Charitable Contribution

Network Chuck made a video about the neat things you can do with Docker containers and one of those he listed was running client software from an organization called “Folding@Home”, or “Folding at Home”. “Folding” refers to running simulations of proteins in the research of Alzheimer’s, several types of Cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, just to name a small few. Labs from all over the country (world?) have a great need for computing power for their simulations. They have more models than available computers to do heavy crunching.

It’s pretty easy to set up if your using a desktop computer. First sign up for an account and then install the client app on your computer. Using your browser go to the Folding@Home dashboard and hit “play”.

But since I have a Proxmox server I was just going to run it in a container on a Ubuntu server. Once I got it set up, which wasn’t hard, I went to the dashboard and started folding.

Now, if your a Proxmox junkie I can hear you say “why don’t you just use a Linux container in Proxmox and I’ll answer you with “that’s next on my list. I just didn’t know how to do that yet since the instructions were for Docker containers. Baby steps.

One thing I noticed right away is that it pegs the CPUs at 100%, constantly. I gave it 4 CPUs and all of them are going full tilt. For the first time since I got this Beelink Proxmox server I can hear the CPU cooler fan.

I’ll let it run indefinitely. It’s self loading, queuing up a new model after the previous finishes. And that’s my contribution to society.