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Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19
- sunshinerag 7y agoHas FAH approach solved any other real world problems? Has its findings accelerated understanding of any particular disease or helped significantly in developing a cure?
- adrianN 7y agoHave you checked the website? E.g. https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/ https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
- atsuzaki 7y agoTheir wiki page lists a handful of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home#Examples_of_application_in_biomedical_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home#Examples_of_app... Do keep in mind that 1. very few drug candidates make it through drug trials (iirc it's something around 1 in 1000), and 2. these trials takes 10+ years, and FAH has been around for only 19 years. It's very likely that a bunch of its results are in trial right now, and we'd only hear about it 10-20 years in the future
- dekhn 7y agoThe F@H paper I was a coauthor on (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24345941 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24345941) has been cited by many in pharma. I honestly can't say whether it has directly contributed, but many people have been thankful for this work because it helped establish the concept that proteins aren't super stable rocks, so virtual drug discovery screening can work better if you can simulate the dynamics of a protein (in this case, we simulated a GPCR, which is a common pharma target).
- nairboon 7y agoMaybe they should reconsider the integration with BOINC. That would give them access to one of the largest distributed clusters.
- ptah 7y agoI can see they have staff shortages that prohibits that: https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc/ https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc...
- anticensor 7y agoDid you mean "inhibit"? Prohibit means to forbid.
- Symmetry 7y agoProhibit as in "(of a fact or situation) prevent (something); make impossible." rather than "formally forbid (something) by law, rule, or other authority". It's not the most common usage of the word but it's still a pretty common one.
- drewbug 7y agoe.g. "prohibitively expensive"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ptah 7y agoto me "inhibit" means more like dampening or lessening something while "prohibit" means stopping something completely
- blackrock 7y agoWhy not use smartphones these days? Just plug your iPhone in at night, and the app will run in the background, when it detects user inactivity.
- rozab 7y agoAnd someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that would be much more energy efficient than a desktop computer
- fluuuhi 7y agoEnergy efficiency doesn't necessarily comes from being better on full load. Smartphonechips provide tons of power saving mechanisms, true but also are quite limited on how they operate. I assume that generic code on a x86 desktop cpu should be more efficient by watt/work in comparison on a mobile chip. I'm also not sure how a smartphone is rated for 100% cpu load 24/7
- aunetx 7y agoNot really actually, as a ARM cpu is not as powerful as a x86_64 one : the "compute power / electrical power" should not be really better I guess
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThat's most likely to be the opposite of what is needed here: do as little as possible and sleep as much as possible. Whereas the project actually needs is as much raw computing power as you can provide. Yes, there are some methods to provide more computing bang for less energy buck, but this is a comparatively minor issue.
- OtterGauze 7y agoWhile true and while phones are considerably more powerful now than they used to be, modern ARM SoCs don't come close to their x86 counterparts.
- viraptor 7y ago
- spondyl 7y agoThere used to be a FoldingAtHome application for the Playstation 3 that I ran for a while. It's a shame it never made its way to other consoles because they're properly underutilised during the day, for me at least.
- antonyh 7y agoIt wasn't great though - it didn't use spare cycles. It had to be started and run exclusively. If they baked it in to use cycles when games were paused for instance or made it switch to FAH instead of powering off, it could have been so much more.
- lucb1e 7y ago> for me at least. I like how you leave room for the possibility that there is a significant percentage of people playing on their consoles for the vast majority of their waking hours :-)
- sliken 7y agoA friend tried this in the last week and was frustrated that there seemed to be no way to limit CPU/GPU use to only work relaed to Covid. Is there a way to limit work to Covid?
- Geezus42 7y agoBOINC
- gchamonlive 7y agothere are detailed steps in the arch wiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/BOINC https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/BOINC however it seems that folding@home isn't on BOINC. Either that or I am misinterpreting: https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc/ https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc...
- bmdavi3 7y agoI tried this the other day and ran into the same issue. Couldn't figure out a way to set it to covid.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- archi42 7y agoSaw that on Heise (German IT magazine) a few days ago. Setup on Arch Linux is really simple (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home), but with our electricity costs over here it's more expensive than what I'm willing to contribute - my CPU compute node [2*2687W] at home draws 500W on FAH, which translates to 112US$ per month (80W idle, but it's mostly powered down anyway). Else this & BOINC would be a really nice way to utilize my unused hardware.
- dwardu 7y agoGo to the apple store and set up the mac pro in each store to fold.
- tareqak 7y agoDoing that on your own would probably get you in trouble. However, if Apple chose to do it themselves, then it would be a both a good PR move and of possible help to humanity. Same goes for Microsoft and the Microsoft store, and every store that has computers running on idle (Best Buy, Office Depot, etc). Who can we tweet at?
- shrthnd 7y agoGenius idea!
- bookofjoe 7y agoWhenever I'm in an Apple Store or department, I bookmark my website and leave it on the screen. Every little bit helps when you're at the end of the long tail....
- luckylion 7y agoAnd, did you see increased traffic from Apple corporate networks?
- bookofjoe 7y agoNot that I noticed, alas.
- savoytruffle 7y agoThe public display computers even in Apple-owned retail stores aren't on the corporate VPN so they won't show a 17.x.x.x IPv4 address (or an Apple-owned IPv6). They will show whatever local ISP the store is using.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
- ozfive 7y agoWhy are they not appealing to the major cloud providers at this time to use any spare resources couldn't they set it up so that the cloud providers could count using resources as donation to a charity?
- nicolaslem 7y agoCloud providers do not have much unused resource. Tricks like spot instances make sure that they are as close to 100% utilization as possible while still being able to handle a spike in demand.
- ozfive 7y agoCan I spin up instances and write it off for charity as a business?
- Xylakant 7y agoThere should be no need to write it off as charity. If you spin up instances, it's a cost which gets written off as any other cost. If you use those for folding at home, that's your (business') thing. (Obviously, this is generalized and your local tax situation may differ)
- willis936 7y agoThat’s their point. If you’re billed for instances, but those instances are used for charity and can be written off taxes, then why not? Tax write off donations in the form of product usually help clear out stock/keep things moving. They’re like a guaranteed sale. So it may be best to appeal to the providers of the instances.
- balfirevic 7y agoBusiness expenses (for the company spinning up instances) are already written off taxes, which is what ozfive was talking about. Do you mean that the cloud provider can write off that income as charitable donation?
- hrgiger 7y agoYesterday I was looking for that, there is also fold.it users create their own proteins [0][1], those proteins passed to researches for validation or maybe they still validate through rosetta, even some users automate protein generation via lua scripts. Yesterday I wanted to check/contribute source code but its closed:( [2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit [2] https://fold.it/portal/node/986352 https://fold.it/portal/node/986352
- NohatCoder 7y agoI doubt that this is going to help much, if you could fold your way to a virus cure, surely we would have seen cures for a bunch of other common viruses.
- hrgiger 7y agoseems like rosetta@home already has candidates: >"We are happy to report that the Rosetta molecular modeling suite was recently used to accurately predict the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus protein weeks before it could be measured in the lab. Knowledge gained from studying this viral protein is now being used to guide the design of novel vaccines and antiviral drugs." http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
- khnov 7y agoThis makes no sense to me that they do not have a windows version ... Majority of PCs in the net are windows based ...
- squarefoot 7y agoNext scam: cryptomining app that pretends to help finding a virus cure.
- nipponese 7y agoOr obsolete, donated ASICS that that are now a legit part of the network.
- whalesalad 7y agoThat would be interesting. Not the Trojan horse you’re thinking of... but using it instead for good. One of the downsides to f@h is you aren’t compensated at all for your contributions. Now obviously that’s not such a big deal, since you’re ostensibly doing something altruistic for society and your fellow man/woman. However... if you put a real cryptocurrency behind it and coupled proof of work to solving real scientific issues... that could bring a lot more compute into the cluster.
- schoen 7y agoThis concept is called "proof of useful work" and we haven't really found practical examples of it yet. (There are also systems that pay people with cryptocurrencies for contributing computational resources, but the cloud computing markets are probably efficient enough that you could get cheaper computation overall by paying cloud providers regular money to rent computers from them.) Proof of useful work, in which the cryptocurrency itself is verified by people who are also doing inherently useful computation, has a big challenge because the properties of the problems that are used in cryptocurrency PoW are so specific. Partial hash collisions, the typical example, have properties like * it's trivial to generate a practically unlimited number of new instances * new instances can be created in an objective way with no ongoing involvement by a central authority * the instances can be parameterized by an arbitrary seed value (representing the identity of a block) * the instances can easily be scaled by an adjustable difficulty * a purported solution can be verified extremely cheaply I don't believe we've found any broadly useful computation problems that have all of these properties.
- doener 7y agoPrevious link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473937
- mentos 7y agoIf this was a war effort we’d probably get Microsoft to push out a patch to windows 10 to let users opt into it securely? Or does the computing power of 100M+ home PCs still pale in comparison to a few cloud providers?
- Havoc 7y agowow their UX is atrocious. * Download page doesn't explain why there are 3 packages and which you need * On installing first & clicking next it pins all CPU cores to 100% * The package that presumably controls this silently fails to install - on a brand new up to date ubuntu install. ...so now I'm stuck with a service pinning everything to 100% (while in use) and no way to control it. Uninstalled. I'll stick to BOINC. (edit: tried the terminal route - seems to fail because of python-gnome2 dependency). You'd think they'd get their stuff to work with Ubuntu...it's at a mere 50% of nix marketshare.
- thrownaway954 7y agoTHANK YOU!!!! I was just going to comment this. I went to their website and gave it the 5 second test. I couldn't figure out ANYTHING through their homepage in a 5 second scan. There is ZERO call to action that makes any sense on their homepage. WTF is folding? Why not just say, HELP US FIND A CURE? What's funny is that I can bet these projects sit in a conference room and wonder why they aren't getting the support they deserve and it's all because they NEVER explain themselves correcly to the average layman.
- jolmg 7y ago> WTF is folding? folding@home is a protein folding[1] simulator. > Why not just say, HELP US FIND A CURE? Though their work helps others find a cure, they themselves are not looking for a cure. Their contribution is only to help understand these things better by simulating the proteins folding. I'm not saying this to downplay their work, but to explain why referring to folding and not to curing makes more sense. I imagine that it may even be the case that not all their work is with the aim of helping find cures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
- thrownaway954 7y agoyou're missing the point. what they do is incredible but it is not explained simply their website to the common visitor.
- Graham24 7y agosounds like a great new idea for phone scammers; try to con people into downloading their covid research project.
- dmos62 7y agoSo how is using home electronics an efficient use of electricity (and money) for doing these tasks? What are the economics of this? Wouldn't it be more efficient to donate the money you'd spend on electricity and equipment?
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe efficient use of money part is that they already have the spare capacity. The electricity is likely worse but it is a rounding error compared to the years of continuous operation to equal the new hardware cost. Plus it is donated electricity anyway.
- eecc 7y agoDonating money towards what? Setting up a new supercomputer dedicated to this sort of work comes with a lot of overhead and most crucially time delay. Even slapping a leftover raspberry pi online is worth more if done in a couple minutes. Edit: the RaspberryPi is not supported, unfortunately.
- gambiting 7y agoI'm running my GTX1080Ti for this, GPU-Z is showing me that the card is using 200W while running, let's be generous and say the entire computer uses 300W while running these computations. That means 7.2kW used per day, or 223kW used per month. At my current electricity price of £0.12/kWh, this is costing me £26 a month. I have no idea who I could even donate this to so it would make any impact whatsoever. But I know for certain that there is literally zero chance they could rent a GTX1080Ti-equipped machine for £26/month anywhere in the world.
- ac29 7y agoDonating 26/month to Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders) is almost certainly going to have more of an impact than a small computation donation to FAH.
- landtuna 7y agoIf it's cold outside, the waste heat is basically a space heater.
- Zenst 7y agoThis is wonderful and gives people a constructive way forward instead of feeling useless. Does bring hope that after this they could tackle other uncured viral infections like herpes for example.
- UncleOxidant 7y agoGotta say the instructions are pretty awfully lacking. You go to the download page and you download the client and there's nothing that tells you what you're supposed to do after you download the client. I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 and after downloading the client I had to do: $ sudo update-rc.d FAHClient defaults $ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb $ sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient start Yeah, it only took a few minutes of googling, but why not put that info on the download page? I edited /etc/fahclient/config.xml so that gpu v = 'true', but It doesn't seem to be using the NVIDIA GPU after restarting the client. Any hints?
- hateful 7y agoThis is a great example of something that happens when a technology/program/framework has a long history and an existing community. Most users have been there for a very long time and sometimes the instructions or documentation doesn't explain what new users may or may not know. I see this a lot in the nodejs tooling, Azure, vmware. Each version of a product slowly changes the way the product works and most documentation, readme and blog posts miss key information that they assume people would already know. If I'm new to node, I may not know things. It's like when you have some sample C# code and it doesn't include the "using" line and/or the Nuget package used - assuming the person already knows what package would perform this task - because it's "obvious" to existing users.
- UncleOxidant 7y agoAlso tried BOINC and got "cannot connect to core server" and apparently (based on googling around) you've gotta open up a specific port. Would be nice if they told you this on the download page or at least where to look after you download. I gave up on both folding@home and BOINC. I don't have all day to fiddle around with this shit.
- nu11p0inter 7y agoGood post, good insights. I faced the same when starting on nodejs stuff, things that were obvious to others were completely lost/hard to find for me.
- 7y ago
- Aaronstotle 7y agoI wish that Folding@Home was on BOINC. It has an awful interface/uses a local webserver to control it. I'm glad they're doing something, but they should make the experience more user friendly, I usually stop out of frustration with starting/stopping.
- synack 7y agoI threw together a quick and dirty dockerfile for it. https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/fah-docker https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/fah-docker
- jgeada 7y agoWhat guarantees do we have that some for-profit pharma corporation will not take the information discovered by this, patent it and profit at our expense? As it is, the public already funds most of the early research into drugs and yet almost all the resulting IP ends up owned by big-pharma.
- riantogo 7y agoCan't people sue based on prior art if that happens?
- turbostyler 7y agoThis website does an absolutely terrible job of explaining itself. The layout of the homepage is awful and starts with a random video, then a request that I start "folding at home" - whatever that means, followed by more nonsense language to anyone who, like me, arrived at the site with very little context. The first thing on your site (after the navbar) should be an explanation of what your product is/does in as few words as possible.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Corona2019 7y agoCORONAVIRUS – WHAT WE’RE DOING AND HOW YOU CAN HELP IN SIMPLE TERMS https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/ https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-d...