Folding@home on Windows Home Server

The science behind Folding@home

Distributed Computing

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, which means that it uses millions of networked computer systems to form a virtual “supercomputer” to run protein folding simulations.

The Folding@home client software is loaded on a computer which automatically contacts the central servers to receive “work units”. This client software then runs in the background on spare CPU time, and uploads finished work units to the server.

How can you help?

Folding@Home is a great way to make your Windows Home Server do useful work even when you’re not using it. Since it runs at a very low priority, you should never realize it’s running when you’re actively using the WHS to do your work. The WHS is a good fit because Windows Home Server systems are typically running 24/7, coupled with the fact that most are underutilized (generally tasks like media streaming and providing shared folder access involve very little CPU usage). Therefore, if you are an advanced WHS user, we invite you to join our HomeServerLand Folding@home team or start your own team. Those owning a Playstation 3 know that they can use their PS3 for Folding@Home. Likewise Macintosh, Linux and Windows users can also download the software as well.

The project has already come up with a number of notable scientific results, and is with our help and yours, continues to go somewhere tangible as you can see at the Stanford’s Research Papers page.

Folding@home on WHS Installation Instructions

1. First, download the 32-bit (x86) console client from the Folding@home download page.

2. Save the download package to your client computer.

3. Before unzipping the FAH package, we need to unblock it (to avoid potential issues and missing files). To do so, right-click on the package and choose Properties and click on Unblock.

4. Extract the contents of the FAH zip archive by once again right-clicking on the FAH package, then choose Extract All…

5. Rename the Folding@home-Win32-x86-623 folder to Folding@home , doing so will make it easier to manage.

6. Copy the Folding@home directory to your Windows Home Server Software share.

7. Establish a Remote Desktop connection to your Windows Home Server and move the entire Folding@home directory from the \\servername\software share to the root of the system drive C:\.

Configure the FAH client

1. Execute the FAH console application Folding@home-Win32-x86.exe located in C:\Folding@home.

2. Next, the FAH client needs to be configured for the first time. Note that some settings are based on previous answers, or on new answers to the same question when reconfigured. Also note that these configuration items are based on the v6.23 console client and may be different for other versions.

• User name- Enter a user name which you want to appear in the donator statics page, you may keep the default Anonymous name.
• Team Number- You can choose to be part of a team (for many reasons: inside team competition, promotion of a team,…) , to join our HomeServerLand Folding@home team enter 86547.
• Most users can skip and accept the defaults for the Passkey[] , Use proxy[] and Acceptable size of work assignment settings, to do so slowly read each question and press the Enter key to accept the defaults.
• Change advanced options (yes/no) – press the Y key for yes (we need to configure additional settings, specifically we need to configure the FAH to run as a service).

3. In the advanced options settings area, we recommend to leave the default core priority, press the Enter key. This means that by default, the core runs at the lowest possible priority (idle) so that the Folding@home software running in the background does not impact the performance of the Windows  Home Server system.

• If your WHS is quite powerful, for example powered by Intel XEON processor(s) we would suggest setting the FAH clients CPU usage requested to at least 50%. For Intel Atom powered WHS system or if you experience lag, too much noise due to working CPU (when Idle) try 25%.
• Machine ID – If you are or plan to run the Folding@home software on several clients you can set an integer 1-16 for identification. If this is your first FAH client, enter 1
• Launch automatically at machine statup, installing this as a service – YES, this configures the folding client to automatically run in the background (no window) when you start your computer (even if no user is logged in).
  Note: If you have already configured the service you can permanently remove it here, too. If the service is configured, this question changes to: Do not launch this program automatically, remove the service (yes/no)?and answering yes will uninstall the service.

4. At this point the client will load and start folding. We recommend watching for about 15-20mins to see if there are any problems with the client and with fetching/sending work. By default the client will checkpoint aka “auto save” every 15 minutes to save the progression between frames.

5. After about 15 to 20mins you can close the console window, then restart your WHS. If all is configured correctly the FAH client will automatically start to run in the background as a service. To view the progress and status you can open c:\Folding@home\unitinfo.txt

WHS Folding (Windows Home Server Add-in)

WHS Folding is a Windows Home Server community add-in and is not operated by, sponsored by, endorsed by, or affiliated  with Stanford University’s folding@home distributed computing in any way. WHS Folding is merely a wrapper and requires the official folding@home software application. The goal of WHS Folding is to provide an easy to use way to monitor and configure basic FAH client settings conveniently through the Windows Home Server Console. This eliminates having to remote desktop into the WHS to hunt down status text files.

Screenshots

The add-in is currently in private beta and the author Kurt Anderson is looking for a few beta testers. If you are interested please leave a comment below.