Assist COVID19 Researchers

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So, most of the tools in this forum are things we use for our own purposes. Here is a tool we can implement to help researchers. Folding@Home is asking computer users to donate computer resources. From their website:

We need your help! Folding@home is joining researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies. By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where a research team at Memorial Sloan Kettering is working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies. The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs.

Wikipedia Folding@home has a detailed article that covers history, examples of research, and description of the software used.

Instead of emptying your local stores of face masks and hand sanitizers, you can donate the resources that you already have, to help our global community. We’ve patched and tweaked our computers for maximum performance- so this is a way we can pitch in and make a real difference!

The Folding@Home graphical user interface (GUI) is open-source, but the client is proprietary software- Folding@Home saying that security and scientific integrity as the reason. Accurate data, quickly distributed, is important, and will be distributed to other scientists and laboratories world wide, in hopes that the open collaboration that started with China posting the genome on line, will allow a rapid, effective response to the virus.

For those with actual metered connections, this is probably not for you.

Stop feeling helpless, or panicky, or stuck in absolute denial, and do something constructive and helpful to the world at large by supporting COVID19 research.

But cover your cough, and wash your hands before you hit that keyboard!

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

8 users thanked author for this post.

satrow, SueW, ve2mrx, woody, Kirsty, Myst, Cybertooth, Rick Corbett

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I have been running it overnights.

1)
Somewhere (probably in installation) there was an option for
CPU “number”, with recommendation of “1” which I accepted.
My guess was that “number” is meant as a sequence number,
i.e. which CPU to use from among multiple on-board CPUs
(or from among multiple on-chip cores).
Does “number” instead mean how many CPUs /cores to use?

2)
I think of CPU longevity,
a) not knowing whether inexpensive portable computer CPUs are
sufficiently robust for continuous load;
and
b) wishing that the load would not all be on the same core.

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I think that is number of CPU cores.
If you are worried about overuse, run a temperature monitor on the CPU (CPUID HWmonitor).
Having all load on the same core is unlikely to make a difference to CPU life if core temperature is controlled. I’ve been running Folding whenever the machine is on for the last 7 years.

cheers, Paul

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Thank you, Paul, for telling me about HWMonitor.

HWM labels my cores as “CPU 0 and “CPU 1”.
Through its use I see that F@H always uses both cores of my processor chip.
So, in F@H, “CPU number” and “1” do not mean one core,
nor do they mean one CPU in HWM terms.
Perhaps “CPU” in F@H means processor chip.

Because HWM’s logs are grapshs, a small amount of logging occupies gigabytes of disk space.
Wise default is logging disabled.
I should hope to discover in the program the abilitiy to (de)select things to be monitored.

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[carpintero]

Correction:
HWM labels my cores as “Core 0 and “Core 1”.
Through its use I see that F@H always uses both cores of my processor chip.
So, in F@H, “CPU number” and “1” do not mean one core.
Perhaps “CPU” in F@H means processor chip.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by carpintero.

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