I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. 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.
There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
Related Stories
Faculty of Medicine researcher Rachel Harding will be the first known biomedical researcher to welcome the world to review her lab notes in real time.
The post-doctoral fellow with U of T's Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is also explaining her findings to the general public through her blog.
She hopes her open approach will accelerate research into Huntington's disease."This should drive the process faster than working alone," she says.
Article from University of Toronto: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/huntingtons-disease-university-toronto-researcher-first-share-lab-notes-real-time
Her 'blog' itself, for your critiquing! https://zenodo.org/record/45428#.VteOS-_R9qP (Zenodo. Research. Shared)
This, basically, was the way medicine used to be done: share, critique and collaborate. Here's hoping that she makes it so that all that is old is new again.
And how cool it would be if it was in the Stargate Command (SGC)
[Ed Note: Don't forget, that SoylentNews is contributing to the research efforts for Huntington's Disease as well. There is an official Folding@Home team for Soylentnews.org. Please take a look at the previous article and contribute some CPU cycles if you can.]
I'm thrilled to report that the Soylent News Folding@Home team is now ranked among the top 1000 folding teams in the world! As of this submission, we are currently at rank 996. The team has been active for just over two months and has made impressive progress. Thank you to all who have participated.
Current team member rankings follow:
- cmn32480
- Beldin65
- LTKKane
- tibman
- Kymation
- meisterister
- Runaway1956
- kurenai.tsubasa
- SirFinkus
- NotSanguine
If you'd like additional information, or would like to join our team, there is more information available here, or feel free to join us in #folding on chat.soylentnews.org
Please note that the numbers across the different reporting sites are not exactly consistent. Team members may appear in different orders based on where and when the stats are viewed.
Thanks
-SirFinkus
[Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that takes advantage of otherwise idle computing resources on volunteer's computers to simulate how proteins fold and thus guide progress to finding a cure to diseases such as: Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers. --martyb]
Back in February of this year, one of our site's members Sir Finkus introduced our community to Folding@Home with this story:
I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for SoylentNews. 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.
There is more information on the project here , which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
We are pleased to announce that our SoylentNews Folding@Home team is now approaching the top 500 spot! Our team size has plateaued, but new members are welcome at any time. To put this milestone in perspective, since the time when the team started in mid-Februrary of this year, we have overtaken 229,814 teams!
We even have a channel, #folding, on IRC.
Official Stats:
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/teamstats/team230319.html
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319
Better Stats at:
Team Summary
Teams Overall Rank
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 501-600
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 499-500
Related Coverage:
Soylent News has a Top 1000 Folding@Home Team!
Huntington's Disease: University of Toronto Researcher is First to Share Lab Notes in Real Time
[Ed Note 2: Damn devs have made a liar out of me... moved it back to the original schedule noted below. - cmn32480]
[TMB Note: Site update complete. Bumped so folks will notice.]
It has been a few months since we last updated SoylentNews, and we've not been content to rest on our laurels. Our next site update is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, 2017-05-21, depending on staff availability. We'll update this story when we know for sure when it will take place.
Since this post was started, other things have come to light, so there's a bit of everything in here. Read on for the full scoop:
Web Site Changes
In this latest update (scheduled around 00:00 UTC on 5.21.2017, but we are flexible), we have made the following improvements:
- Supported subscription payments made with Bitcoin [again].
- Fixed a bug which blocked non-whole-dollar bitcoin subscriptions.
- Provided immediate feedback of theme changes.
- Added button that, when clicked, marks all comments in a story as "unread".
- Added support for "<s>" and "<strike>" tags.
- Fixed bug where a plus sign "+" in a user's nickname made their user page inaccessible from site links.
- Removed unused Javascript code.
- Made minor, non-user-facing changes (code cleanup, etc.)
Backend Changes
As always, we appreciate constructive feedback. Reply with a comment to this story, join us in #dev on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), or submit a bug on GitHub.
Separately, the team has made great strides in moving to running on Gentoo. We are taking this step very methodically, making sure we have a solid foundation in place on one server before we even think of rolling it out to the rest of our systems. Yes, that means we will be free from systemd. Kudos to NCommander, Mechanicjay, Audioguy, TheMightyBuzzard, Paulej72, and Deucalion.
