PC owners borg into most the powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure
- Reference: 1585056920
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/24/folding_at_home_470_pflops/
- Source link:
How so? Well, just like the lunatics [2]stripping toilet paper from shelves the world over , at times of crisis it helps to feel that we are doing something – anything – and Folding@home, which borrows PC-owning donors' idle CPU and GPU cycles to simulate protein dynamics, has naturally been extended to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
Towards the end of February, when the outbreak was gathering pace, the project, founded at Stanford University in 2000, [3]put out a call to arms asking for interested individuals to donate their home rigs' resources in an effort to better understand COVID-19 and thus perhaps even identify a cure.
The novel coronavirus infection starts in the lungs, where a "spike protein" binds to a receptor protein on the surface of lung cells. It is this "spike" – or the knobbly bits we all know and loathe – and how it shifts, folds and interacts with the ACE2 receptor that needs to be studied so that an effective therapeutic antibody can be developed.
"We can build computational models that accomplish this goal, but it takes a lot of computing power," wrote Folding@home boffin Ariana Brenner Clerkin. "This is where you come in! With many computers working towards the same goal, we aim to help develop a therapeutic remedy as quickly as possible."
Anyone can [4]download the software , which runs in the background sipping unused cycles to help run its sims. Given the enormity of the situation, people have unsurprisingly been receptive. Folding@home's director, Dr Greg Bowman, told Twitter on Friday:
Amazing! [5]@foldingathome now has over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power. To put that in perspective, that's more than 2x the peak performance of the Summit super computer! — Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) [6]March 20, 2020
IBM's Summit super 'puter debuted at ORNL in 2018 boasting 200 peta-FLOPS – floating point operations a second, which in a layperson's terms translates as 200,000 trillion calculations solved per second. Big Blue has [7]pledged Summit to the corona-cause too , alongside the White House-sanctioned COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium comprising 16 systems, more than 330 peta-FLOPS, 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs.
UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer [8]READ MORE
330 is still some way off the heady heights of 470, though Folding@home has the advantage of borging hundreds of thousands of insane gamer rigs to help out, rather than being a single, standalone system.
Summit's days at the top of the HPC pile are numbered, however, as the US Department of Energy's uber-system [9]El Capitan , which has been commissioned to simulate America's nuclear weapon stockpiles, is tipped to be capable of two exa-FLOPS – two times 10 18 floating point calculations per second – by 2023. But who knows how many PCs will be running Folding@home's software by then? Of course, civilisation would have to make it through this unscathed too.
In the meantime, if you fancy helping out with Folding@home's efforts, [10]there's a disclaimer : "These calculations are enormous and every little bit helps! Each simulation you run is like buying a lottery ticket. The more tickets we buy, the better our chances of hitting the jackpot. Usually, your computer will never be idle, but we've had such an enthusiastic response to our COVID-19 work that you will see some intermittent downtime as we sprint to setup more simulations. Please be patient with us! There is a lot of valuable science to be done, and we're getting it running as quickly as we can."
Hey, you've got to be in it to win it, right? And that i9-9900K/RTX 2080 Ti combo isn't under much stress while you're working from home. I mean, you are working, aren't you? ®
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/14/from_ibm_summit_to_exascale/
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/04/bog_roll_pullout/
[3] https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19-2019-ncov/
[4] https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
[5] https://twitter.com/foldingathome?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[6] https://twitter.com/drGregBowman/status/1241037866215657472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[7] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/23/coronavirus_covid_19_round_up/
[8] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/15/uk_archer2_supercomputer/
[9] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/04/el_capitan_two_exaflops_supercomputer/
[10] https://foldingathome.org/covid19/
Added my i9 work rig.
Completed
A couple of covid-19 work units already. This i7 7820X with 1080Ti is certainly a lot faster for F@H then the previous machines I used for my first 100 work units.
I heard about F@H when it first started thanks to the User Friendly (comic strip) team of forum regulars.
Until 2009 my hardware was too limited to be useful. After that, I just didn't care too much nor wanted to spend the electricity.
But lately I have a new comp with cycles to spare, so I joined the CoVi mob and signed up last week.
I think I've done two units; been mostly idle.
If I'm leaving my new big-box running instead of sleeping, please send more work!
Correction
Since they fixed the stats server, I was able to check: 18 units!
And I joined the Folding Vultures, too: "Biting the hand virus that feeds IT locks down the world."
Very worthy
I've installed this now.
Here's an idea, could we get an El Reg team going? Vulture Power!
Re: Very worthy
Done! Folding Vultures are go, team number 250966 . Join up, and let's get folding. My Ryzen 5 2600 is just about respectable (although clearly not earth shattering – the 24GB RAM might help though), but my GPU is nothing to write home about... come join in and see what we can do.
Re: Very worthy
Done! Bringing a Ryzen 5 3600 with an RX-5700 to the table. Not the fastest thing out there but should crunch a few numbers.
