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Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

foldingathome.org

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#31
post #14

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?

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, whomever could just gift some data centers to the protein folding effort.

It'd be amazing PR bang for the buck.

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#34
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#35
post #19
post #11

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

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?

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....

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#36
post #14

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?

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

https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-pred...

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."

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#37

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.

Indeed, there was a [0] story yesterday - an initiative Vodafone are supporting to compute a cure for cancer while your phone is charging.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479644

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#38
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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....

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