
Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19 - ForFreedom
https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19-2019-ncov/
======
ozfive
Why are they not appealing to the major cloud providers at this time to use
any spare resources couldn't they set it up so that the cloud providers could
count using resources as donation to a charity?

~~~
kossTKR
Google has just done this with AlphaFold a few minutes ago:

[https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-
pred...](https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-predictions-
of-protein-structures-associated-with-COVID-19)

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."

~~~
beojan
Not quite, Google are running their own code.

~~~
kossTKR
I agree that the wording could have been be better. "This" here referring to
the link after the :, not the folding@home project.

I wonder how AlphaFold compares.

------
UncleOxidant
Gotta say the instructions are pretty awfully lacking. You go to the download
page and you download the client and there's nothing that tells you what
you're supposed to do after you download the client.

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
    

Yeah, it only took a few minutes of googling, but why not put that info on the
download page?

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?

~~~
hateful
This is a great example of something that happens when a
technology/program/framework has a long history and an existing community.
Most users have been there for a very long time and sometimes the instructions
or documentation doesn't explain what new users may or may not know.

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.

~~~
UncleOxidant
Also tried BOINC and got "cannot connect to core server" and apparently (based
on googling around) you've gotta open up a specific port. Would be nice if
they told you this on the download page or at least where to look after you
download.

I gave up on both folding@home and BOINC. I don't have all day to fiddle
around with this shit.

------
sunshinerag
Has FAH approach solved any other real world problems? Has its findings
accelerated understanding of any particular disease or helped significantly in
developing a cure?

~~~
dekhn
The F@H paper I was a coauthor on
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24345941](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24345941))
has been cited by many in pharma. I honestly can't say whether it has directly
contributed, but many people have been thankful for this work because it
helped establish the concept that proteins aren't super stable rocks, so
virtual drug discovery screening can work better if you can simulate the
dynamics of a protein (in this case, we simulated a GPCR, which is a common
pharma target).

------
Aaronstotle
I wish that Folding@Home was on BOINC. It has an awful interface/uses a local
webserver to control it. I'm glad they're doing something, but they should
make the experience more user friendly, I usually stop out of frustration with
starting/stopping.

~~~
synack
I threw together a quick and dirty dockerfile for it.
[https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/fah-
docker](https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/fah-docker)

------
sliken
A friend tried this in the last week and was frustrated that there seemed to
be no way to limit CPU/GPU use to only work relaed to Covid.

Is there a way to limit work to Covid?

~~~
Geezus42
BOINC

~~~
gchamonlive
there are detailed steps in the arch wiki page:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/BOINC](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/BOINC)

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...](https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc/)

------
Havoc
wow their UX is atrocious.

* 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.

~~~
UncleOxidant
I don't think BOINC is that much better. I got it installed and running and
got 'cannot connect to core servers'. Nothing on their download page talked
about where to go next for instructions either. After googling around I see
something on a message board about opening up certain ports. If they want
people to help out with this stuff the first thing they need to do is improve
their documentation and onboarding.

At least I got the FAH thing to run, but only on the CPU not the GPU. I give
up.

~~~
olejorgenb
I also had trouble getting the GPU to work. Maybe this helps:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577145)

------
squarefoot
Next scam: cryptomining app that pretends to help finding a virus cure.

~~~
whalesalad
That would be interesting. Not the Trojan horse you’re thinking of... but
using it instead for good. One of the downsides to f@h is you aren’t
compensated at all for your contributions. Now obviously that’s not such a big
deal, since you’re ostensibly doing something altruistic for society and your
fellow man/woman.

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.

~~~
schoen
This concept is called "proof of useful work" and we haven't really found
practical examples of it yet.

(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.

------
dwardu
Go to the apple store and set up the mac pro in each store to fold.

~~~
tareqak
Doing that on your own would probably get you in trouble. However, if Apple
chose to do it themselves, then it would be a both a good PR move and of
possible help to humanity. Same goes for Microsoft and the Microsoft store,
and every store that has computers running on idle (Best Buy, Office Depot,
etc). Who can we tweet at?

~~~
bookofjoe
Whenever I'm in an Apple Store or department, I bookmark my website and leave
it on the screen. Every little bit helps when you're at the end of the long
tail....

