running F@H during off peak hours and on weekends on their networks and data centers?

Clive Hunt

A company needs to make profit and universities need to avoid costs. FAH has power costs and no profit.
(Except for the coins you can get but that will not work anymore when big companies come in.)

Another problem is that FAH runs best on fast GPUs while the PCs at universities or even data center don't have fast GPUs.
(Except for special GPU data centers which are expensive).

So as you found there are many unused PC resources but FAH usage needs to get paid and someone needs to do the setup and maintanance.

My company (globally > 120’000 employees) explicit prohibit use of application like SETI (= BOINC); while FAH is not direct mentioned it follow a similar approach to download executables from an “untrusted” source. This cause a risk for internal and external compliance (e.g. GxP or SOX). Let’s ignore the power consumption; but the information security risk will be perceived as too high for many companies (and potentially universities).
In case of FAH I see the risk rather low; but my company wouldn’t spend a brain cell to even evaluate this. No go.