Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@home


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They are burning through the work units as fast as they can generate them.  One of the admins over on the Rosetta@Home forums posted this earlier today.

 

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Yes indeed. We burned through all the work units.

We're currently facing 3 issues that sort of made us run out:
1. The compute power is incredible. I queued up something 2 days ago that would take more than a week to run locally and it all picked up in like 18 hours.
2. Creating these jobs takes human and CPU time on our end and we're stretched thin. I'm working my hardest to get stuff pushed through the pipeline, but for a lot of these, I have to develop new software to get the jobs set up correctly. Additionally, some stuff we can't run on R@H and so it has to be precomputed.
3. We almost have the new update out, but not yet. We're updating Rosetta by about 2 years. Once this happens, we'll be able to do interface design and the newer members of the lab who do protein design will have a much easier time submitting work. As it stands, doing design on R@H requires me to use a pretty old Rosetta without all the newest features.

Once we get interface design going, we should hopefully be able to bring you a lot more work. It'll all finally make sense why we've been making these "scaffold" proteins.

But, to give you an idea, queueing up a full day of Rosetta design on Boinc these days is really tough on our end. We'll say each WU needs 10 structures, and R@H is going through 1M per day. That's 10M structures I need to produce or about 700GB of data. And that's to queue 1 day of work.

The structure prediction stuff is a lot easier to queue. You only have to upload 1 structure and then say I want 10M outputs. So you send the same WU 1M times.[/i]

 

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Also posted by the R@H mods today about some downtime.

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The project has had some 30,000 hosts attach in the last two days. So, while this is a great situation, it does create some growing pains. Rosetta will only send work that they need volunteers to complete. They never send jobs just to verify results of others, or just to keep machines counting up numbers. This makes your CPU available to other BOINC projects you may be attached to, rather than consuming it just so things appear to be progressing smoothly.

There will be a new application and work units released later today. Thanks for your contribution to the project.

 

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40 minutes ago, mattekure said:

If you cant get any Rosetta@Home tasks, I would encourage you to select one of the other BOINC projects to work on as well.  While it may not be COVID specifically related, there are many worthy research endeavors you can participate in.

Oh snap. I thought my Boinc was having issues. but there's really no tasks lol!

 

How much power

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Just reassembled my old UNRAID server, an old dual Xeon x5670 box with 48 GB of RAM, put a drive in it just to run the Boinc docker on it.  It also qualifies as a space heater with 24 threads all completely maxed out. Then also installed Boinc on my old laptop for the points lol.

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Just an FYI for those running BOINC with Snort/Suricata, apparently couple days ago a new rule was published that was blocking COVID-19 transfers with BOINC

ET INFO Suspicious GET Request with Possible COVID-19 URI M1 

I hadn't had any work on two machines in two days and the transfer queue was in continuous retry.  Seems there is some malware going around which is why that rule was created and propagated.  This particular case was directly tied to BOINC as the trigger so I have suppressed it and now back to crunching.  If you are out of work units and the transfer queue is full, something to look into depending on what monitoring you have on your network.

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Personal favorite, I added World Community Grid as my second project.  They do research in a number of areas you can select from including childhood cancers.  You can also bump up the resource share for Rosetta@Home so that whenever they do have tasks, they will get priority.  You can do that in the Rosetta@Home website.  Click on the Preferences for this project, click the edit button, and change the resource share number.  I set my Rosetta@Home share to 2900 and WCG to 100. 

image.png.bb93f2dd31db49b4237133298c9a666f.png

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In the next few days, CA's application feed will be grabbing the download statistics for the various boinc and folding @ home applications and generating the stats.  As a precursor though, this is the stats for linuxserver folding@home and boinc applications.  CA will not generate the graphs for these 2 applications because they are too new to the system, and not enough data is available to create any credible graph.

