Most powerful computer ever? - F@H Increases in Size 10x While Fighting COVID-19

[GOTSpectrum]

On February 27th Folding at home announced it would take up the fight against COVID-19. 

 

https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19-2019-ncov/

 

Quote

2019-nCoV is a close cousin to SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and acts in a similar way. For both coronaviruses, the first step of infection occurs in the lungs, when a protein on the surface  of the virus binds to a receptor protein on a lung cell. This viral protein is called the spike protein.

Quote

 therapeutic antibody is a type of protein that can block the viral protein from binding to its receptor, therefore preventing the virus from infecting the lung cell.

Folding at home is using the work they did on the SARS virus as a basis to quickly ramp up work for the new COVID-19. The speed in which they have rolled out a number of Work Units has been incredible.

 

On the 10th of march F@H announced that the first batch of WUs were now available to everyone who was running the client. https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/

 

 

Spoiler

After initial quality control and limited testing phases, Folding@home team has released an initial wave of projects simulating potentially druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and the related SARS-CoV virus (for which more structural data is available) into full production on Folding@home. Many thanks to the large number of Folding@home donors who have assisted us thus far by running in beta or advanced modes.

It is actually really impressive that a volunteer network of computers can trade blows with the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Being able to have rapid access to computing resources this vast quickly will massively help medical researchers around the world devise methods of treating COVID-19. It will also help that when the next corona virus spings up we will have computer models that may well be applicable to the new potential new virus of the future.

 

 

Folding@home is a network of volunteer computers distributed around the world that aims to perform biomedical research with the single intent of helping to further understand and develop cures for a range of diseases such as; Alzheimer's, cancer, and Parkinson's. The exact research that is done is simulating the 'folding' of proteins in the body, this is important because the function of a protein id directly related to its physical shape. And this, when the protein is created in the body it needs to reshuffle its shape to get into the correct structure to perform its task. Many illnesses can be linked to faulty proteins in the body such as many cancers and neurological issues, along with a wide number of other general health concerns. Folding@home is one of, if not THE world's fastest computing systems. Before the explosion of users the network had a reported speed of approximately 98.7petaFLOPS At this speed this network if compared with the TOP500 list of supercomputers would fall into 2nd. 

 

But that isn't all, tech outlets, manufactures and YouTubers have all spread the work regarding the effort!

 

A variety of tech news outlets have reported on the project including kit guru. Most of these outlets have been advertising a team, either their own or one they are affiliated with.

 

Spoiler

https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/featured-tech-news/christopher-nohall/put-your-cpu-and-gpu-in-use-against-the-covid-19-virus/

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15633/covid-19-toms-hardware-2020-folding-at-home-race

 

https://www.neowin.net/news/join-the-folding-at-home-neowin-team-to-fight-the-novel-coronavirus/

 

https://hackaday.com/2020/03/18/join-team-hackaday-to-crunch-covid-19-through-foldinghome/

 

 

Various Tweets from third parties:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Folding@Home has reported gained 400k new folders in the last couple weeks which means a 10x increase in the number of active volunteer systems. It really is all quite impressive to say the least, even being conservative F@H is now most probably the single most powerful computing system ever created!

 

The first results are already starting to be produced!

 

 

 

But it hasn't all been smooth sailing! Folding at Home has been experiencing massive server issues due to the large volume of new signups.

 

At first it was simply the fact that they could not generate WUs quick enough to meet demand!

 

 

Then they started to have issues with server being able to fulfil all the request for WUs! I cant seem to find the Tweets for this but let me tell you even now we are struggling to get work units consistently!

 

So what can you do to help? Well by joining us over on the event thread and firing up your system! Lets beat this thing, hell there's even a few prizes to be won!

 

I have been passionate about folding at Home for quite some time and if we can all band together to make for a better tomorrow I say we should, by distributing the costs of running the computation we can research things that otherwise would never have been able to be investigated. This is because some of the work that runs on the Folding network is too far 'out there' to be funded by any normal research grant which means they'd never be able to afford time on a real supercomputer. We truly are helping all of humanity wit this work. All of the data they generate is made freely available through research papers, of which F@H had produced over 200 by this point. If you are interested you can find them here! https://foldingathome.org/category/papers/

 

 

[Bananasplit_00]

Awesome to see! Need to get quieter fans so I can join in the fight

[Metallus97]

UH YES BOIIIS!

This is truly amazing and I am glad to be part of it!

another GPU coming it next week

 

 

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Awesome to see! Need to get quieter fans so I can join in the fight

Noctua!  

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Awesome to see! Need to get quieter fans so I can join in the fight

JOIN US!

 

[GOTSpectrum]

Just now, Metallus97 said:

UH YES BOIIIS!

This is truly amazing and I am glad to be part of it!

another GPU coming it next week

 

This very well could be the first exaFlop computer by now, and it's still growing!

 

i'm actually so proud to be a part of this and proud of our team!

[Metallus97]

1 minute ago, GOTSpectrum said:

This very well could be the first exaFlop computer by now, and it's still growing!

Lets hope the publish some new numbers on performance after the scaling hell is over!

1 minute ago, GOTSpectrum said:

i'm actually so proud to be a part of this and proud of our team!

 

[Valentyn]

Been at it a little while, and got my other rigs going as well! ( Sadly no GPU work on Macs, so the Radeon Pros are idle )

Fight the good fight!

 

Sadly they can't get out enough work units, most of my systems are sitting idle for hours as no WU are available; but they are increasing server capacity daily it seems.