Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, farmpuma, just brew it!
JustAnEngineer wrote:F@H's server stats show them assigning 100,000 units an hour, but neither of my machines has had anything to work on in the past seven or eight hours. Interestingly enough, the team's throughput is holding pretty steady.
https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ?s=&t=2630
P.S.: They're up to 120,000 assignments per hour on Tuesday morning, but my three clients (2 GPUs + 1 Ryzen) have seen a total of two work units in the past 15 hours.
DPete27 wrote:Well, that escalated quickly.
F@H just broke the exaFLOP barrier. Now larger than the top 100 supercomputers in the world combined.
Points earned
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777,217 go to Team The Tech Report's total of 14,674,793,766.
Flying Fox wrote:A couple of clarifications:
- You can use your own ID and join The Tech Report team (id: 2630) to contribute your points to overall TR
- Only if you want to fold under the name TRFrankenbot as an aggregate entity (still under TR) that you need a passkey
Side note: if you have been idling for long but still want to contribute to the science, you can join Rosetta@Home (a project under the BOINC client) as they are also crunching WUs related to the virus. The COVID-19 ones seem to be CPU only WUs, but at least you can get some calculations done and help out. When you sign up, you can optionally choose to join Tech Report 2630 to give some credit to the team as well.
Krogoth wrote:Has it delivered anything worthwhile?DPete27 wrote:Well, that escalated quickly.
F@H just broke the exaFLOP barrier. Now larger than the top 100 supercomputers in the world combined.
Sweet mother of mercy. That's an insane amount of aggregated computing output.
Vrock wrote:Krogoth wrote:Has it delivered anything worthwhile?DPete27 wrote:Well, that escalated quickly.
F@H just broke the exaFLOP barrier. Now larger than the top 100 supercomputers in the world combined.
Sweet mother of mercy. That's an insane amount of aggregated computing output.
Redocbew wrote:I'm in! I won't be running it 24/7, but while I'm not in the office I see no reason why I can't put some spare hardware to use. The gaming machine has an i7 6700k and an RTX 2070, so that should be a decent addition to the horde.
When I installed the client last night it seemed to have no trouble picking up a work unit, so either I got lucky, or those problems are starting to work themselves out.
My systems are still spending 80% of the time waiting for work units.Understanding how the spike opens up to engage the ACE2 protein could be extremely useful. Every step along the way could potentially be targeted with therapeutics. Unfortunately, there is no way to watch a spike undergo this transition, at least with existing experimental techniques. Data on what the open state even looks like is also limited.
To overcome this limitation, we are using computer simulations to watch the COVID-19 Demogorgon open its mouth. To do this, we are using a two-stage process. In the first stage, we use an algorithm called FAST adaptive sampling that allows us to focus simulations on capturing specific structural changes, like the opening of the spike. While we can see these processes, it’s often still hard to say how long each stage of the process takes. Such information is valuable because long-lived steps are generally better therapeutic targets. To get that information, we then take representative structures from different stages of the opening process and start thousands of simulations on the Folding@home distributed computing platform. These simulations let us identify additional structures of the protein, determine the relative lifetimes of all the different structures, and prioritize them for drug development.
Both steps are extremely computationally expensive. If you tried to simulate the opening of the spike on your home computer, you’d be lucky to see even part of the process within the next 100 years. Even with the reasonably powerful computer cluster we run at the Washington University School of Medicine, we’d be hard put to capture this event. Needless to say, none of us wants to wait that long for a COVID-19 treatment to be developed.
Fortunately, we have reinforcements! Over the past three weeks, over 700K citizen scientists have joined the Folding@home project. This 20-fold increase in participation has given us unprecedented compute power to bring to bear on COVID-19. In fact, Folding@home is the first computer to achieve the exaFLOPS scale and is now estimated to be more powerful than the next top 100 supercomputers combined.
We have also established a number of collaborations with industry. For example, John Kahan, Chief Data Analytics Officer and AI for Health lead at Microsoft, shares our vision, saying, “The scale and size of the current global pandemic requires a collaborative approach between companies, non-profits, governments, scientists, and clinicians. We are glad to be able to support the Folding@home project through Washington University School of Medicine in the acceleration of COVID-19 related research using Azure cloud resources.” By joining forces with the AI for Health and Azure teams at Microsoft, we’ve been able to bring significantly more compute power to bear on the first stage of our simulations. They’re also helping us host additional servers to better serve the Folding@home community.
Of course, please bear in mind that this work is at the bleeding edge of science. We’re throwing everything we’ve got at COVID-19, but we can’t say for sure if/when our work will lead to treatments.
