NaCl end of life announcement!

[MeeLee]

I guess it's official!
Apparently, NaCl's end is near.

I sent Google a message like 3 days ago about the incorrect operation of NaCl. Not sure if this was what triggered it?
Anyway,

I received this notification today:

[artoar_11]

I see the same notice (after reloading twice). It was convenient for me to use it on the office machine

[MeeLee]

Yes, I'll miss that as well.
However, lately my quad core barely got 2k PPD, and 6 core barely got 3 to 4k PPD.
With the introduction to RTX cards breaching 1M PPD, most of this is all past now.
RTX cards brought in a new era of deep learning.

That, as well as the bitcoin market. Now deep learning and mining products are accessible very cheap.
Like, aside from faster graphics cards, there are now better motherboards allowing more GPU sockets per board.
Also more CPU cores (ranging from 6 to 16, up from 2 to 4 just 3 years ago), means more cards can run simultaneously.
Third, mining or deep learning racks, or rigs like this one, now cost next to nothing.

[toTOW]

I know I shouldn't, but I want to say : finally !

[Theodore]

If anything, my chrome browser seems to be running nacl WUs, without nacl add on. So who knows?

[MeeLee]

It sucks that there is no option available for those who could run CPU WUs, on their work computer (without admin privileges) anymore.
I don't suppose there's a FAH Client that runs from an exe file, without installation?

[toTOW]

I think those two things lacks on current FAHClient and would efficiently replace NaCl :
- stand alone client which stores everything locally, with no need of installation and specific privileges.
- support of proxies in such client.

[bruce]

Somebody, somewhere, has decided that your permissions should be limited -- either in the administrative structure of your University or your employer. Find out who is responsible for your proxy and who they report to. They MIGHT be willing to grant an exception for them to install FAHClient on your machine. (I'm not particularly hopeful.)

There are a number of very old discussion on this forum. You can, of course, be fired/expelled for violating company/university policy -- and I'm not aware of the details of such policies but AFAIK NaCl hasn't been identified as a violation. Read FAH's EULA which does restrict FAH to running on your own equipment -- as an intentional protection of you. Some companies have become corporate sponsors of FAH's scientific research.

[foldy]

Maybe it is an option to rewrite the FAH NaCl code to webassembly. Webassembly is the successor of NaCl and it will run in any browser like Chrome, Edge or Firefox and WebKit for MacOS too or even on mobile devices or gaming consoles. I don't know if the FAH GPU core could also be recompiled from OpenCL to webassembly.

[oloung1]

Maybe it is an option to rewrite the FAH NaCl code to webassembly. Webassembly is the successor of NaCl and it will run in any browser like Chrome, Edge or Firefox and WebKit for MacOS too or even on mobile devices or gaming consoles.

this would be nice, as i don't use windows outside of work and still want to passively contribute.

[bruce]

At the present time, NaCl seems to be still supported by Chrome so there's no point it re-writieng it into WebAssemply.

In my mind, the critical question is associated with the upgrade of the FAH infrastructure upgrades that will require extra effort to continue to support the NaCl client. I don't have any information about that extra effort, but is suspect that the same extra effort would be required to support a webassembly client.

[MeeLee]

It's past the deadline, (21st) and still going strong.
The links are removed from the main site, but nacl.foldingahome.org is still working.
The main issue is probably reducing server overhead.
I can imagine it takes more server workload to send out Nacl packages than WUs.

[bruce]

NaCl WUs are significantly shorter than regular WUs. That means for the same amount of work, the servers do need to send/receive a larger quantity of connections. Other than that, the overhead is pretty much the same except for the larger number of entries in the points database.

[Theodore]

We'll, nacl still seems to be running fine...
I wonder what's up?

[bruce]

As was already stated, there are upcoming changes to FAH's infrastructure that will cause the non-support of NaCl (plus Google has announced discontinuing support on Chrome).