Folding@home Team: Hash Crackers United
A Folding@home team for the password-cracking / hashing community (and anyone else who wants to help!).
Update: You may want to throw your GPUs behind a larger geek team,
r00t folds, which is in the top 100 at this writing (2020-06-16)
Want to help? Start folding now and join us!
(And if you join our team, let me know!)
Here are some tips and references to help you ramp up.
About
Our goal is to use our spare hashing/cracking/crypto compute to support
the Folding@home effort to combat COVID-19 by identifying a therapeutic antibody.
And since SETI@home has recently
announced
that their project is sunsetting,
it's a way for me to transition from
my previous labor of love. :)
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Linux micro-howto
(Focused on Ubuntu/Debian; see
the main Linux installation guide
if you're running a different distro)
Optional:
create your passkey
(so you can track your individual stats)
mkdir -p /usr/local/src/sci/foldingathome
cd /usr/local/src/sci/foldingathome
Find latest client in
the download area
under
fahclient/debian-stable-64bit/, might be
here (latest.deb)
wget '/path/to/fahclient_[latest]_amd64.deb'
sudo dpkg -i --force-depends fahclient_[latest]_amd64.deb
Answer the prompts. Be sure to use our team ID (236327). Then edit your config to use all GPUs and not CPU (one core per GPU needed to feed work to GPU; tune accordingly - see
my sample config.xml)
sudo service FAHClient stop
sudo vi /etc/fahclient/config.xml
sudo service FAHClient start
tail -f /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt
You might also find
my crude shell script handy for watching status/progress from the command line (assumes NVIDIA).
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Projects
Notable Folding@home projects for our effort.
COVID-19 projects
As of 2020-03-08, upcoming Folding@home GPU
projects
that tackle COVID-19 appear to include:
- 11741 / 11747: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2
- 11742 / 11748: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease in complex with an inhibitor
- 11743 / 11749: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease - potential drug target
- 11744 / 11750: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor binding domain trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody
- 11745 / 11751: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor binding domain mutated to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody
- 11746 / 11752: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2 (alternative structure to 11741)
- NEW: looks like GPU projects are expanding up through 11764 (see
this forum post)
CPU projects:
- 14328 / 14329: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease - potential drug target
- 14530 / 14531: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease - potential drug target
I'm not aware of a way to explicitly opt into these yet.
(Thanks to cvsi and @billycontra for spotting these!)
Non-COVID-19 projects (that you may commonly see):
- 11737: This is a CORE22 test project -- the DHFR benchmark. [This appears to be the "give this out if there's no other work available" project - all my systems are currently running this]
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Web Console issues
- There's
a crazy reload loop that happens with the Web Console in Chrome
(see GitHub issue #6),
maybe involving JavaScript and it being HTTP (not HTTPS) and Chrome being mad about it. But you can also go to
https://client.foldingathome.org,
which knows how to connect to 127.0.0.1:7396 itself somehow, wrapping it in a different way (pulling updates with JQuery), so I just set up an SSH tunnel that forwards 7396 on my workstation to 127:0.0.1:7396 and that sidestepped the issue temporarily, but I've found that I have to switch between Incognito and non-Incognito once in a while to compensate. Clearing all site data in the Dev Tools doesn't help. If you're in a browser session that is logged into the Google ecosystem, the repeated loops trigger reloads of api.google.com and gstatic.com, sometimes triggering Google to ask you to log in again generally for that browser session.
- If you do this, and you see "Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document" in the Chrome dev console (F12, Console tab), you may need to add an exception for client.foldingathome.org and/or 127.0.0.1 to allow third-party cookies.
- If the main stats are working, but your username and team vanish, you may have to force a reload with Control-Shift-F5 or similar.
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Web Console in action
The web server listens on TCP 7396. Don't be alarmed if it comes up with blank info for a minute or two after start/restart. But if it takes more than a couple of minutes, you may need to stop and start the client (or if you're using Chrome, troubleshoot with the 'Web Console Oddities' info above)
Adding a 'just work on COV-19' option
requires a new version of the client (which seems short-sighted, TBH), so to support the COVID-19 effort, selecting 'Any disease' for the 'I support research fighting' is probably best.
UPDATE - a new version of the client supports selecting related projects!. Thanks for the tip, @s31nlc!
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References
- Configuration guide
- Arch ref (good general ref. Note that v7 client switches to non-root user automatically, no tweaks needed)
- Linux FAQ and instructions
- Command-line options
- Example config is /usr/share/doc/fahclient/sample-config.xml
- Linux client cmdline options: /usr/bin/FAHClient --help
- Linux client log: /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt
- Linux file locations - mostly /var/lib/fahclient
- Error "Temperature control disabled. Requirements: single Nvidia GPU, tmax must be < 110 and twait >= 900" can be ignored if you're using another GPU temp control framework
- Even with no CPU tasks, the system will consume one core per GPU, to feed work to each GPU
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Join us!
Every little bit helps - thanks for joining!
And if you join, let me know!
(And if you're already doing Folding@home for another team - awesome, keep going! :D )
