Posted on 03/03/2020 10:31:54 PM PST by texas booster
The Coronavirus is causing lots of problems around the world, and it can feel a bit unfair that many of us are home living our lives, unable to help. However, that doesn't mean we can't do anything. Folding@Home announced that it is taking the fight to the Coronavirus, and you can donate your computer's leftover processing resources to help researchers find a cure.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by the Stanford University, aimed at learning about protein folding with the purpose of fighting disease. Distributed computing means that rather than using one big supercomputer, Folding@Home relies on users donating their computer's reserve power to the organization as a charity. By concentrating the computing power of the untold masses on singular problems, the organization can wield the power of a supercomputer, but without the cost.
To understand how this helps, we have to explain a little bit about protein folding. When proteins are made they emerge as a long string, but for this string to be useful to the body, it needs to fold into a three-dimensional shape. These folded proteins can be found on the surface of cells and they determine what enters and exits the cell.
The 2019-nCoV also has proteins on its surface called spikes, which trick the ACE2 lung cell surface receptor into letting the virus into the cell and starting a viral infection. One way to stop infection is to find a way to block this protein that resides on the virus, preventing the virus from binding to our cells, and thus rendering it unable to establish an infection.
(Excerpt) Read more at tomshardware.com ...
1. Download and install Folding@Home as you would a normal program.
https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
2. Use Custom Install options to set the startup preferences of your choice.
3. Run Folding@Home. You will automatically be redirected to the web control.
4. Enter a FReeper name and join our Team: 36120
Please see the link for more details on setting up the program.
I started folding back in the Genome@Home days, and was with SETI before that. Once I realized that the science I was advancing could become very personal, and might even save a life (mine!) I moved my systems over to the Stanford University folding project.
The FReeper Folding team started about 2000 and has stayed at about the #120 team in the world for years. We used to have competition from DU, but that faded once they realized that they had to buy their own electricity to fold.
F@H does not take much time or effort, and if you have invested in quality computer components you will see a payoff very quickly.
Please join if so led.
The “Team Stats” site appears to be having issues....was going to see where I was on the “FR Folding, A tribute to RR” team...I switched to folding for cryptocurrency awhile back tho. (”CureCoin” & “FoldingCoin”) so I fell well back on the FR team stats.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/teams
Here is a link to the FReeper team. We are currently the #97 team in the world, and are led in points by hagerstrom and LonePalm. Thank you in advance for joining the effort.
I posted the link to the Extreme Overclocking site, which has recently streamlined their stats site.
Apparently the EO site was up to 2 GB of stats in an Excel file ... a bit larger than most of my spreadsheets!
bookmark
A link to the DU folding team. Just sad. Much like Biden.
Looking at DU's stats that had a pretty active team last year from April to October, then they just vanished.
Interesting.
Wow, blast from the past...It’s been a long, long time.
Is there any chance that I’ll be mining bitcoins rather than unfolding proteins?
OMG folding. What a blast from the past. This is possibly the original Virtue Signaling before the term was coined. It was a huge deal with all the leftist gamers who wanted you to do folding with your Playstation when you weren’t playing gamed on it. Folding can cure cancer they said. So if you don’t do folding, your not helping save the world they said.
Virtue Signaling I say.
Does anyone know if the client lets you tweak the load?
I disagree. It's valid science. There have been published results from the F@H work. Protein folding is computationally intensive. If someone wants to donate electricity to the project, it's something that can actually contribute to the advancement of science. Folks who participate should understand that it's really not just 'wasted cycles' that are a part of this though. You'll see a measurable increase in electricity consumption from any system running F@H, especially if they are running the GPU cores. Taking part in this is actually costing you money. If you want to do it though, there is nothing wrong with it. I would not go as far as to say that it will "help cure coronavirus" though. They really aren't that specific in the proteins they are working on from what I recall.
You can certainly continue to mine using your CPU and GPU. When I tried it I earned about 0.02 cents daily.
I would probably be singing a different tune had I been mining BTC since the beginning but I wasn't that farsighted.
However I do believe that F@H has made valuable additions to science at a very basic level. Being able to model the process by which every protein in our body folds, and applying it to specific diseases, gives me hope that one day I will benefit, or my children or grandchildren. Or someone elses’ kids.
At worst I have had a great excuse to buy some new toys through the years ...
Once that was deprecated the Pande Labs had a partnership with Google to run folding in any Chrome browser. That has also deprecated.
While many gamers may well have been virtue signalling, the science is still valid. Here is a link to their 222 published and peer reviewed papers:
I was half kidding.
But charitable come-ons are often a Trojan Horse for abuse of the contribution.
In this case, your computer time, or worse, if the program isn’t an evil virus.
So, the BTC question was partially in jest.
I have a son who did some graduate work in protein folding and who “thought” about buying bitcoin when it was in the one to ten dollar range, but didn’t do it. Too bad... now he has to work for a living.
We used to have monthly posts asking folks to sign up. Somewhere I have links to our very first threads, back when we actively competed with DU and other organizations.
Or I should say that DU competed with us. FReepers started folding first and we organized as a team first, peaking at about 350 individual folders at one time, and about 1900 systems.
It was fun to see the team race up through the charts, breaking into the top 2000, then 1000 and slowly pushing our way into the top 100.
maybe we can entice by tellin all the full name of our team...
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