Folding@Home ARM64 Linux Beta Release for COVID-19 Vaccine Research

A few months ago, we reported that Rosetta@Home supported 64-bit Arm SBC’s and Servers in the Fight against COVID-19. But Folding@home did not support Arm hardware just yet, but thanks to work from Neocortix, Linaro, Arm, miniNodes, and Packet.com, we now get support for Folding@home on ARM64 meaning you can help researchers studying SARS-CoV-2 virus and help them develop a COVID-19 vaccine with Raspberry Pi 3/4 boards, or other 64-bit Arm SBC’s and servers.

The solution relies on Neocortix Cloud Services Platform allowing the unused capacity of large numbers of individual mobile phones or other connected nodes to be harnessed into a single, unified computational engine. The very first application that made use of the platform was Neocortix PhonePaycheck were users get paid to let businesses perform calculations on their phones at night while charging and connected to WiFi. That way users of premium phones like Galaxy S10 or S20 can make around $80 a year when used for 8 hours a day, or $240 per year with a spare phone running 24/7.

Back to ARM64 Folding@Home topic… If you’d like to participate you can download and install the beta version of ARM64 Debian packages for Folding@Home (FAH) client, control, and viewer. The press release also mentions support for Android smartphones, but the app has yet to be released.

I don’t have an ARM64 board running at the moment, but the installation should go as follows:

You’ll have some setup to do during FAHClient installation, and first, you’ll be asked for a user name. Then, you can optionally join a team, enter a passkey (also optional), and select the load level you’d like to allow on your board/server/computer.

Finally, you’ll be asked whether to start FAHClient automatically. If yes, it will start in the background, if not simply run the command below:

At this point, the program will run and select a task automatically. But if you want a little more control, visit https://client.foldingathome.org/ on the machine where you installed the program, and select the project you’d like your computer to work on, and other settings.

Alternatively, you could run FAHControl to launch a graphical interface and visualize the project as it runs.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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