The basic idea is to use HTCondor's "work fetch" mechanism to start the Folding@Home client when you have idle resources. This means you don't have Folding@Home jobs cluttering up your schedulers or in your the accountant, and you don't have to do anything special to preserve your Folding@Home progress.
If you wish to run Folding@Home jobs as work submitted to a HTCondor Schedd and tracked by HTCondor's accounting mechanism this is not the recipe for you
Assumptions
- We assume that you're configuring a Linux execute machine.
- We assume that execute machine already has Folding@Home installed. Many of the ways to install the Folding@Home client on a machine try to configure it to run in the background; you'll want to disable that.
- We assume that
/opt/fah
is a great place to put our Folding@Home bits.
Instructions
- Create user named 'backfill' for Folding@Home to run as.
- Make directories so that Folding@Home can preserve its progress when preempted: create
/opt/fah/slots/slot1
,/opt/fah/slots/slot2/
, and the like (up to the number of cores on your machine). Make sure that the 'backfill' user can read and write to them (chown
them appropriately). - Create the following files:
/opt/fah/fetch_work
#!/bin/bash # extract SlotId from the Machine classad passed on stdin eval `awk '/^SlotID/ {print "export _CONDOR_BACKFILL_SLOTID="$3}'` # build a job classad from a template in the HTcondor config called FAH_JOB condor_config_val -macro '$(FAH_JOB)'
The following configuration can be changed if you want credit for your contribution.
/opt/fah/config.xml
<config> <!-- Client Control --> <fold-anon v='true'/> <!-- Folding Slot Configuration --> <gpu v='false'/> <!-- Folding Slots --> <slot id='0' type='CPU'/> </config>
- If you're using static slots, use this recipe for your configuration.
- If you're using partitionable slots, use this recipe for your configuration.
Example output showing one idle partitionable slot and 4 slots that will only run backfill jobs.
$ condor_status example.domain Name OpSys Arch State Activity LoadAv Mem ActvtyTime backfill2@example.domain LINUX X86_64 Claimed Busy 0.000 1000 4+18:49:55 backfill3@example.domain LINUX X86_64 Claimed Busy 1.000 1000 4+18:47:15 backfill4@example.domain LINUX X86_64 Claimed Busy 0.000 1000 4+18:48:04 backfill5@example.domain LINUX X86_64 Claimed Busy 1.000 1000 4+18:48:11 slot1@example.domain LINUX X86_64 Unclaimed Idle 0.000 507340 11+19:08:11 Machines Owner Claimed Unclaimed Matched Preempting Drain X86_64/LINUX 5 0 4 1 0 0 0 Total 5 0 4 1 0 0 0