Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19 • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ac29 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #55

dmos62 wrote: post #49

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?

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…

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.

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

#82

Post by Aaronstotle » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

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

#83

Post by wrboyce » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #50

dwardu wrote: post #11

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

Mac Pro isn’t being sold in Apple stores. Made to order only.

Perhaps so, but they certainly have demo units out. I saw one the other week in my local Apple Store.

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

#84

Post by lucb1e » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

spondyl wrote: 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.

> for me at least.

I like how you leave room for the possibility that there is a significant percentage of people playing on their consoles for the vast majority of their waking hours :-)

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

#85

Post by synack » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

Aaronstotle wrote: post #82

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.

I threw together a quick and dirty dockerfile for it. https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/fah-docker

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

#86

Post by bookofjoe » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #38

bookofjoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not that I noticed, alas.

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

#87

Post by Havoc » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #77

Havoc wrote: post #43

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…

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 l…

BOINC behaves very nicely on the CPU. You can tell it how many cores to use and how much total cpu time.

So you can easily set it to keep say 4 cores free for the user at all times

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

#88

Post by jgeada » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

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.

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

#89

Post by savoytruffle » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #38

bookofjoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#90

Post by savoytruffle » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #50

dwardu wrote: post #11

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

Mac Pro isn’t being sold in Apple stores. Made to order only.

Some Apple Stores in large cities are stocking the new Mac Pro. I don't know if they also carry a typical upgraded model, but that has sometimes been done in the past. The normal "stock" model is not very impressive and exists pretty much just as a baseline minimum price.