For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
#1762180
Posted on the COVID-19 discussion thread, but thought I'd post it here too:

I've installed Folding@Home on my computer which is processing stuff I don't understand to help the efforts with understanding the Coronavirus' proteins which might help with finding new treatments.

With Ebola they came up with a structure that had a site that was druggable which previously hadn't been seen. Info on their COVID-19 programme here.

If anyone is interested, I have set up a Flyer team so we can see how our collective efforts are going - just enter team number 262865 when you install.
#1762181
JonathanB wrote:Posted on the COVID-19 discussion thread, but thought I'd post it here too:

I've installed Folding@Home on my computer which is processing stuff I don't understand to help the efforts with understanding the Coronavirus' proteins which might help with finding new treatments.

With Ebola they came up with a structure that had a site that was druggable which previously hadn't been seen. Info on their COVID-19 programme here.

If anyone is interested, I have set up a Flyer team so we can see how our collective efforts are going - just enter team number 262865 when you install.


I don't get this, it was technique in use a few years back with some limited success but the advent of large scale cloud computing from AWS, Azure, Google et al effectively made it redundant. You can run up a zillion instances on AWS for pennies to run these sort of simulation models, so what am I missing???
#1762182
johnm wrote:You can run up a zillion instances on AWS for pennies to run these sort of simulation models, so what am I missing???


People having a warm fuzzy feeling from doing their bit to help....
kanga liked this
#1762184
Why not just use a supercomputer?

Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Supercomputers are not only very expensive to operate, but they are often simultaneously shared by many different research groups, and it is a challenge to scale a molecular simulation to all of their processors. Protein folding dynamics is statistical in nature, so a single long simulation from a supercomputer would not be sufficient to fully understand the folding process. Folding@home is one of the most powerful computing systems on the planet, and we use novel methods to utilize its network to statistically analyse the dynamics of protein folding. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not be possible by any other means! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.
#1762187
Supercomputers are very different from cloud instance assemblies and from PC clusters so my guess is they're set up to run slowly in the background on PC instances rather than fast on a vast number of cloud instances. Quicker if more expensive answers on cloud would be my guess.
#1762192
The fastest "supercomputer in the cloud" so far has been https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/20/supercomputer_aws/ but I would hazard a guess that they used spot instances that could be removed at any time.

The power available in millions of home computers is vastly more than AWS could muster of everyone could be persuaded to run it , (it's also free)
#1762207
I've joined the team, having been running this for some weeks. It takes a while to get itself going but is completely unobtrusive in the background. It reminds me of SETIathome which I was running for quite a while some years back.

Will we do any good? Who knows - but we'll certainly do no harm.

G
JonathanB, PaulB liked this
#1762265
I’m now through my third reboot and various updates, just trying to get my “machine” (part server, part PC) up to date before I switch graphics card.

I was hoping to do some benchmarking “before and after”, but I now remember why I gave up on Windows as something “fun” to have at home.... :shock:
PaulB, Flyin'Dutch' liked this