 

LinuxServer Boinc

 

Added to CA on March 18th.  At the time of it being added, there were 179 downloads.  Today (April 6) there are now 60,950 downloads

 

LinuxServer Folding@Home

 

Added to CA on March 20th.  At the time of it being added, there were 14 downloads.  Today there are 134,884 downloads

 

Graphs are available within CA for the original folding at home app from CaptInsano from a few years ago (long deprecated) that barely worked (if at all).  It's gone from 99,320 on March 5th to 102,450 on April 4th.  While this is a very modest increase, the graphs tell a far different story for just what is going on.

 

image.png.35638979a48ed82a54ff2e49be16119b.png

 

Very steep climb on people trying it out :)   Once graphs are available within CA on the official boinc container and on mobiusnine's folding@home container within a couple of days) I will post them.  I expect that each of them will see a very steep rise in the downloads per month.  (And the graphs currently available which are from early March are very suggestive of just where they are going to wind up)

 

 

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3 hours ago, Squid said:

LinuxServer Boinc

 

Added to CA on March 18th.  At the time of it being added, there were 179 downloads.  Today (April 6) there are now 60,950 downloads

 

LinuxServer Folding@Home

 

Added to CA on March 20th.  At the time of it being added, there were 14 downloads.  Today there are 134,884 downloads

 

 

 

image.png.35638979a48ed82a54ff2e49be16119b.png

 

 

Wow- these are some great metrics! Thanks a lot for sharing @Squid. Looking forward to seeing the other container numbers soon. 

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The official boinc container (the one referenced in the blog post)

 

image.png.5b1685987b26539eb2ba24c0c05ba294.png

 

To put it into a little bit of perspective, before these world events started happening the monthly download count was heading downwards (only 235,632 between Oct 10th and Nov 9th).  After covid-19 became a world issue everything changed.  From February 7th to March 8th, there were 464,826 downloads.  From March 8th to April 7th there were 637,444 additional downloads.  This is just the docker container, and does not include downloading Boinc for Windows / Mac / iOS / Android

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Would love to throw my mining machines at the team but need a "good/easy" way to get them up and running and have not had the time to research the best way to do that.  If anyone is using there mining machine in such a fashion and can point me in the correct direction that would be much appreciated.

 

EDIT: Never mind, it appears the minig software I run has added support so it is just a matter of me taking the time to get that up and running.

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The folding @ home app referenced by the blog post

 

image.png.fd04c8b9ac7205673403518e3bd66260.png

image.png.d6b87729d075d396b09e70878df4bd13.png

 

It went from averaging around 5,000 downloads per month to 167,076 downloads for the last 30 days!  Because of that huge increase, it is also the top app in both the top new installs and trending apps sections.   Once again, this is only this particular docker container, and does not include downloads for Windows / Mac / iOS / Android

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On 4/4/2020 at 3:49 AM, unevent said:

Just an FYI for those running BOINC with Snort/Suricata, apparently couple days ago a new rule was published that was blocking COVID-19 transfers with BOINC


ET INFO Suspicious GET Request with Possible COVID-19 URI M1 

I hadn't had any work on two machines in two days and the transfer queue was in continuous retry.  Seems there is some malware going around which is why that rule was created and propagated.  This particular case was directly tied to BOINC as the trigger so I have suppressed it and now back to crunching.  If you are out of work units and the transfer queue is full, something to look into depending on what monitoring you have on your network.

Thanks , I had this exact issue , and also couldn't access forums.unraid.net !

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  • 2 weeks later...

Since the stats for Boinc (the official docker container) / Folding@Home (container from mobiusnine) will come out for CA later this week, here is an update on the LinuxServer containers which are still too new to CA to have them generate any graphs

On 4/6/2020 at 11:36 AM, Squid said:

LinuxServer Boinc

 

Added to CA on March 18th.  At the time of it being added, there were 179 downloads.  Today (April 6) there are now 60,950 downloads

As of May 4th (4:36am EST), there are 161,170 total downloads

 

On 4/6/2020 at 11:36 AM, Squid said:

LinuxServer Folding@Home

 

Added to CA on March 20th.  At the time of it being added, there were 14 downloads.  Today (April 6) there are 134,884 downloads

As of May 4th (4:38am EST), there are 588,162 total downloads

 

 

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