How large of a positive force is all of the DC being done actually going to have?

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Rolo Mae

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  • #1
    I was struck by a nagging thought this evening when I looked at my little F@H utility... I realized that for years now, I have been something akin to addiction regarding distributed computing.

    The reason I checked my folding program that normally just resides in the background, was to see what sort of PPD my videocard was pushing out. I look every day when I think about it. And I get a tiny dopamine burst when I notice a substantial gain in points being accumulated for work being done.

    I don't allow any computing device I have in my life to remain idle. The only exceptions are the devices for which folding are not an option. And it weirdly makes me really angry and frustrated when I think about my playstation 4 just sitting there. Then I think about all the playstation 4's out there... and all the xbox's. Millions of them that could all be contributing. Electricity concerns aside... why not make these little computing devices we create work at 100% capacity all day, every day, for as long as they possibly can? Phones too... but with respect to my phone, I am only mildly irritated that I cannot fold with it. While there is a lot of power there these days... and CPU's in our phones are insanely powerful for their size... I can accept the idea of my phone just being my phone... and that it doesn't have to work very hard day to day. BUT - it must then AT THE VERY LEAST function the way I need at absolutely any moment I need it to. That is the trade for me not making it chug away on calculations at full steam 24/7.

    I simply cannot explain it in the end... but I am absolutely unable to stop caring about DC altogether. For many years now.. I have been willing to pay the price of contributing to Folding@Home. My desktop, my laptop that I use specifically for Ableton, my wife's work issued Macbook Air... They all cost a certain amount to chug away all day every day. I've spent hundreds... probably thousands of dollars in electricity costs month to month, year to year, all so that the things in my life that can work, do, and are working.

    But is it all pretty much just a giant waste? That is the dark cloud that is sort of lingering above me this evening. All I have are my little points I am issued. The more work I do, the more points I get... and hey I'm even in the top 20 now on the Ars team! Username = Yondaime. Those are the scraps I cling to in order to keep going on. But I don't REALLY know if I am actually contributing anytihng. Not really, I really wish there was a way to be certain about it. To know for sure that all this effort is actually paying off.

    I suppose in the end as long as there is a chance that all my time and money and effort will help us understand or potentially cure these awful things humans go through then I will keep on going.

    How about you? How much do you care about this? How much do you think we are all really helping? I'm really curious what people really think about this. Feel free to share!
     
    J

    JimboPalmer

    Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
    9,402
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  • #2
    About a decade ago, the Director of one of my clients heard about F@H and wanted 'her' PCs to help. At one point I was running 55 PCs, folding on CPUs.

    I retired in 2016, and the Director died in 2011, so all those PCs have been replaced. At home, I have 6 laptops and 3 desktops doing CPU folding, and two of the Desktops have GPUs that can fold (GTX 1060 and GTX 1050ti) So I am also a top 20 folder in team Egg Roll, usually #2.

    It is a hobby for my PCs, it keeps them off the streets at night, they stay warm and busy. Oddly, since I joined F@H, the real push in CPU design has been to make idle CPUs (and GPUs) use less power when idle. The P4 Willamettes I started on, used almost the same power idle as crunching, but modern CPUs (as if I owned any) idle using almost nothing, so the cost of folding is way up, because the cost of not folding is down.

    F@H is odd in as much as the results are public domain, but mostly of interest to the medical research community. ("Big Pharma") It points them in directions that yield new treatments.

    I do not think F@H is ever going to cure anything, the real money is in lifelong treatment.
    I do not think F@H is ever going to cited as where a given drug came from, they want you to believe it was their research, not ours.

    I do believe F@H lowers the cost of drug research, just not the price of drugs. (more, but not cheaper alternatives)

    Crunch on!

    https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
     
    T

    TigerAway

    Ars Tribunus Militum
    1,777
    Subscriptor
  • #4
    Before, leaving a computer idling was generally a waste, so DC made sense (if the server needed to be running.)

    Now, since CPUs idle so efficiently you are basically donating $ in the form of compute power. Unless it’s a project you really believe in and follow, then you might be better off donating $ in the form of $. For example, to support Alzheimer’s research.
     
    B

    Beyond

    Ars Praefectus
    5,236
  • #6
    TigerAway said:
    Before, leaving a computer idling was generally a waste, so DC made sense (if the server needed to be running.)

    Now, since CPUs idle so efficiently you are basically donating $ in the form of compute power. Unless it’s a project you really believe in and follow, then you might be better off donating $ in the form of $. For example, to support Alzheimer’s research.
    Click to expand...
    Here we go again. Similar logic would encourage gamers to quit buying and playing games and donate that money to research. Also golf. There's at least one guy who's spent over 100 million dollars of our money playing golf in the last 2 years. I would prefer that golf money be used to further just about any type of research. You could also make an argument concerning crypto-currencies and massive power usage. Not to mention city lights and massive power usage. Look at Las Vegas alone, gigantic power waste just to draw in the suckers that are born every minute. The only winner is organized crime. Don't get me started. (Seems that ship has sailed.) ;)
     
    Z

    ZeroZanzibar

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    24,252
  • #7
    There is no getting around the fact that the trade-offs in running DC have changed.

    Once upon a time, once you made the strategic decision to leave your PC on full time (there were good arguments about component life and the thermal shock of power on / off cycles we made in here) then participating in DC was free because the power consumption was the same or near enough to not matter when idle or busy. There were also machines that were somehow required to be always on for some functional reason. Some Arsians got permission to crunch on various corporate or university farms, for instance. The fact that it was well and truly free in those days was an argument I made to my own management team to aid in getting permission.