SoylentNews' Folding@Home Team Update
It's amazing how spare compute cycles add up! SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team which is helping researchers find a cure for diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's — among many others. Our team was launched on Feb. 12, 2016. In just over 15 months, we have amassed well over 300 million points which places us at Team 304 out of 226564! Barring any surprises, and continuing at our current rate, we are on track to break past 300 and into the 2xx's on or about May 28th, 2017.
We are always open to receiving new team members. Contact Sir Finkus for more information, either via email at this site, or via the #Soylent or #folding channels on our IRC -- Internet Relay Chat server.
Accounts Milestone
New account creation has been relatively consistent and steady over the past year averaging out to a new account pretty much every day. It is a pleasure to inform the community that, on May 18th, account number 6600 was registered on the site.
Funding Shortfall
Lastly, it is my sad duty to inform the community that our cash intake has been seriously deficient so far this year. Our budget for the six-month period of Jan 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017 is $3,000 and we are currently at approximately half that, with less than 6 weeks to go.
We have in excess of 100 users who have been active on the site within the last 30 days whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do — I have failed to notice my own subscription's end on more than one occasion!
Plain and simple, the site needs to pay its bills. Please look at your subscription page and consider making a contribution. The dollar amounts shown in the text-entry fields are the minimum amount required for that subscription duration. We've had a few users anonymously contribute significantly more than that in the past.
Some have chosen to give a gift subscription to NCommander (UID: 2) as a sign of support. However you choose to make a contribution, please do so now.
Thank-you
-- martyb
SoyentNews is staffed by volunteers who give of their time and knowledge to provide a forum where people can discuss stories submitted by the community. We have no outside funding source.
Per our advance announcement on Saturday, May 20th, we completed our site update... one day ahead of schedule! And, even more amazingly, the community came together and we had over four dozen people subscribe since then! THANK YOU! Read on for more details.
This is a followup to: SoylentNews Site Certificates Expiring... We ARE Working on It, But... [Updated]
and: Site Services Restored
Certs (Not Just a Breath Mint):
Thanks to the efforts of The Mighty Buzzard and NCommander we now have valid certs, issued by LetsEncrypt installed on all of our servers. Except that the IRC server needs to be bounced to make its cert active on the backup daemon, all should now be in effect. As in our original story, you can check our certificate status with these links:
https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us
Developers:
The past few days have brought into focus a situation that has been building for several months: We really only have a single person who is working on developing features for the site, The Mighty Buzzard. As with any large and on-going undertaking, this burden is taking its toll. I try to help out as I can, but as I am the primary QA/Test guy who is much better at the user-facing things than what all happens "under the covers", my abilities and assistance are limited. If you have any spare time and would like to lend a hand (and every bit helps), please reply in the comments or contact The Might Buzzard directly on IRC.
Community:
I recall in the early days of this site when things would fall over several times a day. That has largely become a thing of the past... to the point where it is unusual for any issues to appear on the site and the support services we maintain (email, wiki, IRC, etc.) The baseline code on which this site was founded (open-sourced, out-of-date, back-level, and non-functional) was not promising, but the staff managed to bludgeon it into shape and we now have a solid foundation. That it continues to run as smoothly as it has is a testament to our SysOps folk who toil largely in the background and just keep things working... as well as the continued care-and-feeding that TMB so generously provides. To all of you, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!
Some numbers: we are approaching the 23,000th story posted; have recently passed 700,000 comments submitted; have had over 3,300 journal articles posted; and are on the cusp of having our 120th Poll!
Though all numbers are approximate and unofficial, it appears we surpassed our funding goal for the first half of the year ($3,000) with a net subscription tally of just over $3,250! I'll leave it to our treasurer to collate and post the official numbers. I'll leave the "Funding Goal" side bar as is for a week or so to commemorate this accomplishment. Do note that subscriptions are still being accepted and will count towards the second half of the year's funding needs.
Folding@Home: Not all of you may be aware, but our soylentnews team for Folding@Home is currently at 240th place... in the world! It started with a single story posted to this site. Just over four years ago, we were at 230,319th place! If you have any spare computes you would like to contribute, especially GPU-based, we'd love to have you sign up! Just reply in the comments and I'm sure someone will get back to you.
Whenever I write one of these stories, I always fear I'll have omitted someone or something important. Please accept my humble apologies if I have done so as there is no intent to slight any contributor.
