Running Folding@Home as a Service

So a google search on running Folding@Home as a service turns up a crap ton of results. I’m here to add to that list :-)

You should go ahead and

sudo su -

The first thing to do obviously is to download the latest and greatest from Folding@Home, at the time of this post:

wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Untar

tar xvvf FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Move the files to where they “need to go”/”out of the way”

cp -R FAH6.02-Linux/* /usr/share/folding

Let’s go to that directory so that we can run the initial configuration, after the questions are done and it begins to start processing workloads just Ctl+C

cd /usr/share/folding

./fah6

After closing stopping the script we will create a startup script. So let’s go home.

cd ~

Create the new script

vim fah6

Copy the following into the file then :wq

#!/bin/bash

cd /usr/share/folding

./fah6 >> folding.log 2>&1 &

Then we add the script to the /etc/init.d

chkconfig -a fah6

Bangin’ You are now done. To verify it works:

/etc/init.d/fah6

Wait a couple seconds for Folding@Home to start then run

top

to see it slam out your CPU.

If you’d like to see it’s progress here and there observe the log file that is created within the /usr/share/folding directory. I would like to see if this can be changed/moved so that I can do some stuff with the log file. Particularly have the ability to be able to show off how far my computer gets with each work unit. That shall be saved for a later date.