Folding Forum

Looking at F@H's twitter and facebook pages, there does seem to be major partners involved already, for example this facebook post from March 14, naming Microsoft, GitHub and CoreWeave: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php? ... &__tn__=-R

Hey, I'm a sysadmin for a university faculty, I can donate resources for _server_ side. Who do I contact concerning this? (not 'one box with 100TB', but things can be arranged to look like one )

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.

I know, the federal government has been fairly useless. But they have lots of money to throw around.
Ask, and they will probably throw some (maybe a lot) in your direction.

Wanted to offer my efforts as well, if there's a need. I'm an ops guy with a decade of experience, currently working with production systems in the tens of thousands of nodes. I can't offer anything in the way of massive hardware, but I can certainly take on some of the firefighting work - y'all must be worn out by now!

If there's interest, feel free to send me a private message and we can work out details - happy to vet myself and verify identity and all that fun stuff. Will gladly sign NDAs, terms, etc.

This project means a lot to me, and now is certainly a crunch time, so I'd be thrilled to help smooth things out if at all possible!

This is really key, I think. I'm part of an organization that is trying to figure out how it might be to help in the COVID-19 picture, but without an (even-just partially- formed ask), it's hard for me to forward this along to people in the decision-chain for further analysis.

RGB_Lights wrote:Please let us know what the need is. Many of us have serious tech connections. That same interest that overran the capacity due to publicity is ready to overrun you with resources, but there need to an authoritative ask.

Please think big, ask for what you could put to use in a massive surge scenario, not what you think you could get. We really can help. With an authoritative description of a big request, we can also save you the trouble of assembling many small offers. You have an unparalleled case for support and a big ask at this a solid strategy.

Hey all,

New user here (have run various distributed computing platforms in the past on and off), just wanted to offer any help needed on a volunteer basis. I'm a sysadmin/devops with >15 yrs in the field so can help with likely anything server/server-maintenance/debugging/scripting related. I WFH so I can likely fit in stuff between work tasks as well as evenings on PST/EST times where needed. Can provide any sort of credentials needed for trustworthiness purposes.

I realize a lot going on atm so no worries if you don't need more cooks or can't really find time to organize but just so you know offer is there.

Is there a folding@home Discord or Slack that I'm missing btw?

I agree with a cloud compute based approach to address the scaling issue. However, cost is a significant factor in this. Has anyone considered a gofundme page to account for the additional costs. I don't know FaH's specific infrastructure requirements to speak to which cloud vendor would be best (GCP, Azure, or AWS), but armed with that information, I could certainly architect it and price it out so management would know how much they will need from an infrastructure perspective. As for who would design, build, migrate, and manage the environment, and the associated costs, that would require even further discussion.

I know they have already made some arrangement with Azure, there are two new servers listed on the server status page in the process of being configured hosted there. As that is publicly visible, I am mentioning it here. As I understand it there are multiple negotiations going on.

It looks like one of the WU servers is already on AWS:
My expertise is in cloud architecture. I can help with design and costing. It will require a great deal of intimate infrastructure knowledge to scope everything out to alleviate the scaling issue. But I'm willing to assist if you are willing to let me. So, let me know if you are interested and we can get started on this.

livingmentor wrote:It looks like one of the WU servers is already on AWS:

Code: Select all

C:\Users\livin>ping -a 18.218.241.186

Pinging ec2-18-218-241-186.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com [18.218.241.186] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 18.218.241.186: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=35

My expertise is in cloud architecture. I can help with design and costing. It will require a great deal of intimate infrastructure knowledge to scope everything out to alleviate the scaling issue. But I'm willing to assist if you are willing to let me. So, let me know if you are interested and we can get started on this.

18.218.241.186 is actually an Assignment Server (AS), which only directs the clients to Work Servers (WS) which in turn holds Work Units (WU); so I think the bottleneck right now is not really on the AS servers but the WS end.. Also not sure if the researchers are able to keep up with supplying new WUs.

GingeraMan wrote:Get corporate sponsorship they are all desperate to show off their stuff so let them brand the rescue all they like. We saved FaH blah blah blah. Has anyone approached Amazon etc?

Has anyone approached Bill Gates, the Surgeon General, the Senator and Congressmen for the state where F@H is located? If you can, even the Vice President might be able to help. What about CNN? From the inactivity of my client program, we're drowning. Has anyone approached IBM, Apple, any high tech computer company?

Probably a really dumb idea, but what about community hosted WU servers?

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.

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.