To the community, I offer my thanks for your contributions to the site as well as your patience and understanding during the challenges of the past few days. Contributions are not just financial (though we wouldn't be here without them -- Thank You!), but also submitting stories and comments, and moderating comments, too! The community continues to impress me with your wide-ranging knowledge and expertise; I have learned much from the exchanges in the story comments!
Lastly, please keep janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) in your thoughts and wishes while he undergoes a medical procedure and attendant recovery period. Best of luck JR!
--martyb
Don't worry; they'll make more.
[Editor's preface: SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team (#230319) As of this writing, SoylentNews.org is ranked at number 210 in the entire world! My current Core 2 Duo laptop would do little to support the effort compute-wise, so I assist as best I can by cheerleading, communicating our team's progress, and similar activities. We have a channel on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server "#folding" where there is sporadic discussion about progress. Check out the list of previous stories at the bottom of this story... to get involved, just mention it in the comments and come join our team!
If you are wondering what in the world F@H is, Wikipedia has a nice summary of Folding@Home . And, of course, there is F@H's "About" page, too. --martyb]
Intro:
If you are a Folding@Home (F@H) contributor, you may have noticed that you aren't getting your normal allotment of work units. It appears to have started some time Friday, March 13. The root cause? Schools shutting down around the United States.
Looking for Work [Units]:
Kids are scared (some more, some less) of the Coronavirus, they read something somewhere about efforts such as F@H that are working on curing various diseases. Those kid's gaming rigs are exactly what F@H and other similar research groups need. And, some of these kids have machines that most of us would envy! A well-built gaming machine is simply awesome!
https://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=61
That forum is filled with "newbs" trying to figure out how to set up F@H on their machines, and then complaining that they can't get a work unit.
This post, specifically, explains that the huge influx of volunteers has depleted the available work units. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32424 Apparently, on Friday, the staff filled the WU servers' caches with the normal weekend's amount of WU's and they were gone by early Saturday morning. Someone volunteered to work on Saturday to refill the caches, which were promptly emptied out again.
One of the posts on the F@H forum suggests that F@H has about 4 times the number of folders that it had a week ago.
What to do?
If you find yourself unable to download a WU, take a look at the log. You will probably find complaints,
"No WUs available for this configuration" and/or "Port 8080 unreachable, trying port 80" and/or "no http service available".
Those and more are all related to the fact that the servers are being hammered by half a zillion school kids who are looking for something useful to do with their time, and their computers.
Be patient, and just let your client work through it. It will eventually download a work unit, crunch it, and return it.
Official Statement:
Straight from the F@H project: Coronavirus – What we're doing and how you can help in simple terms – Folding@home
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @04:52PM
It's too bad folding@home is proprietary software.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @04:54PM
Yeah, too bad. Could you imagine, helping defeat Alzheimers with proprietary software? Sorry about your failing memory Grandma, but I don't want to lose my brownie points with RMS.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 12 2016, @04:57PM
Both granny and RMS eat their own toejam, so perhaps they could get along after all!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:42PM
Make sure to give Microsoft and other such corporations lots of money, because rich people donate some of their money to charity. The fact that it does some good does not justify the evil it does by not respecting your freedoms. Your attitude is a race to the bottom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:41PM
I like how you read my post, completely disregarded all content contained therein, and then replied to an argument I never made. Good job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:48PM
I didn't disregard all the content within. Your point was simply idiotic. You tried to downplay the fact that it's proprietary software by saying that it also does some good things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 28 2016, @10:59PM
You tried to downplay the fact that it's proprietary software by saying that it also does some good things.
I think the other AC succeeded at that, not merely tried. And your argument was remarkably stupid. Up your game.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by paulej72 on Friday February 12 2016, @05:10PM
Could you imagine someone running a modified version of a theoretical open source version that returned shit data. And that version put up on a sharing site so that it became the dominant version people used. Research would be set back years.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday February 12 2016, @05:59PM
that's not how it works, because scientific software can be compared with multiple data sources.
They exploit the fluffy "screensaver supercomputer" meme, to lower their research costs.
Perhaps, the funding agencies should pro-rate their grants for all the free computer time they are getting?
Pros:
Raising the profile of the use of biophysics to solve complex clinical problems
Cons:
Not raising the actual intellectual level by keeping the "how" secret and focusing on the "how much time can YOU donate?".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:26PM
Unfortunately in this case it is about 'cred'. So people would cheat with points. I have seen people cheat over less.
