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:
Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday August 27 2016, @04:10PM
1. Link to https://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] for FSM's sake, not http!
2. Site expects to take control of my computer (JavaShit) before giving me any reason to trust them, or even why that should be necessary. (HTML still works, you know.)
3. Speaking of trust, if I give my CPU over to someone else's code how do I know they're just going to fold proteins? I would imagine this is open source... right??? but the first web page provides no such information, just a breathless "Download here!" which is, again, only available via JavaShit.
Not getting off to a good start here...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @04:19PM
Some of the different BOINC programs actually prefer if you run them in a VM. That way, it is not only more secure for the user, it allows server farms to run them on their idle machines and gives the program a more consistent environment to run in.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:20PM
Bad enough dedicating your cpu or gpu, but dedicating the necessary resources to emulate an entire OS seems a bit over the top.
It would be one thing if it were a tiny Free-Dos VM, but usually they want access to your GPU, as well as your CPU(s) and some way to measure the user workload on the machine so as to get out of the way when you are busy. A Virtual Machine just makes all that stuff harder.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:09PM
They aren't really that much bigger than the software itself. The reason is that with a VM, they know exactly the "hardware" it is running on and what software is needed. Therefore, they can cut out all the crap and just use the minimum. Additionally, most projects on BOINC don't actually use the GPU, either due to memory constraints or lack of the proper type of parallelism. In addition, you can still control the load and whatnot, as a supervisor can pause VMs and use other rate limiting.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:22PM
On my computer, I added a repository, then did ~ # equo install sci-biology/foldingathome
On my secondary computer, I didn't even need to add any special repository - # apt-get install foldingathome
On Windows, you don't have a "trusted repository", so you have to make up your mind whether you trust foldingathome.
The forum may be helpful, if you have questions - https://foldingforum.org/ [foldingforum.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:26PM
In my response to you, I missed the moderation as flamebait. I resent that someone modded you as such. Your concerns are legitimate, and they deserve a legitimate response.
All I can say is, I trust FAH not to be running malware in the background. I'm not sure how far I can trust FAH to release information to the public, without charging for it. So, I trust them, up to a point.
If I'm a sucker, well, I'm in good company. A lot of pretty smart people are running the software.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday August 27 2016, @06:59PM
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. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:10PM
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
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]:
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @02:23AM
You might imagine so, but Folding@Home is 100% proprietary software. It is truly unfortunate that the researchers felt the need to release it this way.