Plea for spare computing power in new disease therapies

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Until today, I’d heard of distributed computing but I hadn’t heard of Folding@Home. From their website: Folding@home is a project focused on disease r
[See the full post at: Plea for spare computing power in new disease therapies]

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satrow, ryegrass, Grond, Elly, OscarCP, SueW, woody, AJNorth, Fred, Pim

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Snap!

What do you do with your spare CPU cycles?

cheers, Paul

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Kirsty

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i took part in distributed computing for some years (world community grid, primegrid, pogs, seti@home) until my old nvidia gtx 295 ti was fried during the process, i stopped contributing my computer- and gpu-power for anything.

PC: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64bit, Group B
Notebook: Windows 8.1, 64bit, Group B

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Honx:”until my old nvidia gtx 295 ti was fried during the process”

This sounds like something that might be useful to understand, particularly for people who are considering participating, or are actually participating in projects based on distributed computing. So, how did it happen?

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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OscarCP wrote:

Honx:”until my old nvidia gtx 295 ti was fried during the process”

This sounds like something that might be useful to understand, particularly for people who are considering participating, or are actually participating in projects based on distributed computing. So, how did it happen?

i’m no pro so i can’t tell what happend exactly, i can only tell what i encountered: my pc was running 24/7 and these tasks were running, some of them did only utilize cpu, others did utilize gpu (cuda) very intensive. one day after i got up, i encountered that both monitors were black, but the pc was still running. so i had to turn off the pc the hard way, a few minutes later i tried to power it on. it sounded normal but still no signals at any monitor. so i took it to repair and there i was told that my geforce was dead.

PC: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64bit, Group B
Notebook: Windows 8.1, 64bit, Group B

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SETI @ Home did the same thing to one of my old nVidia GPUs about 10 years back (at that time, SETI @ Home essentially was a screen saver that utilized CPU & GPU cycles; I have no idea how it’s set up now). So, since then, no mas Distributed Computing for this guy.

Windows 10 Pro x64 v1909 Desktop PC

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Alas, after 20 years, SETI@Home disbanded earlier this week.

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jhvance

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Dang. That’s discouraging. SETI seems a noble and reasonable cause to me.

Windows 10 Pro x64 v1909 Desktop PC

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OscarCP

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woody wrote:

Alas, after 20 years, SETI@Home disbanded earlier this week.

this article says: “Officially launched at Berkeley on May 17, 1999…”, also wikipedia says something similar. but there must be something wrong in history, because i remember already doing seti-related stuff back in 1998…
i know exactly it was 1998 because i still used win95 at the time, few weeks later i switched to win98 and never used win95 again.

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Actually it’ll be “hybernated” as of March 31. I’d say it’s more a matter of them giving in to the recent series of tricky database issues they’ve been having. Plus of course the constant lack of funds, and the lack of manpower too recently, couldn’t deal with both their plan for Nebula and S@h anymore and they keep hoping to get Nebula really off the ground.

Odd though, with Breakthrough Listen and talks of getting data from other telescopes as well, you’d expect them to have even more data now. And just recently they had increased the limit of work units, which again indicated that. But then the database couldn’t handle it anymore, and while there have been such issues in the past and they were worked out, guess this time it was the final straw for the skeleton crew and shoestring budget they still have.

Sad. Shocking really. Any computer I’ve used since slightly after the original launch of the classic SETI@home client (initial version couldn’t support proxy connections and I was behind one at the time, had to wait a month or so before they patched that) constantly crunched for it. So nearly 21 years. Feeling… quite at a loss now.

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Grond wrote:

SETI @ Home did the same thing to one of my old nVidia GPUs about 10 years back (at that time, SETI @ Home essentially was a screen saver that utilized CPU & GPU cycles; I have no idea how it’s set up now). So, since then, no mas Distributed Computing for this guy.

I had an EVGA GTX 460 v2 GPU several years ago.  I put an aftermarket cooler on it, and I wanted to put its capabilities to the test, so I ran the card with Furmark, an especially punishing graphical benchmark/torture test.

After some time, something happened, and I could smell the magic smoke.  I don’t remember if the PC crashed or if the screen just went dark, but either way, I couldn’t use it in that condition, so I opened the case and took a look at the graphic card.

On the back of the card (the side facing upward in a typical PCIE setup), there was one small chip, close to the corner of the PCB, that had clearly exploded… black soot marked the location, and the little chip’s cover had been partly blown off.

I called EVGA, as the unit was under warranty, and I didn’t expect them to cover it, given the circumstances.  I told them I had been testing the thermals (the actual GPU temperature itself was fine, but that was on the other side of the card) with Furmark at the time that it died.

They told me that they do not recommend running Furmark, especially on the older generation cards, as they have little ability to protect themselves from an impending thermal disaster.  Newer architectures, he said, have a lot more thermal safeguards and are more able to prevent self-destruction.

They RMA’d the card even though I’d been responsible for the card’s demise, and since the 460 v2 was an older generation GPU, they didn’t have any to send as a replacement, so I ended up with a GTX 660.