Once the project is done they should release the source so it can be checked and replicated though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:45PM
If people can "cheat" merely because they can see and modify the source code, either your software is poorly designed or having it be proprietary is not going to help one bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:51PM
all software is poorly designed
probably something to do with humans being involved in the process, or something
there might be some 'hello world' implementation that could be considered well designed, but then it probably runs on an operating system that's poorly designed
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:25AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:45AM
That's not entirely comparable. When I download a browser, I can trust a signature of the binary (or, when I build from source, the hashes of the git repository). The trust is based on the fact that some more or less high-profile people publish their keys and vouch for the software with their good names.
In an interactive online project with thousands of anonymous participants, the situation is different. If the key is part of the OSS-package, it can be extracted and used to sign falsified data. If the key is generated for each user, there is no base to trust this signature since $evilperson can generate a signature just as valid.
That said, the concept they seem to employ here is security by obscurity, which is usually discouraged. I still think the only solution is to have some other kind of verification for the data.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:51PM
The software would still come from a central repository with the maintainers having tight control of what does or does not go into the code. They would certainly not distribute the keys any more than they are distributed for Linux.
I certainly would hope they verify their data. After all, intentional tampering is not the only way the data could get corrupted. The typical way to do this is to send the same work package to several clients, and compare the results. But there may also be checks that are less computationally expensive than doing the complete calculation again. I didn't check what they actually calculate, but if, for example, the algorithm is an iteration converging to the correct solution, then running the iteration step just once should be sufficient to check whether the iteration really converged.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:41PM
The software would still come from a central repository with the maintainers having tight control of what does or does not go into the code.
... which is a valid argument when you want to protect the user. But not when you want to prevent the user to modify the SW in order to receive higher scores with questionable data.
They would certainly not distribute the keys any more than they are distributed for Linux.
That would be different key of course. The binary is signed by the SW distributor, the returned data might be signed or encrypted by the SW running on the users computer and would need another key for that as well.
I certainly would hope they verify their data. After all, intentional tampering is not the only way the data could get corrupted.
For that a hash sum should suffice.
The typical way to do this is to send the same work package to several clients, and compare the results. But there may also be checks that are less computationally expensive than doing the complete calculation again. I didn't check what they actually calculate, but if, for example, the algorithm is an iteration converging to the correct solution, then running the iteration step just once should be sufficient to check whether the iteration really converged.
Basically my point: Arguing to avoid tempering by keeping the source closed is arguing for security by obscurity, which is wrong. Nevertheless the situation is slightly different from the case where the user is the one being protected, and the arguments need to be refined.
Nitpick: Checking convergence might not be enough, since the user could also just "optimize" his version by running less iterations. But if the algorithms contain operations with properties like e.g. Prime-factorization, as in operation is way more expensive than reverse operation, the check might be simple, safe and cheap.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:37AM
So the project implements security by obscurity?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday February 12 2016, @05:56PM
Then sandbox it in a vm. That'd give you better control over the power consumption anyway, if you're the kind of person who cares about it.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is actually one of the few things that SHOULDN'T be given the opportunity to be forked.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:38PM
What would a VM help? I refuse to use software that does not respect my freedoms.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @08:36PM
Anonymous Coward, help! I'm about to be smashed to bits by this car crusher! Quick, pull the lever!
"Now hold on a second, pulling this lever might activate some software I cannot view the source code of. You see, it's important that all software I use respects muh three essential freedumbs: the freedumb to use the software however I wish, for --"
SPLAT
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:16PM
Three? [gnu.org] With that said, you're not going to get software that respects your freedoms by mindlessly using proprietary software and letting its developers abuse you. People who simply give up rarely accomplish much of anything.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday February 12 2016, @08:39PM
Well, my suggestion stemmed from not knowing whether the situation was ideological or technical.
Sounds like it won't help you though, in this case.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 12 2016, @09:25PM
That's strange, isn't it?
Especially since the underlying software is mostly open source or public domain or "your scientific article must quote our software" kind of licenses.
ISTR that folding@home used GROMACS [wikipedia.org], from the University of Groningen, for some of their molecular modelling.
Can't be bothered to find its primary download site now, so I quote from the Wikipedia (BE WARNED! verify for yourself):
Maybe the found that GROMACS was lacking a screen-saver, and tacked a proprietary screen-saver on?
