How to run Folding at Home on powerful Virtual Machine in 5 minutes via Vast.ai?

about 17 hours ago (Edited)

This is tutorial step-by-step how to buy computing power and run Folding at Home to help cancer/Alzheimer etc. research easily and effectively. The instruction works for Linux and macOS, I assume noone running Windows would be determined enough to perform it anyway.

Open the terminal and type:ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/Documents/ASI/key_name

(You can use different directory, but is elegant to have separate catalog specifially for one task). You will be asked to choose the passphrase for the key, choose wisely as there will be no "I forgot password" option. There will be two keys created: the private one and the public one. Create the catalogue before You create ssh key in it :).

Vast.ai: https://cloud.vast.ai/?ref_id=513344

I have used also ASI:Cloud, which works nicely but is more expensive in general.
ASI Cloud reflink: https://asicloud.cudos.org/?referrer=xfclRp0489inOH8t7CiJJ
Go to Console (or type cloud.vast.ai in the browser bar). " "Wklejony obraz (2).png""

Click Select Template and choose NVIDIA CUDA (for AMD and Intel GPUs there might be different one, but currently there are none on vast so I cannot check).

Browse through available machines and select the one You want. If you focus on energy efficiency, I recommend choosing RTX PRO Blackwell or RTX Ada GPUs. The amount of memory and its bandwidth is not crucial in Folding at Home. H200 or B200 GPUs will be also very effective, but they will be much more expensive and the difference is not worth the price for that goal (for the same money, You will get better results by running PRO Blackwell or Ada cards for longer, than H100/H200/B200 for shorter). Avoid using gaming machines, if You decide however, I think it is better to choose a few weaker ones than like one RTX 4090 or 5090. If You care about environment, You can also focus on choosing the location with high usage of nuclear or renewable energy, like France, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, California.

When You decide, click Rent. So far I have been using cheaper "Interruptable" machines but was never interrupted so far:). And even so, the Folding at Home saves the results often, so I recommend choosing these machines.

Now go to "Instances" on the left bar.

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Click Key button

Add PUBLIC SSH key and confirm

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In Terminal on Your PC, write chmod +600 PATH_TO_YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY

Then type:

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Exchange my path to the private key with Yours, and the IP Address of my machine with the IP address of Your machine which can be found here:

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(the command written here does not work directly, as it does not contain path to the private key)

Then type the passphrase.

You are connected :)

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Then type consecutively:

wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/fah-client/debian-10-64bit/release/fah-client_8.5.5-64bit-release.tar.bz2

apt install bzip2 -y

tar -xjvf fah-client_8.5.5-64bit-release.tar.bz2

cd fah-client_8.5.5-64bit-release

nohup ./fah-client --account-token=Your_token > fah.log 2>&1 &

Note: in the future when Folding at Home will get newer version, replace 8.5.5 with the newer one, You can always go here: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

and copy path to the proper link:

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always choose .tar.bz2 download as it is "plug and play" one.

The nohup command makes the FAH run in the background even when the ssh connections ends.

Replace the token with Your Folding at Home account token. You can find it here:

" "image.png"" Open Folding at Home in Your browser as You do always.

The machine should be visible now:

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Click Setting icon and enable all GPUs You have paid for.

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I recommend leaving at least as many CPU cores free as You have GPUs, their work is marginal comparing to GPUs anyway and if enabling all cores will slow GPUs for at least 1%, it is not worth, and if they have a lot of cores, like 64 in that case, difference between 62 and 64 is marginal also.

Save the changes and click Start Folding button.

Congratulations, You have just created Your first Virtual Machine running Folding at ~~Home~~ Server.

You can also connect to the machine in the second terminal window, and type nvtop or nvidia-smi dmon command, and You will see specifically how GPUs work. For CPU, type htop.

If GPUs don't run on full power, try different provider next time, maybe he has set some limits.

Last but not least: create Your own instruction in the .txt file, so You can start action faster than checking each time on my blog.

If You have some questions, feel free to ask.

RTX PRO 6000 are beasts.

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