Rosetta@home, from the University of Washington, is using BOINC to model important coronavirus proteins.

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Awesome!

Hi, I tried folding@home too yesterday and can't seem to start it again this morning. Do you know o the differences between these two projects ? They seem to pursue the same goal (protein folding) through the same sort of means : distributed computing. Why is folding@home not included in BOINC ? It would be more practical, as BOINC has more options and seems more effective. Thanks. [self-edit : Ok I see this question has been brought up recetly on the forum; sorry I am new here, started only yesterday ! you can delete my post if you like].

Same here, there's been several days where I had no work units. A lot of entities are crunching for F@H which the research staff are grad students or volunteers and can't keep up with the demand for WUs. I deleted F@H and went back to BOINC, crunching only for Rosetta@home. I used to crunch for World Community Grid for 10 years but stopped as they're not supporting COVID-19 projects at this time.

As far as I understood is that the sudden influx of computers, going from 30K sustained to 400-500K almost overnight, has swamped FAH's network connection. Their servers can cope, they just don't have the bandwidth to send out the work and receive the results back in a fashionable manner.

I tried folding@home when the news first came out about them and corvid-19, I gave up after it crashed my system 3 times in as many days crunching just GPU tasks even at the min. settings. Waked up in the morning and have to cycle the machine. NOT GOOD. I would have tried Rosetta@home, but it seems that it doesn't use GPUs. Does anyone know who within the BOINC world is running these types of studies that have GPUs as an option for processing?

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I've suspended 3 out of 4 Projects and switched all 8 cores to Rosetta to help with the fight, number crunching fine.

If you have a recent Nvidia card, you can run GPUGrid.
They will be getting some Covid-19 work units at some point.

But check the requirements.
http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=5002

Does anyone have any familiarity with running something like this from a virtual machine? I'm looking at setting up a VM and watching it to see how it performs.

BOINC runs just fine on a VM, with or without Xwindows running (in the case of *nix). However, if you are using a VM from a VPS provider (Amazon, Linode, etc.), you will almost certainly be in violation of their terms of service, so please use BOINC only on a VM running on hardware you own.

There is not a huge benefit in running BOINC on a VM, because BOINC provides all the controls over system and resource usage that you might want to control by running it in a VM. Compared to not running in a VM, the VM will provide some overhead that isn't necessary.

My comments are based on having tried running BOINC on a server running CentOS configured with OpenVZ virtualization. In the end, I wound up running BOINC on the host OS over bare metal.

I love this project but it's a pity it takes no GPU share. It runs on my Windows and Android producing a lot of heat making me sweaty.

As far as I've been crunching for Rosetta@Home, they are not known for GPU -- only CPU. Same with World Community Grid (WCG). Every project can not be for everybody. There are many GPU projects you can support: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing -- I like support CPU only projects because it allows anyone with a CPU to contribute to science tasks without worrying about people with higher end GPUs hogging up work units or making your work units seem less significant. Everyone is on on the same common ground with CPU only tasks.

I'm running Rosetta. It likes new hardware. It doesn't like old hardware.

The BOINC project doesn't necessarily agree that you have to roll your own.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/CloudServer

I've run BOINC in three clouds but I would recommend it mainly as a learning experience.

The BOINC client provides control best described as coarse. Modern OSs make up for most of that.

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Rosetta and WCG (IBM) both do Covid19 batches.
Rosetta is one of the only ones (next to Universe@home) to run on Android 10 devices.
My Cellphone has been running non stop for almost a year, and both my older and newer phone now have blown up batteries.
I won't regret the usage of my phone though!
Newer phone hardware may be very interesting in the near future for Boinc projects!

FAH also doesn't give you COVID19 jobs. Only when they're available.
If they're not, you'll be getting other jobs.

My Cellphone has been running non stop for almost a year, and both my older and newer phone now have blown up batteries.

There's a very simple solution for this and it's called a fan. My whole farm, 4 Android devices running Android 6 to 9, lie on top of a cabinet in my living room, next to a 120mm fan that blows cool air over them. The fan spins at 5V (half speed), which is enough to cool all the devices down and make sure the battery doesn't pop. The battery will only bulge and pop when it's getting too hot all the time. So active cool your devices and they'll survive.

next to a 120mm fan that blows cool air over them.

It's a 230mm fan. See https://photos.app.goo.gl/wL8t7anUf7tqneXF6 for my setup.

@RosettaAtHome · Jun 25, 2020 · We have some BIG NEWS: Researchers @UWproteindesign have succeeded in creating antiviral proteins that neutralize the new coronavirus in the lab. (These experimental drugs are being optimized for animal trials now)[/quote] https://twitter.com/RosettaAtHome/status/1276324129390555136

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I'm running an Intel i9 8-core, 16 CPU iMac with 40 GB of RAM and a decent GPU (AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8 GB HBM2 VRAM). Folding@Home only uses the CPUS. Any way for me to deploy my GPU as well, via a different service?