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 12 2016, @09:29PM
(replying to meself)
I said, "that's strange", because it implies that folding@home utilizes about 25 years of Dutch Government coffee, cigarettes, and mainframe CPU time subsidies, and PhD salaries (what I estimate was the cost to construct GROMACS). And then they make it proprietary:-( What do the Grunningers think of this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:38PM
What do the Grunningers think of this?
Folding@home has been granted a non-commercial, non-GPL license for Gromacs,
I don't think they care.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday February 13 2016, @04:38AM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 12 2016, @04:57PM
I believe a lot in every man's computer doing his bidding alone, and no one else's. Windows 10 makes me shudder for that reason, though I left the Windows eco-system about 20 years ago. It's terrible that the capabilities of our machines are being harnessed to economically benefit, through ad-networks, the pocketbooks of the psychotic few, who call themselves MBA's.
So this, Folding@home, is a way to harness networked-computing in a way that makes life better for everyone. I do hope that all of us can throw computing cycles that would otherwise go idle, to a worthy project like this. It costs us personally nothing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @05:10PM
Computers use more power when they are doing more work. Where I live, my electricity during the day costs much more than electricity at night and on weekends. So it's not really "nothing".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @05:48PM
Scheduled tasks. Run at night and on weekends. :) Hell run one hour a week. Its not how much you contribute to a worthy cause, its that you did contribute.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Friday February 12 2016, @05:13PM
Well, other than increased electrical costs.
I mean, I just started running it, I imagine I will continue, but I don't think it's fair to claim it costs you nothing. By their own site (https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc44), they claim .36 USD per day at .15 per kWh. I know it's not much, but it is a cost.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday February 12 2016, @09:19PM
I seasonally run folding at home. In the winter, I'll run it, I'm heating my home anyway.
When I don't run the heat, I don't run folding at home.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:29AM
Just don't run it at work. You can get fired and sued.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by CoolHand on Friday February 12 2016, @05:00PM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 3, Funny) by paulej72 on Friday February 12 2016, @05:13PM
Not to belittle your suggestion, but our last vote went over sooooo well we decided that we do not need to vote ever again :)
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday February 12 2016, @08:44PM
Is there anything to stop you from making a group (even if unofficial)? I'd join it.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:48AM
I think these make wonderful candidates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_BOINC_projects [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @05:09PM
So many people focus on a couple of these projects - folding@home and SETI@home. There are others that deserve to be supported and, in the case of the science fiction of SETI, more deserving of support.
worldcommunitygrid.org (horrible web site - sorry) is one source of projects that you can support. They use BOINC software, which is open source.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @06:37PM
I've been doing seti@home since it came out in 1999. Not about to switch projects with this many years into it. When there's no work, I let boink do einstein@home.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @08:03PM
Ah yes... The early days of seti@home when we overclocked our single core processor and set ice cube trays next to the ventilation holes on the computer case. And ran it on a ramdrive to save wear and tear on the hard drive.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:34AM
Yeah, I figure if I wait another decade and then run it for ten minutes it will make up for my not running it this year.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:57AM
It's like buying a new computer, it's always a bad time to do it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:55AM
Just note that while BOINC is open source, it's only a middleware: most of the actual projects that run on it are proprietary... :-/
Caveat emptor.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 12 2016, @05:15PM
FAH client is available to Arch users in the AUR, search for "folding". The viewer and controller are also available, search for FAH. I don't know why they didn't stay consistent with FAHclient. Ehhhh - it's all there anyway.
I've just installed, now I'm trying to figure out how to set it up, and join the team.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday February 12 2016, @11:08PM
Gentoo here. Instructions for Gentoo: Do emerge --ask foldingathome which will also unmask the package for your architecture and unmask the license if you proceed. For crazy Paludis users like me (assuming amd64 arch and you're not being picky about licenses):
echo sci-biology/foldingathome ~amd64 >> /etc/paludis/keywords.conf && cave resolve foldingathome -cx
Optionally, Paludis users can run cave config foldingathome or just edit the config file.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:01AM
Additional note for Gentoo users. In order to run as the foldingathome user, that user must be in the video group:
gpasswd -a foldingathome video
(Score: 5, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Friday February 12 2016, @05:40PM
Scientific software should be FOSS or at the least testable - otherwise the results can be faked.
Disclosure: Author of related scientific software.
If I run the code on MY machine and give you results (behind a website, say), then you have to trust me, but that's what experimental evidence is for.
