
AWS Just Started Folding - superchink
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/aws-just-started-folding.2578802/
======
nearting
Let's be clear here: this is about protein folding.

I almost panicked for a moment thinking they were folding in some sort of
business sense, before realizing it would take far more than what's currently
going on for AWS to fold.

~~~
nunez
Azure has been having a really tough time during all of this so my head went
there too

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raghava
Oh, spot instances to save lives!

There is also [https://covid19-hpc-consortium.org/](https://covid19-hpc-
consortium.org/)

    
    
      COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
    
      Members: a lot of universities, federal agencies, NASA, US DoE, IBM, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, NVIDIA,
    

compute muscle -> Over 402 petaflops, 105,334 nodes, 3,539,044 CPU cores,
41,286 GPUs, and counting.

To join - go to [https://www.xsede.org/covid19-hpc-
consortium](https://www.xsede.org/covid19-hpc-consortium)

Just curious - are Apple/FB doing anything about it?

EDIT: Apple is helping in a different way
([https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/5/21209270/apple-face-
shield...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/5/21209270/apple-face-shields-
masks-covid-19-coronavirus))

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Apocryphon
The teams are quite fascinating. A diverse bunch of national teams, and
community teams from tech websites to the skeptics community to Bronys to Free
Republic, the Republican mega-forum?

[https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php](https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php)

HN should start one.

------
xref
So I’m curious, we have a tendency on HN to assume every problem has a
technical solution; from autism to inmate rehabilitation, from food insecurity
to poverty, solutions are just one good SaaS idea away.

Is covid@home really going to solve this by donating cpu cycles before
traditional medical research creates a vaccine? Is turning coal into code (ala
Bitcoin) that productive in this case? Because I’ve run the app but feel like
I’m in some kind of techbro bubble to believe I’m making even an iota of
difference

~~~
DanBC
(I'm paraphrasing people here and I may have mangled what they're saying,
sorry)

This thread has some useful commments, one from someone who's actually done
F@H research, another from someone who mentions the length of time it takes to
get a medication trial through the system (without covid-19 easements) and how
few trials actually make it.

There's a bit of discussion around the cost in electricity, and whether it's
better to just send that money somewhere.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491910)

This post links to a blog that talks about F@H that you may be interested in.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662026)

This post is from someone who is a researcher who says that F@H is a form of
science, and so it should continue, but that it's probably not as directly
applicably useful as F@H says.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22576088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22576088)

------
amatecha
So... can we add "@ Home" to this title? Cuz I was like "WHOA how is AWS
possibly going out of business?"

------
swagasaurus-rex
What am I seeing? The chart is blurred out.

~~~
kommissar
Click though to
[https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&...](https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=238068)

I'm still not sure what this is. Who is ec2spot??

My guess is that maybe Amazon installed the Folding client on some part of ec2
capacity in an idle pool waiting to be launched?

I'm not sure. That would use quite a lot of power... and setting up networking
and getting approval to do this would be a ton of work.

~~~
slenk
EC2 "Spot Instances" are unused instances that you can bid on if cost belows x
price. I would assume they are using those unused ones.

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znpy
Why has this article been flagged?

~~~
robjan
I'm going to guess because it's pointing to a forum post which is just a link
to the article, and the title is misleading.

~~~
apexalpha
And maybe because 'folding' could mean 'starting to crumble' or anything else
related to business continuity management.

I suggest changing the title to Folding@home, the more common name for this
type of project.

------
louis-paul
Slightly better context:
[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=938560](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=938560)

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nukeu666
Is amazon the corporation putting in the cpu time or an individual paying for
aws to do this?

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boardwaalk
So, anyone want to hazard a guess at what their bill would be?

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ztratar
No information in the link.

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c3534l
Can anyone explain to me what I'm looking at?

~~~
sq_
The link in the Anandtech forum points to the ExtremeOverclocking leaderboards
for Folding@Home, which is a Stanford project to do distributed protein
folding. They're currently placing COVID-19 related projects at max priority.

My understanding is that Amazon is devoting a chunk of spare AWS capacity to
folding for the project. In the last week or so, they've done about 300k work
units (essentially they've run that many simulations all the way through).

------
emmanueloga_
As usual ... Wikipedia [1] has a better explanation than the actual site [2],
sigh.

"Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for performing
molecular dynamics simulations of protein dynamics. Its initial focus was on
protein folding but has shifted to more biomedical problems, such as
Alzheimer's disease, cancer, COVID-19, and Ebola."

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home)

2: [https://foldingathome.org/](https://foldingathome.org/)

