You can stop here if
If you were looking for a heartfelt feel-good story ‘cause what I did was build a PC.
tl;dr:
I built a Linux PC with multiple GPUs, for science! It runs Folding@Home in a Docker image on Ubuntu Linux . I had a US$1000 budget because that was my inheritance.
Backstory
When my father passed it was time for the executors of the estate who were, in the order established by Dad, my brother, me, then one of our sisters. Dad’s will was written in 2014, after consultation with my brother, whose whole advice was “just split everything evenly, call out possessions you think are interesting”. The result was pretty much that; a straight-forward splitting of whatever estate there was equally amongst his heirs, and a note that listed some things he thought were of particular interest, but not bequeathing any specific items to anyone. At the time it was written and distributed to us I doubt any of us expected there to be much of anything to divvy up and we’d really all just wind up with knick-knacks that reminded us of him.
The new will was written just a few years ago and the changes and outcomes are significant. First, all but one of us get US$1000, and one of gets everything else. There was a couple hundred thousand US$ in “everything else”, plus a property worth another hundred thousand or so. The will included a clause that said if any of us 1000ers tried to fight the will we get a hearty “fuck you” in the form of that US$1000 being replaced by a single dollar. I will say, it’s easy to guess at why he would have made this change and, well, it’s his stuff, ya know? 🤷 But he didn’t, like, leave a letter explaining anything like why exactly US$1000, though some research shows that might be the minimum amount one can will to trigger a “you can’t say you weren’t recognized” clause in New Mexico law. That we know of.
Now, Reader, you might be slavering for gossip about the inevitable foofaraw of variously dismayed or nonplussed siblings! Alas, I will leave you perched in unsatisfied expectation.
I quickly decided I wanted to do something specific with the 1k, not just put it in my bank account. To decide what to do, I thought through some memories of Dad for inspiration. I don’t… have a lot of those. He didn’t try to do stuff with his kids. He did his stuff. There was stuff we both liked doing, like reading, but we din’t share the same tastes. So not books. And the more I thought about the things we overlapped on (drawing - he had a Master’s degree in art, and I doodled badart ), and those thoughts overlapped with thinking about how I felt about the will changing and about his possible motivations. And that’s when I realized I was going to build a computer. Remember, Dad was always very grateful to me that I kept him in computers but he told other people he hated them. It’s not like he’d never used them, either. For a while he taught drafting (how to do architectural drawings) at a technical institute and they - and he - used AutoCAD. And when he got a personal computer, he had all kinds of questions about news sites and social media and so on. But he never had the level of expertise in hardware and software and systems and storage and networks and security that I did. And that reversed the roles. So I was definitely going to do the thing that was mostly my thing.
In the late ’90s, SETI@Home was all the rage among my friends. You could install a client that downloaded chunks of radio telescope data and did some visualizations while it used your spare CPU cycles to look through these signals from the cosmos for messages from aliens. Following in this mold came Folding@Home where you installed a client that downloaded datasets about proteins and tried to figure out how they fold and interact. I hadn’t thought about these projects in years, but a pal of mine got me the bug again and I promptly blew up the liquid cooler in my PC.
I had the folding bug, but I didn’t want to torpedo my own PC again. Enter, my inheritance.
The Thing Itself
My criteria were traight forward:
- total cost under US$1000
- multi-GPU; probably scrounged from friends, eBay and Craigslist (and they were!)
- massive air cooling capability
- place to put a radiator for a liquid CPU cooler
- will run Linux
- uses up some of the spare gear I have lying around (muted success)
- hostname of
origami
I won’t do an exhaustive breakdown of all the pieces, I’ll just link you to a list of the parts for those that are interested.
Installation
Here’s some sites that I found useful and got me up and running:
- Setup Guide: Multi GPU Ubuntu Server AMD & nvidia
- Script for Ubuntu: Nvidia Multi-GPU Installation and Testing
- CUDA Toolkit 12.9 Update 1 Downloads
- linuxserver/foldingathome
Results
It works great.
Thanks, Dad.
[Updated 2025-06-18T15:44:17-0700 to fix link to PC Part Picker]