But if I'm running on *your* machine for *my* benefit, I kind of think you'd want to see the source...
Controlling source code quality with github is easy - don't accept pulls from non-devs without review!!!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday February 12 2016, @10:00PM
Scientific software should be FOSS or at the least testable - otherwise the results can be faked.
Can't you test/perform protein folding in the lab and verify that it matches the simulated results?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday February 12 2016, @05:57PM
This gives me an idea: Would it be possible to create a crypto currency where the proof of work involved some useful stuff like folding@home, instead of otherwise useless calculation of hashes? Imagine this: You would at the same time help solving important science problems and keeping the payment infrastructure working, and you'd even get paid for it!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:47PM
The only one I know of is Primecoin [wikipedia.org] and I'm not sure how useful its computations actually are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:31PM
See also gridcoin if they're still around.
I have a design I'm working on for a crypto currency that solves the problems gridcoin had by doing things a bit different under the hood, haven't named it or announced it yet because I want to make sure it's fool proof before I do. However stay tuned, maybe I can get an ann on soylent if folks here are interested in that sort of thing.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 12 2016, @07:22PM
I don't manage to download the client. Is there a source which uses a plain old link instead of JavaScript?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Friday February 12 2016, @07:26PM
https://folding.stanford.edu/releases/public/release/fah-installer/osx-10.6.4-64bit/v7.4/fah-installer_7.4.4_x86_64.mpkg.zip [stanford.edu] OSX
https://folding.stanford.edu/releases/public/release/fah-installer/windows-xp-32bit/v7.4/fah-installer_7.4.4_x86.exe [stanford.edu] Windows
With linux distributions, I'd recommend checking your package manager.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 12 2016, @08:02PM
Thanks; unfortunately I need the Linux version and I can't find it in the package manager (that's where I looked first, before I even tried downloading it from the web site).
Anyway, I now managed to download it using Chromium.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:45PM
I'm really sorry, but seriously don't fall for this folding@home stuff.
Big pharma can and will patent anything you "discover" and charge you and your dearly loved ones, a fortune for it's use.
I know that this will get me modded down because some people have relatives or whatever with the disease, but let's face facts.
The beneficiaries of this "research" are not the patients.
The beneficial parties are large pharmaceutical companies that can already afford to run these stuff on some of the worlds largest super computers but choose not to because this option is much cheaper. Essentially it's free for them.
They don't have to pay any sort of fee for runtime and they don't even pay anything for the solution. They only need to pay the patent lawyers in order to get the discovery locked up for decades so no one can use it without coughing up prodigious amounts of cash.
In the meantime you are seriously straining your power supply, CPU & GPU pushing them to extremes for prolonged periods of time. This is in addition to the excess power consumption.
Is it really worth it to toss out your boxen a year or two early just to give some big pharmaceutical company an exclusive lock for 20 years on a possible new treatment for what are admittedly horrific diseases?
Doing this made sense in the late 90s and early 2000s when you kept your computer on 24/7. Back when the CPU used the same amount of power as long as the power switch was on. Now we have "green" innovations like power stepping and sleep mode. There are no wasted cycles to spend on this, you're burning power you really don't need to.
What someone really should consider doing is packaging these things into a videogame and letting run on a background thread in the video game. Then discount the cost of the game in order to compensate for the reduced framerate.
Steaming@home ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @10:25PM
I will not use folding stuff because it destroys anonymity. Running a program written by someone else on my machine that connects to its own server for instructions does not inspire confidence.
As for cures for diseases and medical science, one needs to look at what medical breakthroughs have been made in the last few decades. None. The sick murderous criminals responsible for this tragedy are people you don't want to be friends with. They will do anything to keep cures from you. They control the pharmaceutical companies and have control over all research. Their religious laws spell it out clearly [biblebelievers.org.au]
They are NOT allowed to heal anyone who is not of their kind.
Anyone not of their kind cannot get their head around this and how such sick, twisted murderers are allowed to roam free. But it is true. It is happening.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:49AM
Ya know, you should really get that checked, I hear they have a pill for that now.
I'm only half kidding.
Everyone I've ever met who starts talking conspiracy has later found that they had a mental health issue, likely that they weren't even aware of.
This includes myself. Your post sounds exactly like me just a couple of years ago. I was absolutely convinced about the "truth" that was being hidden from me and there were organized groups seeking ill intent for the whole world.
