Thanks! This worked.

Retvari Zoltan,

I set the virtual core limit for Folding @home as you suggested. However, the change has not taken effect yet. I suspect that it won't before the next CPU WU starts.


%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

No such file for me. However, I did find this file and tried it instead, assuming that I interpreted %AppData% correctly:

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\avx\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

This disabled BOINC use of the GPU if a Folding@home CPU task was running, so I doubt if that was correct.

Incidentally, I doubt if my CPU has the AVX feature.

I set the virtual core limit for Folding @home as you suggested. However, the change has not taken effect yet. I suspect that it won't before the next CPU WU starts.

It should take effect immediately, however I had to do it twice, carefully clicking on "OK" and "SAVE".

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

No such file for me.

Perhaps your host haven't downloaded any GPU workunit yet.

However, I did find this file and tried it instead, assuming that I interpreted %AppData% correctly:

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\avx\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

That's strange, there should be the CPU app in the avx folder, which is Core_a7.fah\FahCore_a7.exe.
%AppData% should point to the current user's AppData\Roaming directory, similar to:
C:\Users\Your username\AppData\Roaming
so the whole path should look like:
C:\Users\Your username\AppData\Roaming\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

This disabled BOINC use of the GPU if a Folding@home CPU task was running, so I doubt if that was correct.

You are right, it's the CPU application.
Are you sure you put it in the lower pane?

Incidentally, I doubt if my CPU has the AVX feature.

If it's the i7-5960X, it has SSE4.2 and AVX2. (It's a Haswell-E).

I couldn't add the GPU though the graphical user interface with the v7.6.9, as it always gave number -1 for the GPU slot.
So I edited the %AppData%\FAHClient\config.xml file, I added the following line:

  <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>

before the last line:

</config>

Now it works.

Good point. I have complained about that more than once on the Folding forum.

Another method is just to set the "opencl-index" to "0", which works for my Nvidia cards on Ubuntu. It may depend on the card/motherboard/OS combination, but the automatic setting never works for me on Ubuntu. Maybe it works on Windows, at least for AMD cards

I set the virtual core limit for Folding @home as you suggested. However, the change has not taken effect yet. I suspect that it won't before the next CPU WU starts.

It should take effect immediately, however I had to do it twice, carefully clicking on "OK" and "SAVE".

I tried again, with that change, and this time it took effect immediately. However, it appeared to take the number as meaning real CPU cores, instead of virtual CPU cores. Trying again with half of that number also worked immediately, but appeared to leave an extra fraction of a virtual core in use.

Reducing the virtual core count for BOINC by 1 appears to have stopped the CPU contention.

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

No such file for me.

Perhaps your host haven't downloaded any GPU workunit yet.

As far as I can tell, it hasn't.

However, I did find this file and tried it instead, assuming that I interpreted %AppData% correctly:

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\avx\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

That's strange, there should be the CPU app in the avx folder, which is Core_a7.fah\FahCore_a7.exe.
%AppData% should point to the current user's AppData\Roaming directory, similar to:
C:\Users\Your username\AppData\Roaming
so the whole path should look like:
C:\Users\Your username\AppData\Roaming\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\Core_22.fah\FahCore_22.exe

Correction - what I found was actually:

%AppData%\FAHClient\cores\cores.foldingathome.org\v7\win\64bit\avx\Core_a7.fah\FahCore_a7.exe

This disabled BOINC use of the GPU if a Folding@home CPU task was running, so I doubt if that was correct.

You are right, it's the CPU application.
Are you sure you put it in the lower pane?

I did - but as you said, it was the wrong file.

Incidentally, I doubt if my CPU has the AVX feature.

If it's the i7-5960X, it has SSE4.2 and AVX2. (It's a Haswell-E).

It is. It now looks like the way I was looking for the AVX feature listing put it off the edge of the screen.

My first Folding@home WU appears to have run with AVX and successfully, but all WUs since that one appear to have run with SSE2 instead, also successfully.

I couldn't add the GPU though the graphical user interface with the v7.6.9, as it always gave number -1 for the GPU slot.
So I edited the %AppData%\FAHClient\config.xml file, I added the following line:

  <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>

before the last line:

</config>

Now it works.

Good point. I have complained about that more than once on the Folding forum.

Another method is just to set the "opencl-index" to "0", which works for my Nvidia cards on Ubuntu. It may depend on the card/motherboard/OS combination, but the automatic setting never works for me on Ubuntu. Maybe it works on Windows, at least for AMD cards

Under Windows 10 with an Intel CPU, it did not even create a GPU slot for my Nvidia GPU.

My attempts to log in to the Folding forum have always failed, so I haven't been able to complain there yet.

Under Windows 10 with an Intel CPU, it did not even create a GPU slot for my Nvidia GPU.

My attempts to log in to the Folding forum have always failed, so I haven't been able to complain there yet.

I will save you the trouble.
https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=34873

One of their endearing curiosities is that you have to download a "GPUs.txt" file to recognize a card. It should happen automatically, but may take a reboot or downloading it separately.

Under Windows 10 with an Intel CPU, it did not even create a GPU slot for my Nvidia GPU.

My attempts to log in to the Folding forum have always failed, so I haven't been able to complain there yet.

I will save you the trouble.
https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=34873

One of their endearing curiosities is that you have to download a "GPUs.txt" file to recognize a card. It should happen automatically, but may take a reboot or downloading it separately.

Thanks. I am currently running BOINC set not to download any GPU tasks in order to avoid a GPU conflict during the change.