It sounds like using the GPUs as computation units for projects like these is safer now than it was in the past, as cards (nVidia at least) have more ways to protect themselves when they’re getting hot.  I thought my aftermarket cooler (which is far bigger than the stock one, and with a lot more airflow through it too) covered the extra heat that Furmark imposed, but that one tiny chip was on the wrong side of the card to benefit from the airflow.

It does seem like a design flaw to put a chip that can potentially get so hot that it blows its top on the side of the card without the fans, and to not have any kind of heat sink or heat spreader on it.  It may have been nVidia who originally designed the card that way… they not only design the GPU chip itself, but they also design the card, and the card manufacturers are able to use that reference design as-is, with modifications, or to come up with their own design.  Most of them use the reference design or a slightly modified version, as far as I know.

 

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Grond

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[E Pericoloso Sporgersi]

This Folding@Home software

1. Can I switch it OFF and later back ON whenever I want to?

2. Suppose that, after a while, I’d rather not have it in my computer, is it easy to uninstall?

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by E Pericoloso Sporgersi.

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[E Pericoloso Sporgersi]

E Pericoloso Sporgersi wrote:

This Folding@Home software

1. Can I switch it OFF and later back ON whenever I want to?

2. Suppose that, after a while, I’d rather not have it in my computer, is it easy to uninstall?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by E Pericoloso Sporgersi.

1: Yes . . . be certain to install the GUI (not the CMD) version, an icon in the tray will give you this function.

2: Also yes:  https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/installation-guides/windows/uninstall/

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Grond, Elly, SueW, E Pericoloso Sporgersi, Kirsty

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honx and Grond’s mishaps are discouraging experiences, but I hope that there are more resources these days to find out what is going on, for example in the Web — as is the case with, let’s say, the occasional troubles with Windows updates. So it might be possible to look before jumping into one of these crowd-sourced scientific research projects. Or to disconnect from them, if something bad happened later on.

As to “Nebula”, it looks it is continuing. In fact, it seems the SETI is now getting data from the newly operational Chinese “Five-Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope”, that is similar to Arecibo’s, only larger and has its reflecting surface made of movable plates that can be oriented to form a surface radio-optically equivalent to that of the same telescope pointing in a direction other than the vertical. In this it is unlike Arecibo’s, that moves the antenna feed instead, while, the same as Arecibo’s, the telescope is really immobile, built inside an open cavity on the ground.

So there is still hope that we’ll be hearing from E.T. one of these days. And also that SETI’s GPU-burning days may be now well in the past.

And I also hope someone may have more to say, and do it here, about crowd-sourced medical research studies.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Grond

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See a few more among those listed at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

— Cavalary

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Vodafone, internationally, has been teaming with DreamLabs for a few years now, to aid in various research projects.

From Vodafone.co.uk:

Join smartphone users across the UK and fight against cancer while you sleep
Introducing DreamLab – a free app from Vodafone Foundation that enables thousands of people to help speed up vital cancer research while they sleep. Download DreamLab today, #SleepLikeAHero tonight.

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Elly

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honx wrote:

i took part in distributed computing for some years (world community grid, primegrid, pogs, seti@home) until my old nvidia gtx 295 ti was fried during the process

Folding@home lets you set how much work to allow the CPU/GPU to perform and when to do the work idle/busy.

cheers, Paul

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Grond, Elly, wavy

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@ Kirsty

Kirsty wrote:

Until today, I’d heard of distributed computing but I hadn’t heard of Folding@Home.

There’s more out there than just distributed computing.

Rather than share your computer processing powers, you can become involved in solving the research problems by actually participating yourself–and you don’t even have to have a background in the research itself:

Download and play Foldit and you can help researchers discover new antiviral drugs that might stop coronavirus!

This COMPUTER GAME could help stop coronavirus. (YouTube video)

The Science Behind Foldit

And here’s a Stanford Medical overview on *How playing games can help science*:

https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2019/07/23/how-playing-games-can-help-science/

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doriel, Elly

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I let my PC compute for Folding@home like 10 years ago, I know them, it displayed some complex molecules and you could watch how the molecule grows bigger 🙂 I did really like it.

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Kirsty, Cybertooth

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[carpintero]

> “lets you set how much work to allow the CPU/GPU to perform and when”
I do not see where to configure the when.

————–
A configuration option is to select the cause;
COVID-19 is not among the four selectable items.

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

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While putting out the call to help with Corona virus research, Folding@Home’s client doesn’t yet allow for selecting it as an area of research. Right now they suggest selecting ‘any’ cause, so you will be made aware of the option when it is updated.

Installing Folding@Home will install an icon in the system tray. Click on the icon, and select Web Control to access options.

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

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Microfix, carpintero

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[carpintero]

The local client is the context of my comments.

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

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It’s shown on the web control page above “Stop Folding”.

cheers, Paul

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carpintero, Cybertooth

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