~~~
luckylion
And, did you see increased traffic from Apple corporate networks?

~~~
savoytruffle
The public display computers even in Apple-owned retail stores aren't on the
corporate VPN so they won't show a 17.x.x.x IPv4 address (or an Apple-owned
IPv6). They will show whatever local ISP the store is using.

------
archi42
Saw that on Heise (German IT magazine) a few days ago. Setup on Arch Linux is
really simple
([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home)),
but with our electricity costs over here it's more expensive than what I'm
willing to contribute - my CPU compute node [2*2687W] at home draws 500W on
FAH, which translates to 112US$ per month (80W idle, but it's mostly powered
down anyway). Else this & BOINC would be a really nice way to utilize my
unused hardware.

------
nairboon
Maybe they should reconsider the integration with BOINC. That would give them
access to one of the largest distributed clusters.

~~~
ptah
I can see they have staff shortages that prohibits that:
[https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-
boinc...](https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc/)

~~~
anticensor
Did you mean "inhibit"? Prohibit means to forbid.

~~~
Symmetry
Prohibit as in "(of a fact or situation) prevent (something); make
impossible." rather than "formally forbid (something) by law, rule, or other
authority". It's not the most common usage of the word but it's still a pretty
common one.

~~~
drewbug
e.g. "prohibitively expensive"

------
dmos62
So how is using home electronics an efficient use of electricity (and money)
for doing these tasks? What are the economics of this? Wouldn't it be more
efficient to donate the money you'd spend on electricity and equipment?

~~~
gambiting
I'm running my GTX1080Ti for this, GPU-Z is showing me that the card is using
200W while running, let's be generous and say the entire computer uses 300W
while running these computations. That means 7.2kW used per day, or 223kW used
per month. At my current electricity price of £0.12/kWh, this is costing me
£26 a month.

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.

~~~
ac29
Donating 26/month to Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders) is
almost certainly going to have more of an impact than a small computation
donation to FAH.

------
spondyl
There used to be a FoldingAtHome application for the Playstation 3 that I ran
for a while. It's a shame it never made its way to other consoles because
they're properly underutilised during the day, for me at least.

~~~
antonyh
It wasn't great though - it didn't use spare cycles. It had to be started and
run exclusively.

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.

~~~
gambiting
Considering PS3 only had 256MB of ram and was using all of it for computations
or when running games, I think the chances were pretty slim.

~~~
antonyh
Fair point, I'd forgotten that.

If only they'd released NetHack for PS3, it would have run in the background
easily ;-)

------
Zenst
This is wonderful and gives people a constructive way forward instead of
feeling useless.

Does bring hope that after this they could tackle other uncured viral
infections like herpes for example.

------
turbostyler
This website does an absolutely terrible job of explaining itself. The layout
of the homepage is awful and starts with a random video, then a request that I
start "folding at home" \- whatever that means, followed by more nonsense
language to anyone who, like me, arrived at the site with very little context.

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.

------
Corona2019
CORONAVIRUS – WHAT WE’RE DOING AND HOW YOU CAN HELP IN SIMPLE TERMS
[https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-
were-d...](https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-
and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/)

------
hrgiger
Yesterday I was looking for that, there is also fold.it users create their own
proteins [0][1], those proteins passed to researches for validation or maybe
they still validate through rosetta, even some users automate protein
generation via lua scripts. Yesterday I wanted to check/contribute source code
but its closed:( [2]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit)

[2] [https://fold.it/portal/node/986352](https://fold.it/portal/node/986352)

------
mentos
If this was a war effort we’d probably get Microsoft to push out a patch to
windows 10 to let users opt into it securely? Or does the computing power of
100M+ home PCs still pale in comparison to a few cloud providers?

------
jgeada
What guarantees do we have that some for-profit pharma corporation will not
take the information discovered by this, patent it and profit at our expense?
As it is, the public already funds most of the early research into drugs and
yet almost all the resulting IP ends up owned by big-pharma.

~~~
riantogo
Can't people sue based on prior art if that happens?

------
doener
Previous link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473937)

------
NohatCoder
I doubt that this is going to help much, if you could fold your way to a virus
cure, surely we would have seen cures for a bunch of other common viruses.

~~~
hrgiger
seems like rosetta@home already has candidates:

>"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."

[http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/](http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/)

------
blackrock
Why not use smartphones these days?

Just plug your iPhone in at night, and the app will run in the background,
when it detects user inactivity.

~~~
rozab
And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that would be much more
energy efficient than a desktop computer

~~~
fluuuhi
Energy efficiency doesn't necessarily comes from being better on full load.
Smartphonechips provide tons of power saving mechanisms, true but also are
quite limited on how they operate.

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

------
Graham24
sounds like a great new idea for phone scammers; try to con people into
downloading their covid research project.

------
khnov
This makes no sense to me that they do not have a windows version ... Majority
of PCs in the net are windows based ...

~~~
zirror
They do: [https://foldingathome.org/alternative-
downloads/](https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/)

