How legit is uptodown folding@home? [Not legit]

[MeeLee]

All my android phones are out of work on Boinc, due to WCG and Universe@home being offline.

I wanted to use my phone to run folding at home, and found this website:
https://folding-home.en.uptodown.com/android

Is it legit?
Are there WUs for android phones?
(they're running A50-series cores, not A70 series cores).

And are there any known workarounds to install the FAH .deb client on an android phone?

Thanks!

[Joe_H]

The site is providing a download of the defunct Sony provided client. Sony ended support and servers for WUs several years ago. So the site is not providing a legit client, though if it truly is the Sony Android client the software was legit in the past.

Sony released th code to open source at the time, F@h Consortium members stated at the time they would consider further development. That has not happened. There is only the ARM version of the regular F@h client, that requires running a 64-bit version of Linux and a processor at least as powerful as used in the Raspberry Pi 4.

[Peter_Hucker]

i tried it and it got no work

[MeeLee]

ok. There must be a workaround to run Raspberry pi versions on an android phone, since RPi operating software is based on ubuntu/debian, and both Android and Debian use Linux kernels.
Android may be a bit more restrictive though...

[Peter_Hucker]

If FAH are not producing Android workunits, you can't work around it. I doubt there's a virtual Windows PC CPU ability for Android.

[MeeLee]

If FAH are not producing Android workunits, you can't work around it. I doubt there's a virtual Windows PC CPU ability for Android.

But there are WUs for the Raspberry Pi,no?

Then again, the R-Pi has Cortex A-70 (performance) cores, and most android phones only use A-50 (efficiency) cores; and those two cores are incompatible with one another.
I guess that answered my question.

[Peter_Hucker]

I can't see any evidence of and Android work on FAH. But there's no proper server status like Boinc projects.

[toTOW]

There are some WUs for ARM, but the only client for this architecture requires a 64 bits Linux OS.

Also, anything slower than a RPi 4 won't make the deadlines.

[Peter_Hucker]

There seems to be a lot of computers too slow for FAH. Can't we get smaller workunits for those?

[gunnarre]

Unfortunately no - when you run a simulation you need the whole molecule or at least as much of it as the researcher want to simulate. You'll have to find some other project, e.g. in BOINC for those smaller computers.

[MeeLee]

Would be interesting to see if slower CPUs would work, so long they had more cores?
ARM is still in it's infancy. And Risc V is right behind it.
By themselves the CPUs aren't really that noteworthy, but once you start having more than 4 cores, they're actually pretty efficient.
Probably up to about 30 cores, when they will saturate memory bandwidth.

[toTOW]

If you could get your hands on something like this, it would happily fold : https://amperecomputing.com/

[Peter_Hucker]

I cannot locate those on Ebay
What's the price?

[MeeLee]

I cannot locate those on Ebay
What's the price?

An older 80 core Ampere system goes from anywhere upwards from $2500. The server editions usually go several thousands of dollars more.
While they are quite efficient, they're not as efficient as GPUs in terms of folding.
They need to come out with 100 core CPUs. Like a regular quadcore, with 96 energy efficient cores.

[Peter_Hucker]

Some things don't run on GPUs (including some of the folding projects, or could they all go on GPU?), so I guess Amperes have their uses.