Re: Very worthy
Great :) Your CPU apparently has a ~17% edge over mine, but the GPU is all of 541% up... maybe I should upgrade :P
Re: Very worthy
Lending my 3700x and 2070 super to the mix. Let's get folding!
Re: Very worthy
Joined with a slightly old i7-4770k and a nVidia GTX780.
Re: Very worthy
I'm running 1 thread and its using less than 60MB so I guess lots of ram left on yours for 3d pron!
Anyone complaining about the extra leccy cost, bare in mind that a computer is hardly any less efficient than an electric heater at heating your home. So if your house is cold, fire up all your PCs, double bubble :)
When you say spare cycles...
I used to run F@H but it just ran my system flat out - screaming fans etc. Is it possible to get it to only run a % of my capacity?
Re: When you say spare cycles...
Indeed. I've been running World Community Grid (BOINC-based) for years and its very lean GUI allows you for choosing the % of CPU you allow it to use.
The other day I've installed F@H (Win7) and I do think the GUI is not too clear and most of all the settings are a bit rough around the edges.
At first ("Light" setting) it wouldn't use my GPU (GTX1060) at all and very little CPU so I thought something was wrong with my (old) PC, but then I found this page(*) that explains it and switched to "Medium". The CPU went to almost 90% and the GPU to 100% with all fans blowing at full speed.
No, I didn't try "Full".
It's not that I don't want to contribute, but if my main rig gets fried I have a 10-years old Fortnite pro at home who's going to be very pissed.
May give a try with Rosetta@Home which uses BOINC. Still, the guys seem to have plenty of firepower already. Science is cool.
(*) https://foldingathome.org/faqs/fah-v7/v7-introduction/web-control/folding-power-slider/
Re: When you say spare cycles...
Mine started running as light but used 3 cores so I went into the confif and set it to one thread and its just turning the fan on a little - the kids are doing school work so I cant have it screaming like Dyson when he realises he cant import at the mo!
Re: When you say spare cycles...
I'm running it (Folding @Home) at Medium, and my system isn't cranking too hard. When I ran BOINC, all the fans were blowing at full speed.
Can't get the work (units)
I flung my combined room heater and phat old server into it and have been crunching Covid-19 work units that they've allocated 3 days for in less than 6 hours. Only problem is they keep running out of work units, so now it's sat idle for more time than I'd like, but it's great to know that a community like this can (safely) come together to hopefully make a difference!
Re: Can't get the work (units)
Check out Rosetta@Home on the BOINC distributed computing client. They're working on Covid-19 too. If there's no Folding@Home work units you can switch over to Rosetta. The projects are complimentary - Rosetta calculates protein shape and Folding, well, folds them.
I signed up yesterday. According to the log files the client completed 99% of its first assigned task, then gave up. It seems to be hung now, so I have killed it off.Sorry, guys, but if I am going to give you access to my computer it will have to be with something I can trust not to fuck up.
For those at home with a good rig
Just let it run for a few hours it WILL pick up work as it is available - over the last 2 days mine has been working about 70% of the time, set on medium while I'm browsing.
Medium settings (on a 3950x/vega 64,32gb memory) runs at 30 cores leaving 2 cores for me :-)
Using the creators settings on ryzen master my average temp is around 60 after 2 hours or so.
Also a nice test for your rig :-)
I'm also investigating using my 3d Printer too make facemasks or ventilators,Some guys in Italy have designs undergoing tests.
Would be amazing, if true.
Since most of the compute come from gaming hardware with very dismal fp64 FLOPS capacity, 470 fp64 PFLOPS would be more like 20 fp32 EFLOPS! (and most compute is likely not fp64)
I find that really hard to believe.
I could not find any concrete stats to back this up.
FreeBSD port
Make sure you update your ports tree, and then:
cd /usr/ports/biology/linux-foldingathome && make install clean
Unfortunately, a pkg install isn't available, as their restrictive license forbids it...
Re: Academics
Colour me skeptical that the nerds of the world are going to rush in and save everyone like some episode of The Last Ship. This is the real world, not some science fiction fantasy.
Re: Academics
-1, Troll
got to work now
Tasks: 310 total, 2 running, 250 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 8.9 us, 9.5 sy, 65.5 ni, 16.1 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 16005364 total, 8189480 free, 3927256 used, 3888628 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 999420 total, 999420 free, 0 used. 10942376 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5623 fahclie+ 39 19 428184 173880 13548 R 292.4 1.1 11:14.56 FahCore_a7
4679 rkynast+ 20 0 2905864 283376 123000 S 25.7 1.8 11:39.29 Web Content
4504 rkynast+ 20 0 4159288 503024 207480 S 7.3 3.1 37:57.16 firefox
Have used BOINC for years contributing to fighting AIDS and all sorts of cancer projects. Glad to help and adjusting the settings is simple on the gui. Never interfered with my work so would reccomend. Have stealth installed on clients pcs (hide system icon) as well with no repercussions yet....
Working from home ...?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4
-> quite lucid Mitchell and Webb