Folding At Home

This is a very basic role to help get a simple instance of the Folding@home client onto a bunch of servers. We're using it at Spruce^ki to donate spare processing power of our staging infrastructure.

Please please please do not use this role in production, no matter how much you want to put those powerful servers to good use! It's not guaranteed fit for purpose - there are even speeling mistakes in the readme. Also it will probably send your monitoring/alerting into meltdown.

Requirements

Currently only targets recent versions of CentOS/RHEL and Debian/Ubuntu. Pull requests for other OSs would be welcomed!

Impact

Our servers are CPU only, and this role would require slight modification to support GPUs. So we won't be breaking any records for points earned - my single laptop is outstripping our entire staging environment by a factor of 10 wrt points earned.

However, in terms of the number of WUs solved, the staging environment is ahead of that laptop by a factor of 40. As I understand it there are certain types of work that can't be done on GPUs, so throwing more CPUs into the mix is still helpful.

Role Variables

The following defaults are set and are used in config.xml:

• gpu: false
• power: light (other options are 'medium' and 'full')
• user: ansible.spruce.ki (set to your desired username for stats reporting)
• team: 257758 (this is team "spruce.ki", feel free to use it or adjust as necessary. set to 0 for "no team")
• state: present (use 'absent' to stop and uninstall the F@h package)

Dependencies

N/A

Example Playbook

This is the config we're using on our staging servers. So far under full power we haven't noticed any impact on our productivity, but YMMV.

- hosts: servers
  roles:
    - { role: peteroyle.folding_at_home, user: ansible.spruce.ki, team: 257758, state: present, power: full }

License

Apache

Author Information

Spruce^ki develops a full-featured, cloud-based telecommunications platform used by many Australian-based telcos. Visit [https://www.telcoworks.com.au] to see it in action.