You can run Folding@Home to help fight diseases like COVID-19, Parkinsons, etc (and join the unofficial MPU team) 🤳

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TidBits.com, which had a powerhouse team of volunteers towards the top of the SETI@Home charts (until it was ended) is also fielding a team for COVID-19 (team 236284). You can download the Mac client software at the Folding@Home site.

Is there a MPU team? Has anyone set one up yet?

Just set it up: Team 246725

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That’s a good idea!
Not that I’m aware of.

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/246725

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Apologies because I’m supposed to be a power user if I’m here (hehe) but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make that client work. Installed it, it opened Safari looking for the client, couldn’t find it while it was correctly installed. And then my screensaver stopped kicking in, and my iMac was overheating like crazy with the app idling but using 100% of my resources. I contacted the team on Twitter for help. Crickets.

I would love to help (even more that I have a personal stake in this) and I understand the team has better to do than designing a pretty app but a tad more user friendliness would go a long way to enlist more people into this.

In the meantime – has anybody an idea of how to start things? I have a Mac mini server who would love to fold all day long.

Might be something weird going on with the configuration to control it via browser. Did you start “FAHControl”? That’s the GUI frontend.

I have, and got mugged by a zillion options I had no idea what to do with. It also retried to open Safari, which still couldn’t find the app.
(OMG, I sound like my Dad trying to figure out 1Password…)

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Ha, we are 4 now! :smiley:

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I wasn’t sure if I was configuring the app correctly since it never seemed to start – until last night when it came alive, sucking up all memory on my MBP, racing the fans, and really heating up the device. I had to uninstall to get things settled down.

I had my computers take part in this sort of thing back in the 1990’s. Back then there was little regard to energy saving and the computers basically ran full blast regardless of what they had to do. So it made sense to devote those wasted cycles to a cause. However computers today are designed to be energy saving, shutting off resources that aren’t being used, and most are not designed to be running full blast 24/7. Unless configured to only use a fraction of capability, you are risking damaging your computer. Reserve this challenge for computers with hefty graphics processors (which most Macs don’t have) and fan cooling.

So, Macs are useless for video editing/encoding, data analysis, etc. and should only used for blogging, mailing, web surfing?

nah, for that there’s the iPad :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve seen lots of people complain about overheating in MacBook Pros, and to a lesser extend with iMacs. With a Mac Pro or iMac Pro, have at it! Other models use embedded graphics which is too anemic to bother with. Unless things have changed, units must be completed within a certain amount of time to be accepted, so they really want fast GPUs running 24/7.

I can confirm that on my medium specced 2016 MacBook Pro it’s quite unbearable for long periods of time.

Broke the million “points”! :slight_smile: Fold, fold, fold… :smiley:

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At Medium mine was a bit…overzealous shall we say?

So I dropped it to Low.

FAH was bogging me down a bit so I took it off my iMac Pro. I just installed the FAH Docker image on my Synology. Seems to be chugging along and contributing to the Team, though I haven’t gotten the interface webpage to open yet.