Combined home computers reach exaflop levels

[T18skyguy]

Cutting edge scientist's are working on a molecule to block Covid19's ability to attach to a human cell. They are also working on other disease's such as Parkinson's and cancer. Their goal is to combine at least 1 million home computers to help crunch all the data that's needed. If you leave your computer on, it either works in the background, or you can toggle it to off while you use it. Their website is Folding@home.org Here is an article about it. I figure if I can contribute, then maybe it'll save my life someday. If any of you folks can explain how they combine all these home computers for this job that would be interesting. It's beyond me. The Folding@home.org site is better than that small article.

[philh]

I did this years ago and have forgotten about it. I have a media computer that's doing absolutely nothing 99.9% of the time.

[Heisenberg]

There will be no cure for covfefe-19.

[wa8yxm]

With SETI I had a lot of folks I trust confirmign it as legit. but .. That's not the point of this post.

When I was working some of my co-workers discovered we had internet access. Oh we had an "Expert" who was supposed to lock it down but my hacker skills are, on a scale of 10 where 10 is a Powerful Hacker. in the low fractional range (Below 1) and even I could walk under his lockouts (Though I did it safely.. I did NOT use the browser but a terminal program that was more hacker resistant. the "Browser" ran remotely. the original VPN as it were).

But several of the computers showed up with cut little things like a cat that walked across the open windows.

Well when departmental IT came in and saw those they dang near needed clean underwear... I warned my co-workers.. But do they listen to me?

No.. they don't Took several years before they had Internet access again.

[joebedford]

I ran seti@home for many years but as my current PC has aged, while it's still fast, I don't want to heat it up too much with very high CPU loads.

I'm not familiar with folding@home.org but after some vetting I may let some small loads run on my non-critical PCs. I'm not afraid.

Incidentally, after all these years, seti@home is suspending home computing TOMORROW.

[RayJayco]

Vijay Pande with Stanford University was one of the originators of Folding @ Home Distributed Computing (Short for protein folding or assembling.) I founded a team on my website about 20 years ago when it was first implemented. Teams were very competitive and I have had over 30 machines of mine running it at one time.

I can honestly say that no malware or any such have ever been sent to any of my machines.
For the sake of fairness, I will not name the team that I started, however I encourage anyone that has lost a friend or loved one to cancer, Lou Gehrig, etc., to look into it.

Genomes, proteins and such assemble differently with almost infinite possibilities. Minute differences of temperature, salinity and such within a human body can affect outcome of some bad diseases...

You can learn about it here:
Folding at Home

Vijay Pande, Stanford Professor, Profile

[Gdetrailer]

Hmm.. Allow unknown external programs to install and run in the background on your minimally secured PC..

What can possibly go wrong?

A Hackers paradise!

Makes the "IT" type of security guy in me cringe to think about it that folks are willing to give up personal privacy and security of their PC and data..

Folks, wake up!

Powerful PCs are dirt cheap now days, we are not talking multi million dollar mainframes from the 1960s that had the computing power of a 4 function calculator..

Not to mention someone else using your data bandwidth..

$100,000 worth of two or even four 8 core processor servers wired internally and privately together via 10 gigabit network will end up with faster and more consistent results than employing millions of unsecured public PC idle processor time and week/poor Internet connections..

If modern "science" is relying on public unsecured processing to get things done it will take longer and will be a high security risk to both sides of the coin.

Tread lightly..

[delwhjr]

Here is a list of all the distributed computer projects out there.
List of Distributed Computer Projects

You can see there are many out there working on many different projects in physics, medicine, chemistry, astronomy and other sciences. It also contains a list of projects which were completed or shut down.

There are a limited number of so-called super-computers and it would be impossible for all this research to be carried out on them alone.

[T18skyguy]

When you download the program, they show you a list of disease's, and you can pick and choose which one's you can devote your idle computer time to, or there is a box you can check that says "all of them". There is also a feedback mechanism that presumably shows what your computer contributes too, but I haven't seen it yet. They ask for patience because it takes some time for them to collate whats happening with it.

[Tvov]

I am going to look into this. I have been hearing about folding at home for years... I swear it was well over 10 years ago that I first heard about it.

If my computer can help out with the present situation while I'm sleeping, it is worth a shot.

[ljr]

wa8yxm wrote:

Lwiddis wrote:
Allow others access to my computers based on this article? No

There was a project S.E.T.I. that did this and has done it for years. It was even featured on an episode of the TV show JAG but the program is in fact real (I know as I was part of it).

now there is danger of someone faking such a program but what SETI did was set you up with a screen saver. a packet of data was downloaded and when your computer went into screensaver mode it worked on it.

so this may well be a legit program

I don't do screen savers any more.

Ditto to all that. I had several computers working on SETI for years.

Caution is definitely called for though. I wouldn’t touch it unless I was VERY sure I knew who I was dealing with and what they were doing.

[magicbus]

Did you download a browser or maybe a word processor, photo editor or maybe even a tax program? This is no different. You download a program then a chunk of data to process and it returns the results just as your browser did to read this message. In fact I bet their program sends back much less information than your browser!

You just need to do your due diligence to trust the source.
Dave

[wa8yxm]

Lwiddis wrote:
Allow others access to my computers based on this article? No

There was a project S.E.T.I. that did this and has done it for years. It was even featured on an episode of the TV show JAG but the program is in fact real (I know as I was part of it).

now there is danger of someone faking such a program but what SETI did was set you up with a screen saver. a packet of data was downloaded and when your computer went into screensaver mode it worked on it.

so this may well be a legit program

I don't do screen savers any more.

[wildtoad]

Nope not gonna happen in my house. I’d think that the guys would reach out to IBM and others. I’d suspect they have sufficient MIPS or Flops to do the research.

[opnspaces]

many years ago I ran SETI@HOME (search for extra terrestrial intelligence)on my computers. If I remember correctly it was run by Berkley. Each computer would be assigned a bit of data from one of the many radio telescopes and would crunch through the data looking for certain patterns. Once the packet was analyzed the computer would upload it's findings and then download another chunk of data. Actually I just looked at the SETI website and it has a link to the site for the Covid 19 virus research.
Link