Best Practices FAQ

Introduction

Folding@home (FAH) is a major scientific endeavor, but is also a kind of contest for some donors to see who can donate the most points. In order to keep a sense of fair competition, we asked donors to help us establish a list of rules. These rules are stated below to engender the spirit of competition in a way that is impartial for all donors. We thank everyone for their contributions and hope they will enjoy competing and donating to the project.

Regarding The Project and Work Units (WUs)

  1. Donors should not manipulate the Assignment Server (AS) logic to unfairly obtain a specific Work Unit (WU) project and/or block any specific WUs (for points enhancement). (Sources: PG Member, Super Moderator)
  2. Donors should not delete/dump a WU for any reason other than mentioned below (source: PG Member). Deleting WUs disrupts the project since it takes longer for WUs to pass their deadline, get reassigned, and finally completed. Deleting a WU solely for PPD advantage is prohibited. The permitted reasons for deleting/dumping WUs are:
    1. WU Instability -> When this happens, please report it in this Forum
    2. FAH Client instability -> If this happens, please report it in the appropriate FAH Client Forum
    3. Inability of the host system to complete the WU before the Deadline -> If it happens, please visit this thread or this guide to reconfigure your FAH Client to better fits your computing needs. (Source: Site Admin)
  3. Donors should not use flags/switches to mislead the Assignment Server (AS). Please refrain from "experimenting" with flags/switches designed to be used for very specific purposes. (Source: PG Member)
  4. Donors should not use any means to force the FAH Client to download a WU that is not natively designed for the hardware on which the client runs. (Sources: PG Member, PG Member)
  5. Running a FAH Client on hardware that will only marginally meet the WU's Timeout is strongly discouraged. For example, it is not recommended to run bigadv (BA) work units on slower systems or systems with less than 16 cores and it is not recommended to run SMP work units on slower 2-core systems. If you notice your hardware is not going to complete the assigned WU by the Deadline time, stop the client, delete the work unit, and please visit this guide to reconfigure your FAH Client to better fits your needs.
  6. Donors should not intentionally stop/pause the FAH Client to manipulate the completion time or wuresult upload time of work units.

Regarding The FAH Clients

  1. Altering the FAH Client software, its associated data files, or de-compiling/reverse engineering the software is in direct violation of the End User License Agreement (EULA). (Sources: PG Member, PG Member, PG Member)
  2. Re-distributing the FAH files or packaging the FAH files inside another software package in a attempt to install FAH with or without the user's consent is a violation of the EULA. (Sources: FAQs (see: running on authorized computers only), FAH Blog)
  3. Using unpublished client switches for any reason is prohibited, as these are intended for internal Pande Group use only.

Overclocking

The PG does not officially support nor oppose overclocking, but be aware that any instability which causes WUs to error-out during processing is detrimental to the project, and overclocking makes it more difficult to identify any issues with particular WUs or FAH clients. Folding@home often stresses hardware further than many popular stability testers, such as Prime95. For this reason, we recommend StressCPU. Since it's based on Gromacs - the main software used for FAH's calculations - it's one of the most accurate stability tester for an overclocked machine aimed at stable folding. There's no rule about how long you should run it, but the longer, the better. There is an option (-t hh:mm:ss) to run the program for a limited period. If you don't add this option, it will run until it fails, or you press CTRL+C to manually end it. Please let your computer's temperatures stabilize when testing; this takes longer with watercooled systems. Please see this Forum thread for more information.

Last Updated on September 11, 2012, at 04:11 PM