    Crunching versus not crunching cost the same for such machines, so it was effectively free. That just is not true in 2019.

    Now, even back then, if you decided to power your PCs off and on, believing that thermal shocks were a better idea than running power 24x7, then you would have always treated the power spent crunching as a contribution to whatever the cause may be.

    In 2019, whether you formally power off or not, the electricity at least is now a real cost no matter what you believe or what the machine uptime needs are.

    But, go back far enough, and that just wasn't true for hundreds of our machines.

    Now, this power cost no matter what has been the case for some years now. But for many long time crunchers, memory of the past may perhaps cloud the argument.
     
    Z

    ZeroZanzibar

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    24,252
  • #8
    I seem to also recall the "it is free" argument being part of the DC "value proposition" back then.

    I don't remember which projects traded on the "give us your free, unused cycles" but I am pretty sure several did so.

    It's different now, because such arguments are no longer true.

    Accordingly, I would expect we have less of what we used to call "corporate farming " than we once did precisely because we can no longer tell our bosses that it is free.

    Bottom line is that crunching is now well and truly a cost and a contribution now. Not formerly true.

    And that has to factor into any reckoning of whether DC is "worth it" in a way we once did not.
     
    B

    Beyond

    Ars Praefectus
    5,236
  • #10
    Syonyk said:
    I use the surplus solar power my office generates to run F@H/BOINC (mostly climateprediction.net and World Community Grid). It's power that would otherwise be wasted, since I'm paneled for winter.

    Mostly, I heat with it. It's an expensive alternative to resistive heaters that theoretically does some good.
    Click to expand...
    Good plan. I heat exclusively with computers. A bit more expensive than my off peak electric rate but worth it for the science. I'd like to go solar, but kind of held off for the Tesla solar tiles. The house is super energy efficient and it's designed so that most of the roof faces exactly South. Seems that the Tesla tiles are finally going into mass production, hopefully. A little concerned about the efficiency of solar in Minnesota.

    Question: "Tribus: North of the Snake" I'm assuming that's the Snake River. Is it the one in Minnesota or the one out west?
     
    D

    Deleted member 32907

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  • #11
    Beyond said:
    Good plan. I heat exclusively with computers. A bit more expensive than my off peak electric rate but worth it for the science.
    Click to expand...

    It's just in my office. Small enough to heat resistively without too much trouble. The house is on a heat pump, which is far better, though if I find a surplus after home solar (unlikely, I intend to come in somewhat below actual consumption for a variety of reasons) I may throw some compute in there. Practically, I'm moving compute out of the house, though. Toddler with a thing for cables.

    I'd like to go solar, but kind of held off for the Tesla solar tiles. The house is super energy efficient and it's designed so that most of the roof faces exactly South. Seems that the Tesla tiles are finally going into mass production, hopefully. A little concerned about the efficiency of solar in Minnesota.
    Click to expand...

    Unless your house is built specifically for tile roofs, it probably can't support Tesla Solar Roof nonsense. And God help you when you need to troubleshoot issues with that down the road - you can't just pull/replace a panel without having to do major roof work. You could get a grid tie system with discrete panels now for about $1.50/W if you do most of the work yourself.

    Question: "Tribus: North of the Snake" I'm assuming that's the Snake River. Is it the one in Minnesota or the one out west?
    Click to expand...

    Correct. The one out west.
     
    MadMac_5

    MadMac_5

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  • #14
    Now that the thread has been revived from the dead, and we've gone through the discovery phase of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, we have a bit of an answer as to how helpful DC is. Folding@Home did indeed seem to help some labs model coronavirus spike proteins a bit faster than if they threw a bunch of Amazon/Azure cluster instances at the problem, and it made good use of the massive increase of compute power that Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs had over their previous generations. It also continues to help heat my office in the cold, cold winters!
     
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    Burned

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  • #15
    DC was essential in the open science/open data effort to create novel anti-virals to combat SARS-COV-2., e.g. Covid Moonshot. It just still takes a really long time from identifying drug candidates to actually having done testing, clinical trials, manufacturing and distribution. It seems NIH's take on it is "now that we have developed a process, it will be ready to go for the next time".
     
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    dragongoddess

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  • #16
    An few lines from an article from temple Univ. https://news.temple.edu/news/2020-04-07/distributed-computing-project-takes-covid-19

    “We now know that there are many drug fragments that bind to specific places on the coronavirus’s protein structure,” says Voelz. “These are leads for further drug development. The dynamical information that we get from the Folding@home simulations is really hard to measure experimentally in a lab.”

    In early March, about 30,000 users had downloaded the Folding@home software and were active participants in the COVID-19 project. Several weeks later, that number had grown to more than 700,000. As of April 1, there were more than 1 million people participating. “Combined, we are now the largest supercomputer in the world,” says Voelz, who notes that the online gaming community is a big contributor. “We’ve broken the exaFLOP barrier, a measurement of operations per second that is the equivalent of ten times the compute power of the world’s fastest supercomputer.”
     
    B

    Burned

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  • #18
    continuum said:
    I wonder if there's any newer news on the impact?
    Click to expand...

    Funny you should ask, because there is a very recently published paper in Science about it. The object is to find a patent free antiviral the low and middle economies can manufacture and use for their populations. A candidate drug is undergoing testing. While this is good, obviously you want to go from pandemic outbreak to large scale drug manufacturing in a lot less time. Anyway, here's a link to the article. Open science discovery of potent noncovalent SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors
     
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