Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19(foldingathome.org) |
Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19(foldingathome.org) |
https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-pred...
It's just so fresh it hasn't been posted anywhere yet:
"Normally we’d wait to publish this work until it had been peer-reviewed for an academic journal. However, given the potential seriousness and time-sensitivity of the situation, we’re releasing the predicted structures as we have them now, under an open license so that anyone can make use of them."
It'd be amazing PR bang for the buck.
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
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?
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.
I gave up on both folding@home and BOINC. I don't have all day to fiddle around with this shit.
<config>
<!-- Client Control -->
<fold-anon v='true'/>
<!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
<gpu v='true'/>
<!-- Slot Control -->
<power v='full'/>
<!-- Folding Slots -->
<slot id='0' type='CPU'/>
<slot id='1' type='GPU'/>
</config>
$ sudo /etd/init.d/FAHClient restart
Also, yes, it doesn't seem to be working on the covid problem, it says it's working on: Project 14311
Halorubrum lacusprofundi
sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev
Then edit the config file to include gpu (I also added a gpu slot <slot id='1' type='GPU'/> but not sure if it's needed.
Then restart.
Seems you'll have to wait a while to get a job though.
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
Is there a way to limit work to Covid?
Couldn't figure out a way to set it to covid.
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...
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
It's also way easier to get people to just download and run something rather than donating money, the cash donation is hard and definite while the costs of running a distributed computing client is nebulous.
Edit: the RaspberryPi is not supported, unfortunately.
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.
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 :-)
Does bring hope that after this they could tackle other uncured viral infections like herpes for example.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw
>"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."
Just plug your iPhone in at night, and the app will run in the background, when it detects user inactivity.
At least I got the FAH thing to run, but only on the CPU not the GPU. I give up.
So you can easily set it to keep say 4 cores free for the user at all times
Heat.
Smartphones are decently powerful, but they typically only use the CPU in short bursts. This has allowed them to get away with being extremely skimpy on the cooling, which is good because a phone that needed a heat sink and fan would be incredibly bulky.
If you ran something with sustained CPU usage like F@H, within a minute it would be considerably warm and probably have crazy amounts of thermal throttling.
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
Yes, there are some methods to provide more computing bang for less energy buck, but this is a comparatively minor issue.
I wonder how AlphaFold compares.
> the machines won’t be sold in the company’s retail stores
If only they'd released NetHack for PS3, it would have run in the background easily ;-)
I'm not saying that's the exact number; that depends on a lot of things. My point is that this is a great deal more plausible an outcome than your intuition may think. (It could even be worse.)
A similar idea was in vogue in the oughties about loading JS onto web pages and having people compute things while visiting CNN or something. But especially on the much slower JS of the time, and with no access to GPUs, by the time you worked out all the multiplicative slowdowns involved, and dealt with the crazy broken communications topology (radically slower than in-memory bandwidth, etc.), you were looking at loading down millions of people's machines to get the equivalent of single digit high-power dedicated machines for all but very embarrassingly parallel problems. You were better off just buying the CPU power.
("Well then, what about Seti@Home and such?" All embarrassingly parallel problems running native clients, at high rates of utilization. That's a several orders of magnitude more efficient than running things when a visitor happens to visit some web page (terrible utilization), on a slow JS VM, in a single thread.)
Do you mean that the cloud provider can write off that income as charitable donation?
If a business allows a nonprofit to use excess capacity, the capacity is still a business expense.
Google and AWS have huge amounts of unused computer capacity at low traffic periods. They can still expense those items even if they allow charitable use when not needed for business use.
Worst case if no unused capacity a business can call the expense a marketing expense and can ask the nonprofit to acknowledge their support of the activity. This is not uncommon.