Folding@home team?

Hello all, I was just wondering if there is an official Folding@home team, we got a seti@home team and heck they even get their own topic forum. I would think that somthing like Protean folding would be just as inticing to be apart of. I for one would love it if they found a cure for cancer or aids or somother disease as a result of this project.

Hi sardion,

I just got the folding@home application bundled with the latest driver for my video card, so I really didn't even know about this until now. My son applied me to Team 33, but if ATS was to get a team, I would join it.

I'm curious though. My computer is really crunching these - my son was blown away with how fast I was processing a unit, but I just check this morning and it shows no completions. So I opened my log file and I see that at the stop of each unit I'm getting the same series of entries:

mdrun_gpu returned
Nonzero force sum on GPU
Folding@home Core Shutdown: UNSTABLE_MACHINE
CoreStatus = 7A (122)
Sending work to server
Project: 4742 (Run 1, Clone 139, Gen 9)
Error: Could not get length of results file work/wuresults_04.dat
Error: Could not read unit 04 file. Removing from queue.

Since you appear to have been doing this for some time, can you assist in interpreting what is going on there? The unstable machine entry makes me think it was on my end, but that entry is prefaced by "nonzero force sum on GPU"...what does that mean?

Any advice would be appreciated.

reply to post by Valhall


I presume your videocard is unstable so it's producing errors. Can happen if it's overheating, not getting enough juice (power), bad drivers, bad software, or if it's getting old.

It's in the FOLDING@HOME FAQ.

My client gives an UNSTABLE_MACHINE error and is going to sleep for 24 hours! What should I do?


This occurs when 5 EUE's occur. Rapidly EUE-ing machines are a sign that the client needs some donor intervention to fix it. Please check out the FAQ below as well as forum (foldingforum.org...) for details about how to fix a misconfigured client. This error typically results from a problem with drivers. Please see the instructions above for which drivers you should use for your hardware. Unfortunately, we cannot give more information from the client, since all the client knows is that it can't run CUDA and there's lots of reasons why (and there's currently no way for the core to detect them).

If your client has worked before, try restarting your machine, as that has also shown to help. Restarting the client will reset the EUE counter.

folding.stanford.edu...

[edit on 11/1/2009 by C0bzz]

Thanks for this. I've actually shut down the folding program for the time being because it appears that I have a powersaver setting I haven't found kicking in. My video card isn't overheating at all, but something is making the folding program shut down to almost no calculations when the computer sits idle for just a few seconds. As soon as I wiggle my mouse it kicks right back up and starts iterating fairly fast. I went in on my settings and went to high performance on my powersaver settings, but I don't believe that was all I needed to do. I have Vista and subsequently hate it because I never can find what I used to be able to find quickly.

I'll get my son to look at it next time he's in from work and see what he can figure out.

Thanks again for the help! If it is an instability my son will be able to figure out what's going on.

I use my Playstation 3 for folding every day.

Never heard of this before, but it seems like a great idea to me. Thx for posting

I've not heard of either... will investigate. At the very least is seems like a good way to benchmark your computers performance.

Ok I'm goin on team 33 for the time being

[edit on 12/1/2009 by Now_Then]

Here is the faq for Playstation if anyone cares.

folding.stanford.edu...

I used to have that on one of my older machines. You can make it work in the background, not as a screensaver. Problem is you have to keep your system spooled up.