Network Solution for Windows – Windows system, Linux system, Ubuntu server configuration tip

I’m talking about Folding@Home, the distributed computing project that runs throughout the world to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The project is running large scale simulations on Protein Folds to try and cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers.

So how can your server help, well I bet your server CPU’s hardly ever runs at a high load, otherwise you would be setting up faster processes and more servers, but it does seem wasteful having all these spare cycles just in case you get a surge in users. Well folding@home is clever it will never let your load average go much above 1.0 and if you start experiencing a surge in users folding@home will automatically throttle its CPU use, meaning your users will not be effected. So how do you install and run Folding@Home:

First your need to create a new directory and download the folding at home package to it:

mkdir fah
cd fah
wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Then you need to extract the downloaded files:

tar -xvf FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Now you’ll probably want to run Folding@Home in the background, to do this we are going to use a piece of software called screen to make a virtual terminal, then run Folding@Home inside this new terminal:

Screen
./fah6

If this is the first time you run fah6 it will ask you for some settings, unless you know otherwise just press enter on each of them, this will all the settings to default. Now your server should be running some simulations, you should see a screen like this:

Notice how it took 20 minutes to complete 1%, so don’t worry if it looks like it’s not doing anything, it is. Don’t worry if you want to stop fah, just exit it with ctrl-c it will save its place and continue next time you run it. When it gets to 100% it will upload its finding to Folding@Home and download a new set to work ok.

If you want to return to your normal terminal press Ctrl-Shif-A then D. This will return you to your live terminal, you can quit this if you want because the virtual terminal will continue to work. To return to your virtual terminal run: