Got a graphics card? Put it to work fighting the coronavirus

[cliffordcooley]

Since we're running into these pandemics pretty regularly now (IMHO)

When one believes they are engineered (even by accident), that really is not surprising. It is impossible to predict how everyone's system is going to react when introduced to a potential medication.

 

[trieste1s]

To make folding more sustainable and less taxing on my Ryzen 3600 CPU and 2060 Super GPU, I've temp-limited both of them to 70 degrees C (that's 158 degrees F for you star-spangled revolutionary rebels). Since I live in a tropical country it's probably wise that I do this.

Fans are kept low, and other activities are smooth running. Playing emulator games, Steam games, all not a problem.

 

[wiyosaya]

I'm not saying don't do this to support any chance at stopping this pandemic. Doesn't really matter who gets rich when possibly millions of lives are at stake. That being said, simply reading and wondering will get you information. From the download page at Techspot.
View attachment 86289
Which points you to: https://foldingathome.org/
so I looked up the name Pande Laboratory
Their web page: https://pande.stanford.edu/ at Stanford lists the current staff and alumni.
One of the alumni, went on to become the CEO of Northern Biologics.
A quick DDG look for Northern Biologics
<...>
I think the Versant Ventures description is interesting, but it does remind me of most hype word tech investment hustles, that is just me though.

From my perspective, it is not uncommon for a researcher to go on to try to commercialize their research. IMO, if there is no interest elsewhere, why not? Smaller organizations are sometimes much more flexible than the behemoths in the field and with a bit of angel or venture capital, who knows what new wonders might surface.

The software description at Techspot seems to say this was an individual achievement and not an extrapolation of the BOINC software from SETI@home. I don't know, but SETI@home BOINC says:
View attachment 86291

Absolutely, they are separate. Folding@home and the BOINC effort are two different projects. If I had not been running BOINC, I might have jumped on this. However, the projects I run cover several different research fields. I checked to see if Folding@home was a BOINC project, and, unfortunately, it is not.

None of this means anything except for indicators to those complaining about Big Pharma or others being involved or not getting their personal part of the Wuhan Killer Bug project. This software research was and is not a military operation. It doesn't, and wasn't planned to scale up to saving the world in as short a time as possible. Since we're running into these pandemics pretty regularly now (IMHO), perhaps you might want to write or talk to your elected reps to maybe point the hundreds of thousands of unclassified government systems with GPUs toward this problem.

Just sayin'

Informing people about things like this is certainly helpful, IMO.

One of the BOINC efforts that I ran was through the World Community Grid - The Clean Energy Project. https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/cep2/overview.do

About 36,000 of the compounds analyzed show potential to perform at approximately double the efficiency of most current organic solar cells in production. Scientists can use this information to continue investigating the most promising candidates for use in cheaper, more efficient and more flexible solar cells. Thanks to World Community Grid volunteers, the computations for this project, which would have required 17,000 years on a single PC, were carried out in only three years, and the results are now available to stimulate research in the next generation of solar energy solutions.

IMO, this provides a great example of what is possible when people are willing to donate CPU/GPU time to projects like this and, incidentally, this project was CPU only.

The reason that I run many of these projects is because of the potential to further research and help humanity. There is really nothing in it for me other than the satisfaction that the computing power that I have that otherwise would be idle is helping solve some of the most challenging problems that face humanity.

 

[porthose]

Yea thought about putting Folding@home on a few raspberry pi's I have but they don't offer an ARM version. So I was going to create one along with creating a docker image so others like myself could contribute to the project. However their code is PROPRIETARY. Which means you can't look at it or inspect it, and there is no way of telling exactly what this software is doing, or what kind of information it is phoning home. Use it if you want to, but for me, not having the ability to inspect the code is a deal breaker.

 

[Yynxs]

Yea thought about putting Folding@home on a few raspberry pi's I have but they don't offer an ARM version. So I was going to create one along with creating a docker image so others like myself could contribute to the project. However their code is PROPRIETARY. Which means you can't look at it or inspect it, and there is no way of telling exactly what this software is doing, or what kind of information it is phoning home. Use it if you want to, but for me, not having the ability to inspect the code is a deal breaker.

Interesting. Most academic development is on the government dime. This thing has been running for a couple of decades and wiyosaya's statements indicate it's not related to open source BOINC. Makes me wonder if a grant audit was conducted for the Stanford people involved when multiple GPU/CPU shared processing was starting out. hmmm....