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posted by martyb on Saturday August 27 2016, @03:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Can-we-make-the-Top-400-by-Halloween? dept.

It has only been six short months since SoylentNews' Folding@Home team was founded, and we've made a major milestone: our team is now one of the top 500 teams in the world! We've already surpassed some heavy hitters like /. and several universities, including MIT. (But now is not the time to rest on our laurels. A certain Redmond-based software producer currently occupies #442.)

In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's and thereby help to find a cure. To that end, SoylentNews' team has completed nearly 16,000 work units.

If you'd like to contribute to our team by donating some spare CPU/GPU cycles, you can get started here. There are clients available for Linux, Windows, and OSX. Once you have installed the software, enter the TeamID 230319 to join us.

Feel free to join #folding on our IRC channel if you need any help, or just want to chat.

Thank you to all that have participated, and a special thanks to our top 10 folders:

  1. cmn32480
  2. Runaway1956
  3. Beldin65
  4. tibman
  5. LTKKane
  6. EricAlbers_ericalbers_com
  7. Kymation
  8. meisterister
  9. kurenai.tsubasa
  10. NotSanguine

Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319


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  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday August 27 2016, @06:59PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday August 27 2016, @06:59PM (#394006) Journal

    Thanks for the support and info. I did find the forum but not a link to the source code or a discussion of their security thinking. Maybe if I dig further, but really, they're trying to sell me on helping, so they should be the ones making the effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not me.

    I don't truly suspect them of intentionally bundling malware with the client, but just through carelessness, their software could easily expand a user's attack surface. If they are (a) honest and (b) competent they should be out front with evidence of their thinking in this area.

    And I don't mind the flamebait mod.. much... I take comfort in the knowledge that whoever classifies security considerations as flamebait will soon fall victim to a breach. :)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:10PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:10PM (#394010) Homepage Journal

    Thanks for the support and info. I did find the forum but not a link to the source code or a discussion of their security thinking. Maybe if I dig further, but really, they're trying to sell me on helping, so they should be the ones making the effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not me.

    Et voila! [berkeley.edu]

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:50AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:50AM (#394090)

      FYI: Folding@Home doesn't use BOINC. They've rolled their own multiple times, despite outreach by the people at BOINC.

      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:04AM

        FYI: Folding@Home doesn't use BOINC. They've rolled their own multiple times, despite outreach by the people at BOINC.

        And so it is [berkeley.edu]. My mistake. Apologies for any confusion.

        To clarify parent's point, the following is from the FAH FAQ [stanford.edu]:

        FAH is built from several open source tools, namely Gromacs (http://www.gromacs.org), TINKER (http://dasher.wustl.edu), and AMBER (http://ambermd.org/) for MD packages and MPICH for MPI (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/). If you’re interested in checking out these codes, you should feel free to download them and check them out. One can compile a SMP version of Gromacs by using the latest Gromacs with MPICH. This would reproduce the SMP clients we have on FAH.

        ...

        What about the client?
        Full open sourcing of the client

        We have not outsourced the client for several reasons, relating to client reliability and other issues. However, we’ve come up with a compromise — we have been developing a plug in architecture to allow people to write open source code that we can plug into our client. Visit the Folding Support Forum to discuss, ask questions, and show off your work.

        ...

        Gromacs
        Isn’t Gromacs a GPL’d code? Where’s the source for your mods?

        Folding@home has been granted a non-commercial, non-GPL license for Gromacs, so we are not required to release our source. We have analogous license for the other core codes. The copyright owners of any GPL code (in this case the owners are the Gromacs development team) can distribute the same piece of software with difference licenses in parallel. See the GPL FAQ for more info on this. However, we will release our patches back to the Gromacs tree (and have discussed this extensively with the Gromacs team).

        We are also working to release our GPU code and other aspects of FAH mods in a new open library called OpenMM. You can learn more about that here: https://simtk.org/home/openmm [simtk.org] .

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr