Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

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85 pointssanefive39 comments

Viral Research Firm? I thought F@H was run out of Stanford University.

Edit: it's run out of Washington University (St. Louis School of Medicine) so it's definitely neither a firm nor viral. Mods should change the title.

Indeed.

Not a firm, and not viral research either (that is just one consequence).

It was run out of Stanford until 2019 according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

Yeah, the title is pretty terrible. CPU power? GPUs contribute far more to the project.

Fixed now. Submitted title was "Viral research firm 'Folding at Home' has 400K users fighting C19 with CPU power".

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There was a recent HN discussion on whether this kind of approach has ever produced an effective treatment for anything. I believe the answer was Never, but lots of papers have been published.

Assuming that's the case, I don't put much stock in this giving us a means of fighting the pandemic.

Well science goes frutstratingly slowly, especially in these fields. According to wikipedia the project has helped in 118 papers.

The idea of the single scientist singlehandedly solving everything is mostly a myth. Most of the time, people rely on hundreds of previous papers before making their own contribution. Taken together, all the minimal steps make a significant leap.

Folding@home can very well be part of this effort.

No, its unlikely to help produce an effective treatment, at least not in a useful timeframe.

If you're considering spending a dollar or two a day on electricity to contribute to the F@H project, consider donating that amount instead. Charity Navigator has a good list of well regarded charities that are working on covid-19 response: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...

This is a rather cynical take. It's hard to know the results of basic research on future therapies. Is it likely that this one project is going to find the smoking gun cure when there's hundreds of teams around the world trying all sorts of alternative approaches for medication and vaccines? No. But is this contributing to the sum of human knowledge about the virus? Yes.

That's science though. You have to just try and learn as much as you can, from as many different directions as possible, because we have no idea which approach will lead to useful discoveries until it does.

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something.

Edit: I’d be glad to be proven wrong with a link to an FAQ or some part of the docs.

I followed every instruction to configure ROCM and OpenCL in Ubuntu 18 with my Vega 56 card. All the samples and such work but Folding@Home refuses to believe its there. It might be nice if someone at FAH actually tried using it on Linux.

I would also like a FAQ.

Useful documentation would also be good.

I think I got it to work by editing the config file at /etc/fahclient/config.xml and adding: <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>, then restarting the client. Took me some googling and trial and error though, so I agree this should be made clearer.

I had to run $ sudo apt install nvidia-opencl-dev and than manually add a GPU slot to F@H.

As mentioned, you'll need to ensure your /etc/fahclient/client.xml includes:

  <config>
    <!-- Folding Slots -->
    <slot id='0' type='CPU'/>
    <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>
  </config>

If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like:

  CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
         OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':
                 libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
                 directory

Take that missing library over to the Ubuntu Package Search[0] and it will lead you to ocl-icd-opencl-dev

  apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Restart fahclient and you should see something like:

   CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
  OpenCL Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:1.2 Driver:440.64

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=bionic&arch=amd64&m...

This doesn't fix the problem, since ocl-icd* and nvidia-libopencl* provide libOpenCL.so.1 and FAHClient looks for libOpenCL.so, so you need to add a symlink, in the same directory.

You have to symlink from libOpenCL.so.1 to libOpenCL.so, then restart and it should find your GPU.

Title nit-pick -- It isn't a "firm", but a project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

Make sure to contribute GPU resources as the CPU ones aren't being used for C19 research.

EDIT: I have heard that CPU is also getting C19 research but not exclusively.

Here is a better link with more details: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/coronavirus/blob/master/REA...

FreeBSD port: https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2020/03/19/fighting-the-coron...

NixOS port: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/fight-covid-19-with-folding-ho...

I wish I could. It only uses CPU on my machine, saying there are no work items for the GPU slot.

This can be also because they're having trouble creating GPU workloads fast enough

Or because they don’t tell you how to troubleshoot when the GPU is not enabled.

I have my gpus enabled and they're often sitting idle but also sometimes doing work.

That happened to me initially too, but I left it running (on idle config) and it had obtained work by the next day when I looked.

Thanks, I've tried again after reading your reply and, indeed, it managed to pick up a GPU job rather quickly. I did disable the CPU slot, don't know if it's a coincidence but a couple days ago when I tried this first it spent several hours only running CPU work w/o any GPU.

yes, that might be the trick. I also disabled the cpu slot.

So is someone sitting there, monitoring the results of this C19 folding operation as they come in and then when they see exactly the right result they shout eureka! and dance around the room? Then they shout "Get this to the lab, stat!" After which the lab starts churning out thousands of vials of antidote and everyone gets cured?

My gas furnace supplies a baseline of heat, and my basement gets topped up with electric heat. What are the mechanics of energy usage for me?

I feel like all energy is converted to heat in my laptop. That would mean free computing power?

Am I missing something? Can energy be converted to a form I am overlooking with computational work?

All heat from your electronics (CPUs&GPUs) are waste heat, you could replace your electric heater with a computer to get "free computing power".

Responded cheekily with this link in a reply chain but wanted to bubble it up... you can earn a form of cryptocurrency from folding work units: https://curecoin.net/

I don't mind donating to them, but what are the kinds of problems has folding at home has solved in recent times (~5 years)?

Would be cool if i could join on my PS4... guess I'd need to jailbreak it and run Linux.

its really compute power lol. i am folding with my V100 gpus.

Does this project have enough promise compared to its external cost? I imagine that’s a lot of energy usage.

Better than bitcoin!

and you can still earn crypto from folding: https://curecoin.net/

https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#Examples_of_appli...

Household heat where I live is mostly electric, there's no reason not to do some computation with the energy you're going to be burning anyway.

For a little while I had a script set up to control my BOINC client based on the temperature.

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