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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Fold for COVID19...
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
This is interesting - LINK. Thinking of joining the cause. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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CaptainBoing Guru  Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
I have been "folding at home" for about a month now. https://foldingathome.org/ Small part that I play, but at least it is something more "contributory" than standing in the street clapping for 2 minutes once a week. I figured actually doing something was the best way I could show appreciation in the absence of voluntary work. It tends to run the computers a bit hot (they are doing fairly intensive maths after all) but I figured the extra electricity was worth spending on - like an on-going charity donation where my contribution actually goes directly on the effort and not in "administration" (are you listening Comic Relief/BBC Children in Need/NSPCC/OxFam etc... etc...?) or being lectured and emotionally blackmailed by (the world's richest) slebs. God I am grumpy already.  |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I have setup a PI4 running the image, and am just watching it do it's thing. Yes, you're right - the PI4 in this case runs quite hot when it has a case to run. I have installed a stick-on heatsink to help with that. This IS a great way for people of the whole world, to use spare computing power for the greater good.  It will help the scientists to develop a possible vaccine. I have another PI I am not using, so I think I will set that one up also, and see what else I can rustle up. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
Don't mean to be a wet blanket or undermine good efforts but to me, being the bastard I am, this reeks of one of those feel good but actualy useless endeavours so beloved of the Social media set these days. I had a look at the site and it seems really thin on details to me. I find it hard to believe that they need all this computing power to solve this and the key is not running physical biological tests and experiments. If I were convinced this were a legit thing, I'd go set up 6 Little SFF machines I have up the back for on site work I used to do. Could not care less about the power, Solar is working well atm and not heating or cooling so have loads to spare. I just get very wary of these sorts of Ra Ra Ra things these days as there are a lot of people looking for a crutch to make themselves feel better and a lot of people for whatever reason trying to give them their fix. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Can you please elaborate on why you think that is so? Perfectly happy to be convinced that I have this wrong. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
I have nothing what so ever to come near convincing you it's wrong. I am entirely ignorant to the whole thing. I'm just going on my suspicious gut feeling and dislike for a lot of these " Social" feel good causes. This one to me without having a clue about anything, just seems to reek of that. I just find it highly improbable that with research like that, any and all gubbermints wouldn't throw blank checks at it and the researchers supposedly need the help of Joe public's old computer. My gut feeling is the most powerful computers in the world would be turned over without a second question to this. The money being spent by Gubbermints on this in the way of support packages would mean turning over super computers or buying a 100 more would be done before the ink on the request form was dried. Add to that, the probable Billions a private enterprise could make out of it and the strategic advantage gubbermints would see in it would make this about the most important research in the world right now. Apart from that fact free trial by my feeble mind, I also found the information on the site lacking as to details of what this was being done for specifically and seemed more on people doing it and using the China virus as a nice cover story. Again, I have nothing but my pessimistic gut feeling to go on. Unless you can find a lot better reason than my weightless suspicions, I would suggest you keep going what you are doing. More than every chance I am wrong and that would be a bloody great mistake to take anything away if it is legitimately helping. You should do more research into it than I have which is none before changing anything you are doing. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
You make good points. I will look into it a bit more from my end. You are quite correct about the super-computer thing. This is a task that several super-computers would do well with, and there would be no need at all for any spare computing power from the public. That alone is an excellent point. Food for thought. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 719 |
Also the fact that sites seem to want all the traffic they can handle . There is some profit involved I ' m sure .... Though I cannot figure it out . my site |
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| BrianP Senior Member  Joined: 30/03/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 292 |
Hi all - here's my 2c worth... There's probably some truth in all the above arguments / theories, both for & against. Something else that I came across - apparently the total power consumption of the millions of PCs worldwide running this stuff dwarfs into insignificance that which would be used by many supercomputers doing the same thing. Perhaps it's a conspiracy to save some country heaps in power bills (no prizes for guessing which one). It seems worldwide energy usage has spiked after this began.  Apparently all the uptakes of this "distributed processing" have really stretched the organisers in trying to give everyone some useful work to crunch. I hope this hasn't distracted them from their core task  It is reported that a lot of the delegated PCs have had lots of down time in their number crunching. To sum up - as are others, personally I'm not convinced of how worthwhile it is. There would have to be a large amount of effort involved in both breaking the work up into the pieces to be distributed & then putting the results back into a coherent total. Given the state of our world today, would there be any risk of results being artificially compromised / altered before they were sent back? That said, my knowledge of the intricacies of this is limited, & I would be the last person to criticise any effort to get on top of this pesky COVID 19. Hope you & yours are keeping well. B |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
I'm with Andrew (CaptainBoing) on this one! I have two I5 machines folding continuously . I figure that the increase in power usage is miniscule since they are on 24/7 anyway, so why not give them something to do. Maybe it will actually be of some benefit. Paul in NY |
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| BrianP Senior Member Joined: 30/03/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 292 |
Hi Paul The increase in power consumption (minimal perhaps in each case) has certainly been noticed. Those whose machines have actually been "working" have reported their CPUs permanently maxed out & the extra heat from their boxes is keeping them warm! B |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I've shut down my one, cos I wanted the PI4 for another experiment, but I have kept the ISO image, so I can always put it back online again later. Not sure exactly where I sit on this now!  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| HankR Senior Member Joined: 02/01/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 209 |