[snip]

I will save you the trouble.
https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=34873

One of their endearing curiosities is that you have to download a "GPUs.txt" file to recognize a card. It should happen automatically, but may take a reboot or downloading it separately.

Thanks. I am currently running BOINC set not to download any GPU tasks in order to avoid a GPU conflict during the change.

All BOINC GPU tasks now finished. I manually downloaded GPUs.txt, but it went onto the Pictures folder instead of the Downloads folder.

Copying it to FAHClient and rebooting allowed me to create a GPU slot, once I recognized the circle to the left of the GPU section as a place to click.

It's now Paused; waiting for idle.

How do I supply the idle?

Idle slots in Folding@Home are quite normal right now. I think they are still swamped, and still routinely see some idle slots. They have their own mechanism to ask for work and keep asking at certain times. You might be able to reset the timers by pausing idle slots, and then unpausing them.

https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

Please be patient if you experience idle time as we face the COVID-19 pandemic together! We are working like mad to start simulations of COVID-19 proteins. The enthusiastic response to our effort has been tremendous and has sometimes emptied our queues. This is a great “problem” to have as there is no end to the valuable science we can do, its just a matter of giving us some time to get more running.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2995627323837798&id=136059519794607&substory_index=0

It is for this reason -- slots idle -- that I set Folding@Home CPU to just use 1 CPU thread on each of my PCs, and then have BOINC use my other CPUs/threads. And I have a BOINC GPU "Exclusive Application" set for FahCore_22.exe ... so that *if* Folding@Home is using the GPU, BOINC won't, but if Folding@Home isn't using the GPU, BOINC will.

It is for this reason -- slots idle -- that I set Folding@Home CPU to just use 1 CPU thread on each of my PCs, and then have BOINC use my other CPUs/threads.

They seem to be separating the CPU work units into large and small now, with n<9 being the dividing line from what I can discern.

There is apparently more work for the "large" ones; my Ryzen 3950X running 31 out of 32 virtual cores has been busy almost all the time for the last week. On the other hand, when I ran my i7-9700 (8 full cores), it was out of work so often that I took it down. The situation is fluid, so YMMV, but if you have a large number of cores to throw at it, it could work.

By the way, to my surprise, I am averaging around 500k PPD on the Core A7 CPU work; that is up in GPU territory (Ubuntu 18.04.4).

[snip]

It is for this reason -- slots idle -- that I set Folding@Home CPU to just use 1 CPU thread on each of my PCs, and then have BOINC use my other CPUs/threads. And I have a BOINC GPU "Exclusive Application" set for FahCore_22.exe ... so that *if* Folding@Home is using the GPU, BOINC won't, but if Folding@Home isn't using the GPU, BOINC will.

That's close to what I'm aiming for, but it doesn't look like I'll be able to finish the setup until my computer downloads at least one GPU WU.

They seem to be separating the CPU work units into large and small now, with n<9 being the dividing line from what I can discern.

There is apparently more work for the "large" ones; my Ryzen 3950X running 31 out of 32 virtual cores has been busy almost all the time for the last week.

31 is a prime number, so your CPU app most probably runs only on 30 threads. (check the log at the point when the CPU app started.)
BTW I doubt that there's much benefit above ~20 threads on a 16 core CPU.

On the other hand, when I ran my i7-9700 (8 full cores), it was out of work so often that I took it down. The situation is fluid, so YMMV, but if you have a large number of cores to throw at it, it could work.

Usually I have CPU work on my i7-9700F (6 cores for FAH) and i5-8500 (4 cores for FAH).

By the way, to my surprise, I am averaging around 500k PPD on the Core A7 CPU work; that is up in GPU territory (Ubuntu 18.04.4).

I doubt that. You should check the PPD when there's only CPU work on your host.

To my surprise I received some FahCore 21 tasks lately, so it is recommended to add FahCore_21.exe (FahCore_21 on Linux) to the exclusive GPU app list.

Yep, I just had to do the same! :)

To my surprise I received some FahCore 21 tasks lately, so it is recommended to add FahCore_21.exe (FahCore_21 on Linux) to the exclusive GPU app list.

I'm still waiting for one. BOINC doesn't seen to have a way to add it to the exclusive GPU app list before the file is downloaded.

You can always close BOINC, then add these lines to your cc_config.xml file, in the <options> section:

		<exclusive_gpu_app>FahCore_21.exe</exclusive_gpu_app>
		<exclusive_gpu_app>FahCore_22.exe</exclusive_gpu_app>

Full documentation on the options you can set, is here:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration

You can always close BOINC, then add these lines to your cc_config.xml file, in the <options> section:

		<exclusive_gpu_app>FahCore_21.exe</exclusive_gpu_app>
		<exclusive_gpu_app>FahCore_22.exe</exclusive_gpu_app>

Full documentation on the options you can set, is here:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration

Thank you. I just made that change.

The CPU app (FahCore_a7) is the toughest I've ever run.
I had to decrease the overclocking of my old i7-4770K from 4GHz cores + 4GHz uncore to 3.7GHz cores + 3.5GHz uncore to reduce heat output (decreasing voltages as well) and to avoid abrupt restarts / lockups on that host.
There is much variation in the power consumption of the CPU between workunits.
Roughly saying the higher the credit, the higher the power it uses.

There is another interesting project about Covid-19: https://boinc.ibercivis.es/ibercivis/ from hard hit Spain.

There goal is to investigate, if some of the known viral medication might work as well on Covid-19.

They might need some love.