mikeestacio wrote:My worry is that with all the attention F@H is getting from the media to fight COVID-19 there are a ton of new donors who are opening the client to the first time only to find that it just sits idle and does nothing at which point they uninstall F@H, never to return. We may lose a lot of potential contributors because of this.
It makes me question if we're really doing everything we can. Are we reaching out to companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, and Intel to help fund the server upgrade? Are we doing damage control to inform new donors of what's going on and retain them? I'll tell you that it took me awhile to find this forum to get my answers and before I did, I was searching fruitlessly on Twitter and the foldingathome.org News page for answers.
Well, FAH has always had the baseline level of volunteers... People who started folding before COVID-19 will stick around, FAH isn't losing much in that sense. I am saying this as someone who has folded since 2004.
It does make me wonder how helpful FAH's work is, in the immediate terms. Drug discovery / design is only the first stage. It takes roughly 10 years for a new drug to reach the market. If we are doing long term sciences, we don't really need that many short term volunteers anyway.
Folding with 4 cores on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K
I first started folding back in the Google Compute days!
mikeestacio wrote:My worry is that with all the attention F@H is getting from the media to fight COVID-19 there are a ton of new donors who are opening the client to the first time only to find that it just sits idle and does nothing at which point they uninstall F@H, never to return. We may lose a lot of potential contributors because of this.
Yeah, I worry about that too. That's why I have currently deleted FAH. Let the new guys take the work, I hope they'll stay afterwards.
You don't have to delete it... I just pressed pause, then went on to do Rosetta@Home. Although Rosetta@Home does not say what they are doing, I might just stick to World Community Grid. I do normally contribute to World Community Grid. I am only contributing to Rosetta@Home because some rumour says they are helping with the COVID-19 effort.
Folding with 4 cores on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K
I first started folding back in the Google Compute days!
fangfufu wrote:
Well, FAH has always had the baseline level of volunteers... People who started folding before COVID-19 will stick around, FAH isn't losing much in that sense. I am saying this as someone who has folded since 2004.
It does make me wonder how helpful FAH's work is, in the immediate terms. Drug discovery / design is only the first stage. It takes roughly 10 years for a new drug to reach the market. If we are doing long term sciences, we don't really need that many short term volunteers anyway.
Well technically we do have 10 years of research on coronavirus. If I understand correctly, COVID-19 is a mutated form of the original SARS virus that happened roughly 16 years ago and therapies developed for SARS-CoV are being used as a template for SARS-CoV-2.
Under normal circumstances it would take 10 years for a drug to reach market but this case is a global pandemic that's affecting our economic health as well as our physical. I feel that if we can help provide researchers with these simulations that guide their efforts in the right direction and get the data they need faster we can expedite the process.
Last edited by mikeestacio on Wed Mar 18, 2020 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Last I read, there is about 80% commonality between COVID-19 and the earlier SARS virus. Part of what F@h is doing is identifying drug targets that can be used for treatment using existing drugs, and thus not have to go through a 10 year R&D cycle before they can be used.
iMac 2.8 i7 12 GB smp8, Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp6
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp3
Like many others here, I would be more than happy to volunteer a modest amount of time in addition to my folding power. I'm a SRE/Sysadmin by trade and a programmer by hobby. I'm already part of an on-call rotation, and wouldn't mind adding on to that, especially considering I'll be spending more time at home for the foreseeable future. Additionally, I've helped a few university organizations make the most out of very little, including outreach for resources to support the organization.
Well, it seems we have some talent in this forum. My RTX 2080 TI and I will keep standing by for work, if you have it. So far, all I get is "No WUs available for this configuration" in the logs, indicative that the researchers don't have any work for me to perform. So, in the meantime, I will keep reading through the forums and experimenting to learn more about the platform. While I'm familiar with other programs like SETI@Home and distributed grid computing in general, I am very new to F@H. Some reading will keep me productive.
livingmentor wrote:Well, it seems we have some talent in this forum. My RTX 2080 TI and I will keep standing by for work, if you have it. So far, all I get is "No WUs available for this configuration" in the logs, indicative that the researchers don't have any work for me to perform. So, in the meantime, I will keep reading through the forums and experimenting to learn more about the platform. While I'm familiar with other programs like SETI@Home and distributed grid computing in general, I am very new to F@H. Some reading will keep me productive.
Yep, that error is common until they add more work to the queue and finish setting up the new servers. It will work out over the next couple of days. Keep everything online and running because there's work that gets pulled in occasionally at the moment.
SETI@home seems to have wrapped up at the moment. I hope everyone moved their systems all over to F@h and helped us fight the coronavirus.
F@h is now the top computing platform on the planet and nothing unites people like a dedicated fight against a common enemy. This virus affects all of us. Lets end it together.
You don't have to delete it... I just pressed pause, then went on to do Rosetta@Home. Although Rosetta@Home does not say what they are doing, I might just stick to World Community Grid. I do normally contribute to World Community Grid. I am only contributing to Rosetta@Home because some rumour says they are helping with the COVID-19 effort.
I'm also running Rosetta atm. They have a news article on their site about Corona. They claim to predict the structure of the protein before classical methods did it.
I was thinking that if we can convince Steam to adopt Curecoin as a method of payment it could create more incentive for more gamers to donate their GPU power to F@H as well as increase the value of Curecoin
psimaster wrote:To me it appears that FAH is a very low priority for academia. The apparent lack of interest in solving major illnesses by developing therapeutics indicates to me there is no real intention to address these diseases. Please prove me wrong.
Protein interaction is basically how life works... Understanding how life works is quite useful in developing therapeutics...
Folding with 4 cores on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K
I first started folding back in the Google Compute days!
BTW what is the current user estimate and rough estimate of computational capacity of this thing now, in TFlops? It must be up there with big supercomputers by now...
GingeraMan wrote:BTW what is the current user estimate and rough estimate of computational capacity of this thing now, in TFlops? It must be up there with big supercomputers by now...
It has always been up there with the big supercomputers, mate...
Folding with 4 cores on Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K
I first started folding back in the Google Compute days!
Any updates on the infrastructure upgrade? I see all these media outlets getting more people to download the client but nothing about helping the server side.
