For those that don’t know folding at home is a distributed processing computer network which provides computing power for health research projects in the field of protein science, and is run by Stanford university.
Applications for this science range from cancer research, to alzheimers, and debilitating, terminal genetic diseases such as Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and even mad cow disease.
People all over the world for the last 15 years or so have donated their spare computing power, available on home computers, corporate servers and even gaming devices in some cases.
These generous donations from the general public amount to an incredible amount of money in terms of hardware costs, internet bandwidth, and power consumption costs, plus time and effort of donors to configure and maintain their computers to run the folding at home software in a stable fashion, and make charitable contributions.
Folding at home currently supports both CPU and GPU (graphics card- AMD and NVIDIA) processing of scientific research.
Shortly after installing folding at home, and beginning to compete work units, I noticed a problem with the GPU- the required core file (the application that runs the GPU as a processing unit for folding at home) FahCore_21.exe and FahCore_a4.exe were having an issue shortly after downloading from the Stanford university website. : access is denied.
How to fix??
FIrstly, I looked at the firewall issues that could be stopping the FahClient program communicating with the outside world.
The following list of applications need to be enabled as authorized in the windows 10 firewall to ensure folding at home can run properly: fahclient.exe, FAHCoreWrapper.exe, FAHViewer.exe, FAHControl.exe, Core_21.exe
Its also a good idea to pin these apps to the start menu for easy access too- it doesnt happen by default when undertaking the standard install!
The core file may be different, depending on the age of your system and GPU / graphics card- (mine is an ancient dinosaur by comparison to modern gaming beast rigs) core i5 CPU + NVIDIA fermi GT 430 graphics GPU.
Some of these folding at home client and core files can be a little tricky to find- their default direcotry locations are hidden in the rather hotchpotch file structure of windows 10 or windows 7
The main client and other key applications default file path is fairly easy to find on windows 10:
- fahclient.exe default file path: C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient
- This program controls the CPU calculations (folds proteins)
- FAHCoreWrapper.exe default file path: C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient
- This program allows GPU to be used for calculations too.
- FAHViewer.exe default file path: C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient
- This app visualises the protein folding itself you are undertaking, and renders a map showing the worldwide distribution of donors
- FAHControl.exe default file path: C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient
- Instead of using the web control to configure your client’s behaviur, login etc, (http://folding.stanford.edu/client/) you can use a local program instead.
The core files for the GPU processor are in a couple different possible locations:
Typically only under windows 7 – program data
C:\ProgramData\FAHClient\cores\fahwebx.stanford.edu\cores\Win32\AMD64\NVIDIA\Fermi\Core_21.fah\Core_21.exe
on WINDOWS 10 – the appdata roaming folder under your user account
C:\Users\insertyourwindowsusernamehere\AppData\Roaming\FAHClient\cores\fahwebx.stanford.edu\cores\Win32\AMD64\NVIDIA\Fermi\Core_21.fah\Core_21.exe
The last possible problem stopping the folding at home client from running properly is administrative privileges. Though your account might have administrative privileges, you may need to specify to use them when the F@H client is started- this can be set via the peoperties of the application file.
You will need to navigate to the file’s location in the file system and right click on it to change the default running preferences.
Check the box “run this program as administrator” and hit apply.
After all this is done, the access denied error on folding at home should be fixed.