I strongly encourage readers and posters of this thread to get the facts. So far they seem to be few and far between here unfortunately. It's so easy to obtain them with some simple googling and reading. As to the thought that global energy demand has spiked since the virus arrived (if that what was meant by "since this arrived"), the demand for electricity has dropped, sometimes quite significantly. Links, for now, are not made clickable; a complete list of all references in clickable form will follow in a later post. 1. New England region, USA "ISO New England, which oversees the reliability of the regional electric grid and runs the wholesale electricity market, estimates that demand has dropped 3-5% since the virus crisis struck." https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2020/04/08/new-england-power-grid-covid-19-coronavirus 2. Europe "April 2020, European electricity demand rebounding amid coronavirus lockdowns Power consumption has partially recovered in most of Europe’s largest countries in recent days and weeks, according to ICIS models that control for the impact of temperature, calendar effects and seasonality."  https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2020/03/19/10482507/topic-page-coronavirus-impact-on-energy-markets 3. China and Italy "Recently, some analysis of the impacts on electricity demand, especially in Italy — one of the hardest hit countries in the world — have emerged. Italian power demand dropped by up to 18% as of mid-March. Power demand gives a reasonable indicator of economic activity, as it is used in all sectors from households to businesses and industry. Satellite data has been used to look at emissions from the transport sector, and has found large reductions in major US cities. We used a NASA/NOAA satellite instrument to take a look at the decrease in electricity in some key Chinese cities." https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/these-images-show-how-coronavirus-has-affected-electricity-demand-in-chinese-cities/ 4. Global "In most economies that have taken strong confinement measures in response to the coronavirus – and for which we have available data – electricity demand has declined by around 15%, largely as a result of factories and businesses halting operations." https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-coronavirus-crisis-reminds-us-that-electricity-is-more-indispensable-than-ever |
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| HankR Senior Member Joined: 02/01/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 209 |
The ideas that this distributed home computer power project is a. only some kind of feel-good idea, b. perhaps an idea borne of social media, c. something that came into existence because of the virus, d. a concept that does not amount to anything worthwhile, e. providing little information about itself, and that what little info that's available is vague, could not be further from the simple truth. All the above (and a few more) unfounded speculations are what bother me the most. The project is associated with some of the finest academic, research, and industrial organizations one can imagine (see below). I should say that until I saw the comment about the existence of this particular project on The Back Shed, I had never heard of it. If you want to know what is going on with the folding@home project, please read a little of the detail about it and its history on the Foldingathome website and especially the very detailed and very comprehensive Wikipedia entry for the project (see below). 5. Birthdate of folding at home software: "October 1, 2000" Recent speed of the distributed computing system and the number, 223, of scientific research papers (most peer reviewed) in the 19 year life of the project: "Folding@home is one of the world's fastest computing systems. With heightened interest in the project as a result of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic, the system achieved a speed of approximately 1.22 exaFLOPS by late March 2020 and reaching 2.43 x86 exaFLOPS by April 12, 2020,[7] making it the world's first exaFLOP computing system. This level of performance from its large-scale computing network has allowed researchers to run computationally costly atomic-level simulations of protein folding thousands of times longer than formerly achieved. Since its launch on 1 October 2000, the Pande Lab has produced 223 SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PAPERS as a direct result of Folding@home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home 6. Just SOME of the institutions associated with the project, all highly respected: Washington University (St. Louis, MO) Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York, New York) North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC) Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) Intel (CA) NVIDIA (CA) BE (Sweden) AMD (CA) https://foldingathome.org/ Edited 2020-04-28 10:33 by HankR |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Hi Brian Task Manager might show 100% utilization but that doesn't mean the CPU is working harder. I think that just means that the CPU is working on a user program. If it isn't working on a user or system program it is sitting there clocking away running machine language NOP (no operation) commands. If there is any disk activity that might make it use more power. Paul in NY |
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panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1114 |
The following, from Wikipedia, may shed a little light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding From my reading and the MOST basic of understanding, polypeptide chains of amino acids form the basis of organic chemistry. Upon creation, these chains are in an 'unfolded' state but then they start 'folding' depending on the atoms that are linked together in the chain. The number of possible 'folds' is astronomical but if small sections of the chain are analysed, modelling can indicate what 'folding' will take place. The sheer number of permutations make analysis even by a single supercomputer beyond current abilities. The Covid-19 virus in particular is very large thus folding@home seems a useful option to explore its structure. Thus if the small sections are parcelled out to a very large number of small computers running the modelling software, they can then be re-assessed by some central entity to gain knowledge of the 'folding' process. This is the most basic and quite possibly incorrect explanation that I could find. panky ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
There you go! I have gone from sceptical to completely confused! |
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| HankR Senior Member Joined: 02/01/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 209 |
Paul, Thank you for donating your substantial personal computing time and power to the world's fastest supercomputer, the Folding at Home distributed network machine. I do think you might be thinking of the way CPUs in modern computers used to work compared to the way they do now. Through several techniques, modern CPUs throttle their behavior dynamically depending on the computer power required by the tasks they are handling. So low or no computing demand causes the CPU to decrease its computing power in the name of energy conservation and longer life due to a much lower CPU silicon temperature. So BrianP was correct. I have been able to measure both the CPU silicon temperature and instantaneous power consumption and there is a big increase in both of these CPU characteristics. Note that the Folding software allows for three levels of CPU activity, light, medium, and full, and also the ability to have it only operate when you are not doing work with your PC. Very convenient. No need at all to drive your CPU hard if you don't wish to!  In a later post I will share some of these measurements with the group. Hank |
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| HankR Senior Member Joined: 02/01/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 209 |
Thank you Grogs and CaptainBoing for telling us about this magical and absolutely magnificent project. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I'm STILL confused. Is the general consensus then, that this kind of thing IS a good thing or not? I still have the ISO image, so can put my PI4 back on-line with it, if it is actually something worthwhile.  I could get more PI3's and PI4's online for this work if the general consensus is that it DOES help. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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