Folding Forum

Now that the vaccines are released, or about to be released, did all the input we did for the Coronavirus research accomplish anything? Thanks!
P.S. I hope many of those who signed on for the Pandemic will stay with us. There is so much to still to be done.

[I am just a user like you, this is not an official response]

One of the ways that F@H encourages the use of their data is that no attribution is necessary.

The results of our work are freely available to all, and no one need acknowledge that they used our data.

This helps our data be useful, but does not stroke our ego. We may never know.

If it saves a single life to be un-acknowlged, I am in favor of it. But some days you would like a 'well done'.

Well Done!

This project is not primarily about vaccines, but using targeted small molecules to bind to the virus and disable it.
So they are working on anti-virals. Just look up the COVID Moonshot descriptions.
https://covid.postera.ai/covid

Here is a recent one: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/ ... antivirals

They have made great progress. I think they hope that some of the knowledge may be useful for vaccines, but that is another ballpark.

Some things to keep in mind:

- Not everyone will take the vaccine for one of three likely reasons: 1) Typical anti-vax beliefs, 2) They think these specific vaccines are dangerous because of the rapid development, 3) They have some health concern which may prevent them from taking the vaccine.

- The vaccines so far are ~90% effective, which would be great if everyone took the vaccine, but looking at the point above it means you may still contract COVID-19 from someone who does not take the vaccine. We may end up lacking herd immunity.

- There are currently many mutations of SARS-CoV-2, and while none so far which have spread more widely are expected to have mutated beyond coverage of the mRNA vaccines, at least, it's not impossible that such a mutation could occur.

- We do not know how long the various vaccines will be effective per dose.

With that said, the primary goal of F@H has been looking for a way to deactivate the virus, most likely be attacking somewhere in the spike protein. Recent data has shown that F@H may have potentially found a way to do this, and not just for SARS-CoV-2... but for ALL known coronaviruses. This would be an amazing feat, and could potentially lead to a very inexpensive therapeutic which someone could take any time they felt cold or flu-like symptoms coming on, stopping the virus in its tracks. While the disease might still spread, the serious health concerns would very likely be abated, and we'd never have to deal with a coronavirus-related epidemic/pandemic again, barring large mutation to this key protein.

More information on this discovery was actually posted just yesterday: https://foldingathome.org/2020/12/16/sa ... potential/

Foldbert wrote:Some things to keep in mind:

- Not everyone will take the vaccine for one of three likely reasons: 1) Typical anti-vax beliefs, 2) They think these specific vaccines are dangerous because of the rapid development, 3) They have some health concern which may prevent them from taking the vaccine.

- The vaccines so far are ~90% effective, which would be great if everyone took the vaccine, but looking at the point above it means you may still contract COVID-19 from someone who does not take the vaccine. We may end up lacking herd immunity.

- There are currently many mutations of SARS-CoV-2, and while none so far which have spread more widely are expected to have mutated beyond coverage of the mRNA vaccines, at least, it's not impossible that such a mutation could occur.

- We do not know how long the various vaccines will be effective per dose.

With that said, the primary goal of F@H has been looking for a way to deactivate the virus, most likely be attacking somewhere in the spike protein. Recent data has shown that F@H may have potentially found a way to do this, and not just for SARS-CoV-2... but for ALL known coronaviruses. This would be an amazing feat, and could potentially lead to a very inexpensive therapeutic which someone could take any time they felt cold or flu-like symptoms coming on, stopping the virus in its tracks. While the disease might still spread, the serious health concerns would very likely be abated, and we'd never have to deal with a coronavirus-related epidemic/pandemic again, barring large mutation to this key protein.

More information on this discovery was actually posted just yesterday: https://foldingathome.org/2020/12/16/sa ... potential/

Sounds good! I hope we'll keep up the effort and I hope more and more people will join F@H, our computing power should always be increasing. I hope and pray we're given credit if our work leads to a treatment. More power to F@H!!!

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ary.php?s=

If you click on Monthly active users, you see the reality.

Even if the information from the projects we are working on (as volunteers) can be used by the producers of the current vaccines to improve their efficacy, others can use it to create vaccines or treatments that can be made at a lower cost---and be more easily distributed/used in third world countries where access to refrigeration is not possible.

Paul

JimboPalmer wrote:https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ary.php?s=

If you click on Monthly active users, you see the reality.

The fall-off among Active Users since the April high is significant but the Monthly Points totals have actually held up much better and appear to be holding for now at roughly nine times the pre-pandemic totals. This may in part be due to a higher retention of mega 100M+ PPD donors.

Burlingtonian wrote:

JimboPalmer wrote:https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ary.php?s=

If you click on Monthly active users, you see the reality.

The fall-off among Active Users since the April high is significant but the Monthly Points totals have actually held up much better and appear to be holding for now at roughly nine times the pre-pandemic totals. This may in part be due to a higher retention of mega 100M+ PPD donors.

Don't forget CUDA. Since late september NVIDIA cards have seen a point increase of about 25%.

Jonazz wrote:Don't forget CUDA. Since late september NVIDIA cards have seen a point increase of about 25%.

If you contrast Points to WUs, you can see the impact of the CUDA processing.

As a historical note, No one expected COVID-19. F@H was perpetually out of WUs, the F@H network was not able to cope with the data traffic, and the 'Helpers' here were swamped with questions they did not have answers to. You can not blame those who lost interest in that time.

Since it was so swamped, even though users quit, point did not dip much, as now users could get WU's24/7 and often get access to servers. (not this weekend, though)

I congratulate both Volunteers and Helpers for sticking with the Project! (as we know, the servers 'know' when staff is gone so we can expect WUs again after the 1st)

Not only have GPUs been upgraded, but since the first of the year I have added two Ryzen 3950X and two 3900X. That is a lot of cores.
I use as many as I can on Folding, but there is not always enough work.

Have any of you replaced two GPUs with a single one with increased total FAH throughput? If so, then you, too, have contributed to the fall-off of users without a fall-off in PPD. (though there was no actual loss in the number of donors)

Also remember that some of the corporate and institutional contributors created a new CPUID for every Work Unit they submitted, or otherwise spun up short-lived instances, which inflated the CPU count.

bruce wrote:Have any of you replaced two GPUs with a single one with increased total FAH throughput? If so, then you, too, have contributed to the fall-off of users without a fall-off in PPD. (though there was no actual loss in the number of donors)

Everytime I look on Hardware it seems more like people are replacing one with two or two with three, or just replacing 2080's with 3090's. The arms race still continues with our arms being faster GPUs and more PPD.

But I do suspect that some people who maybe ran an older machine with say a bunch of 1050 or 1060s in it may have replaced them with a single 2080 or similar card, just to cutback on the bills a bit. The whole Covid problem has probably caused unemployment and less money to burn, which probably scales to less folding getting done, especially if the choice is between folding and putting food on the table for your family.