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
Related Stories
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
[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
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: 2) by b0ru on Wednesday April 27 2016, @08:03AM
gg, lads. Keep up the good work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @08:06AM
SETI@Home is where it's at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @08:39AM
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=230319 [extremeoverclocking.com] gives overtaking times to sub-hour granularity (which might be over-precise, depending on the size of a work unit)
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_overtake.php?s=&t=230319 [extremeoverclocking.com] , which is specifically focussed on the overtaking, only gives the overtaking times with 24-hour granularity, rounded up or down to the nearest day. FIX THIS!!!!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @09:09AM
What sort of hardware are you all throwing at this problem?
(Score: 4, Informative) by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:04PM
I've got:
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:38PM
Cool, thanks for the info. That poor Celeron! :)
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @03:20PM
Oddly enough, that is the same box that our poor little IRC bot Exec runs on... but his home is nice and warm!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 27 2016, @06:25PM
I regret to report I have but one core and one GPU giving their life for this project.
The roar of fans in the office is worrisome at time.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:40PM
The roar of the fans is because they love you.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:44PM
Any folding is excellent, it all adds up. You aren't joking about the heat. Had to redo the cooling to support non-stop 100% usage. When the house gets warm it sounds like a leaf-blower on the desk. Replaced case fans with Noctua ($$) and the sound went down a lot. Couldn't figure out how to make the GPU quieter though :( Might have to rethink cooling again for the next build. I hope your computer stays cool!
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:47PM
Using two computers here. An old gaming machine in the guest room that has an AMD Phenom II 965 CPU and AMD HD 6970 graphics card. The other machine is my current gaming box in the office and has an AMD A10 (7850k?) APU and AMD R9 370 graphics card.
Going to build a new machine later this year when AMD releases their new CPU architecture (very excited!). Might even get one of those discrete gpu cards for computing, something like: http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/server/s9300-x2 [amd.com] That way i don't have to stop folding to play games. Weekends are really bad for folding points : P
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Kymation on Wednesday April 27 2016, @05:07PM
AMD FX-8350: 8 cores at 4.0 GHz.
32 GB DDR3 at 1600 MHz
GeForce GTX 760
Linux Mint 17.3
I run FAH on both CPU and GPU. It runs in Light mode when I'm working and Full when I'm not at the computer. This would probably work better if the software would do this automatically, but it seems they can't detect idle in Linux, so I have to remember to do it manually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @09:00PM
nVidia GTX 970.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Wednesday April 27 2016, @11:04PM
I unfortunately haven't really been able to fold much lately, but at my peak I was using:
1. FX 8370e @ 4.6GHz, Radeon HD 7870, 16GB PC3 1600
2. i7 860, 8GB PC3 1333 (GPU isn't supported by FAH software.
3. A10 5700, 8GB PC3 1866.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 5, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:08PM
Summary kind of misses out on explaining what folding@home is.
(yes I've heard of it and am somewhat aware of it, but a hint or two in the summary would've been nice.)
Modest attempt at answering that myself below.
From the folding@home page [stanford.edu], it's about computing folding proteins.
From wikipedia: Proteins are long molecules that can fold in many ways [wikipedia.org]. Curiously enough, the manner of folding determines a large number of effects - a protein folded one way is useful for many things, folded differently it isn't. Since each protein is a long chain, and since it's being folded in three dimensions, there are many, many, many ways for it to fold. And it's not readily apparent what constitutes a "different" folding.
Come in the folding@home project. People from all over the world contribute their computer's idle time to help generate data about folding proteins. Which will be used by Stanford.
<sidenote>
- The goal and contribution is not at all clearly explained on the Stanford page. If someone has more clue, additions and corrections welcome!
- It is not clear to me at all to whom the generated data will be made available. From http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers [stanford.edu], it reads as if all this data is donated to one group of researchers.
</sidenote>
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:49PM
And here's where we discussed this earlier https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=16/02/12/048207 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:52PM
How exactly *@Home things work? Do they run untrusted code from external entities to do calculations?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 27 2016, @04:38PM
Depends on the platform. With BIONC based ones, the team downloads a signed executable that does the calculations, and then submits it back to a central server. A few projects, like SETI@Home, let you compile your own local client and use it in place (which is very non-trivial, but I've done it successfully; I tend to use SETI as a hardware or compiler burnin test); results are always validated by having multiple machines run the same work unit, until a consensus is reached that its correct.
F@H is closed source, but uses GPL components under a special license grant; the reason being is they don't want to have to worry about people making modifications to the client that could compromise test results or the network.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @04:45PM
Yes they do. You trust the project to not give you something bad. There is a slight improvement where they have started running the projects inside a dedicated VM, but there is risk in any code you run from online. Thankfully in UNIX and Linux they run as a special user by default to minimize some risk.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @01:33PM
How many bitcoins did y'all mine during that time?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:38PM
We are just so cool! In celebration, I'm passing out free internet beer, burgers, corn on the cob, and chips all day today. Those who don't imbibe in alcohol, help yourselves to some web coke.
And, while we pat ourselves on our backs, let's think a little deeper about what this is all about. We are supporting medical research with our little competition. There are people proposing ideas that just might maybe could possibly lead to a cure for cancer, or MS, or diabetes, or malaria, or dengue - anything at all. I dare say that all of us know someone - maybe even intimately - who suffers from one of life's dread illnesses.
No one can say that we will discover anything useful, nor can they say that we won't. But, it's a nice dream that our little contributions MIGHT help to cure million's of people's suffering.
I want to invite everyone to join the team. Doesn't matter if you only have a laptop that produces a couple hundred points per day - CMN32480 runs one, and so do I. If you have a gaming rig with a honking huge graphics card, join in with that, and turn a million points every two or three days. Whatever you have, sign it up and join in the fun!
Also join us on IRC - we chat about this stuff off and on, right on the main channel. Need support? Probably not, but if so, join IRC and ask questions!
And, here, have another beer!
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:19PM
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 28 2016, @01:28AM
I spent about 4 minutes googling for a z12 client - and came up empty. Sorry 'bout that!
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Thursday April 28 2016, @04:32PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:26PM
I'm one of those SETI@Home crazies, and I've been doing it since it started back in about 1999, first on my Pentium 100.
When I went to work (as a very junior not much of anything) at the mighty Sun, I collected some old PC junk and built a few machines from the parts and made my own LAN at home to play with. After about 18 months of thrashing my K6-2/500, K6-III/450, Dual Pentium III 550, Athlon XP 2000+, Sun Ultra 10 and some other pieces of junk I got my SETI@Home 2500 work unit certificate and I was proud.
I went down to the big Sun server farm on business once. It was wall to wall E15k machines with the odd workstation and smaller server about. I saw that they had their 2500 SETI@Home work unit certificate up on the side of one of the racks. I told one of the guys there that I'd got mine and it had taken me 18 months. He replied that they'd just got theirs and it had taken them an hour. They wanted something to stress test all the CPUs at once...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].