Folding Forum

Good afternoon, folks.

I've been folding for a few days now. At first, I ran as completely anonymous to see if things would go well, and after a couple of days I set a name for myself to record the points I generate just for fun.

Along the way, I see that I am running two CPU tasks, but no GPU tasks. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro with 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, and two GPUs: Intel UHD Graphics 630 and Radeon Pro 560X. I figured that the GPU normally used for my display (I assume the Intel GPU) would not be used, but I'm surprised to see that the second GPU is not being used.

I suppose that FAH cannot support every GPU available. Is that the reason for neither of my GPUs being put to use?

Thanks in advance!

smp

Welcome to the folding support forum.

Currently GPU folding under OSX/macOS is not supported. There are some oder topics that go into some of the reasons, much longer than I can post about now.

People have been able to fold using their GPUs in Mac hardware with either Windows or Linux installed as a bootable OS. Windows can be installed through Boot Camp, I understand a similar process can be used to install Linux.

Thanks very much for your response, Joe. Much appreciated.

Since I am using the latest Mac OS (Big Sur 11.5.1) Boot Camp is no longer available, so directly booting up in Windows is no longer available. I can run Windows 7 in Parallels, but I do not want to put all that extra overhead on my meager ability, and I don't know if that combination would allow access to the GPU anyway. I guess I'll have to be satisfied that I am doing something, and something is better than nothing.

smp

Your Intel Mac with Big Sur no longer has Boot Camp Assistant?

My understanding was that only Apple Silicon Macs would no longer support boot camp.

responded to wrong post, sorry

smp wrote:Thanks very much for your response, Joe. Much appreciated.

Since I am using the latest Mac OS (Big Sur 11.5.1) Boot Camp is no longer available, so directly booting up in Windows is no longer available. I can run Windows 7 in Parallels, but I do not want to put all that extra overhead on my meager ability, and I don't know if that combination would allow access to the GPU anyway. I guess I'll have to be satisfied that I am doing something, and something is better than nothing.

smp

I responded to the wrong post - I'll quote you this time:

For the record, Big Sur and Monterey have Boot Camp. My 2019 MacBook Pro, with Monterey installed, is right beside me, with Boot Camp Assistant open. I can offer no advice or opinion on Apple silicon - my machine has an Intel 9th gen i9 8 core CPU in it.

I found it by opening spotlight, and typing 'Boot Camp', the app doesn't show up in launchpad.

It is my intention to make a full backup of my existing installation, then try Folding in Boot Camp. Not sure how soon I'll get around to it - probably within the week.

I suppose that FAH cannot support every GPU available. Is that the reason for neither of my GPUs being put to use?

The answer to that is, Apple has dropped OpenCL support. As near as I can tell, the last OpenCL that Apple supported wouldn't be good enough for folding today. If you can find a way to install an up-to-date OpenCL on your Mac, you could probably fold on macOS. My tentative search efforts suggest that is not possible.

Unfortunately there was a long-standing bug in MacOS's OpenCL, so because there was no way to make it work there isn't even a GPU folding core available for MacOS, even after Apple finally fixed that OpenCL bug. If there are developers available to work on a Metal implementation of OpenMM (the folding core), I think they would be more than welcome to work on this project: https://github.com/openmm/openmm

Speaking of Parallels on MacOS, it does not appear to be possible to pass through the GPU to the hosted OS, even though the display can be moved there: https://kb.parallels.com/124266

It is not possible to connect an eGPU device directly to VM, as they are being connected to Mac via PCIe interface which requires VT-d technology support to make virtualization of such connection possible, but VT-d on Mac can't be used for passing an external GPU to a virtual machine.

Maybe if someone has influence of Apple's developers they might at least lean on them to allow GPU pass-through, if not helping out with an Apple native OpenMM port.

Runaway1956 wrote:The answer to that is, Apple has dropped OpenCL support. As near as I can tell, the last OpenCL that Apple supported wouldn't be good enough for folding today. If you can find a way to install an up-to-date OpenCL on your Mac, you could probably fold on macOS. My tentative search efforts suggest that is not possible.

As mentioned in the other reply, there was a bug in Apple's OpenCL support that was eventually fixed. To further clarify, Apple has not yet dropped OpenCL support, just deprecated it in favor of Metal and discontinued further development. This means for most devices they have OpenCL 1.2 support, some older hardware only has OpenCL 1.0 support. A developer note for porting apps to run on the new Apple silicon Macs indicates OpenCL is available when targeting the GPU, but not the CPU. I have not checked all of the details of the latest macOS and its support for OpenCL, but have not yet found any notice that OpenCL support has been removed.