I would think about it to the point of obsession. Late night chats with like minded people and thinking I was in the know about some secret conspiracy.
It all made perfect sense, the Bilderburgs, the Illuminati and an organized Jewish conspiracy to bring the world to heel by controlling the worlds resources, money, medicines etc.
It ended for me when I became convinced that my wife's changing behavior was because she had been "chipped" by the government.
I literally woke up one morning and remembered a simple fact.
Conspiracies do not exist. They cannot exist because people are shitty at keeping secrets and not everyone in a group is like minded even if the group is as small as two or three people. There is an old saying "the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead".
Yes sometimes there is weird shit and occasionally for short periods of time people can in fact conspire and sometimes they get lucky and pull it off.
But prolonged, long running conspiracies fall apart under their own weight rather quickly. People just can't keep their mouth shut, either they feel giddy because they know something no one else does, or they feel guilty. Eitherway they have a yearning and find that they have to talk to someone.
Organized religious conspiracies are even less likely. You'll get nutters and cultists once in awhile, but on the whole people join religion because they want to feel close to the divine and the only thing the divine tells you in every single religion is to be good to other people. It's whackjob religious leaders that tell people that God says anything else. If you think God is speaking to you, that is actually a strong sign of mental illness. Seriously if he/she/it created the whole universe and wants the world to know something, they aren't going to tell it just to you. Put another way, if God wants to talk to you he knows your cellphone number :)
Anyways long story short, I found myself considering the possibility that my spouse had been reprogrammed by the government because she was acting shy and scared and different somehow. I asked our mutual friend if she had noticed anything and she told me pretty bluntly that my spouse of 10 years was planning to leave because I was acting more and more erratic every day and frankly she was scared for her life. It was at that moment I took a long look at myself and sought professional help.
As it turns out I had a psychotic break after being terminated without notice by a company that was bought out and gutted while I was on vacation. A few pills and some 30 or 40 counseling sessions later and I feel a lot better. I no longer need meds and I don't have these sorts of thoughts anymore, but if I do I now know what to look out for and where to turn for help.
Medical science is amazing!
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:42AM
Conspiracies do not exist, huh? Ever hear about Enron? Tuskegee?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:19PM
Also don't forget the LIBOR scandal [bbc.com].
I think we're back to the theory that the number of conspirators is inversely related to the length of time the conspiracy can be maintained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @08:13AM
Doing this made sense in the late 90s and early 2000s when you kept your computer on 24/7. Back when the CPU used the same amount of power as long as the power switch was on. Now we have "green" innovations like power stepping and sleep mode. There are no wasted cycles to spend on this, you're burning power you really don't need to.
This is true, it used to make a lot more sense. And it was a horrible waste that everybody didn't run this back then. But on the other hand even now it's also true that you're in possession of this powerful CPU/GPU that has a lot of potential and which manufacture already took a lot of resources. Which is better to use it or not? Hard to say.
If you're going to, choose your project carefully. Make sure the results actually do benefit everybody.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Friday February 12 2016, @10:46PM
Sweet a decent cause and I can support soylentnews...
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 1) by Gromett on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:46AM
I installed the software, it ran on my cpu but not GPU. Spent an hour trying to get it to work but had to stop for a bit to get some work done.
It messed up my ability to SSH to my servers. Un-installing the software and rebooting allowed me to access my servers again.
I would love to help Soylent get up the charts but I don't have time to fix GPU and SSH issues caused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:29AM
Is there a command line tool to control the client (that is, a command line equivalent to FAHControl)? I've got now problems with my Cinnamon desktop (to the point that I cannot do anything with it), and I think it might be related to the folding@home client (it might have been a bad idea to instruct it to use the graphics card as well). But I cannot pause the client to check, as without access to X11, FAHControl doesn't work.
(Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Saturday February 13 2016, @06:11AM
Not strictly. If you install the fahclient, you should get a cli setup window where you can select options. You'll also find a configuration file in /etc/fahclient/config.xml.
There's more information on running it without a GUI here [stanford.edu].
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @11:52AM
Would the license, though closed source, allow to publish a docker image with this software? I do have a virtual root server which could work on the project, but Grommets [soylentnews.org] experience looks a bit discouraging.
Ok, maybe I can just run it in a chroot environment instead.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:34PM
On the page of That Other Site's team, you'll find:
That's from the era before Beta!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:36PM
lol, color me not-surprised!