Folding Forum

If you don’t have computers to contribute or are feeling particularly generous, you can also make donations through Washington University in St. Louis. These funds are used for a number of purposes, including: 1) supporting our software engineering and server-side hardware (particularly important right now as we scale up rapidly!) and 2) buying compounds to test experimentally based on insight from our simulations.

#2 on, "the things you can do to help."

It sure seems to me that folding@home needs additional hardware to scale.

https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/co ... ple-terms/

Why I suggested contacting the Gates foundation, and using the Azure cloud to scale. Deep pockets, passionate about fighting pandemics, and ability to create great PR for the company Bill Gates founded.

Why cant twitter be used? Bill Gates actually did a TED talk about what is happening right now a few years ago. Im sure he would be super interested in helping FAH

This topic has an amazing amount of input:

- reach out to cloud providers for help, do you think AWS would love a press headline saying "AWS rejected storage for F@H project trying to tackle coronavirus"? Or google? Why the hell wouldn't they just give it out for free?
- tax deductible donations - why do I read about it only in this topic?
- can't make an app overnight. right, but can make an app? in 7 days? in 2 weeks?

And you know what, g2h with "donate here and stfu".

People don't have, in general, spare money in crisis to donate to snobs that are not willing to accept any other kind of help.

On another note - make it more visible what a "Work Unit" means.

Ok my computer computed something. OK I earned some "points". But what the hell was I actually checking? What result did I achieve? Where did this effort go?

Instant gratification is something you, as scientists, have to research and make sure you have in this platform to keep millions of people engaged. It's easy to "donate" computing power. We own devices, we own PCs, some people administer entire organizations or classrooms. You can have them all if you make this a bit more entertaining.

With that said, I am letting this go. Let me know if you need help. With anything that I can help with.

I think it would be trivial to get them to help here

https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/12 ... 6980643840

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/TheOptimist/coronavirus

I'm sure the team will look at all your ideas and see what is possible. I'm in no way related to the team but I'd like to thank you all for the effort you are putting in these posts. Keep on folding!

Why the reluctance to reach out for corporate sponsorship? Big cloud providers are always looking for ways to strut their stuff so this seems like a win for everyone? If no one has approached them I will. This is exactly what cloud is all about.

I appreciated being volunteer run but "no man is an island" and this is a worthy cause.

Thanks all for the feedback, advice, and, of course, compute power. We can use all the help we can get! We're picking up new skills as fast as possible. If you have skills/time to offer, please reach out to me by private message on the forum or twitter. By all means, if you see opportunities to take initiative, please take them. Some folks have made enormously valuable introductions to tech firms, for example. I'm prioritizing getting more work servers and work units up. If someone with some science background and writing skills wants to take a stab at updating wikipedia, that would be awesome! I'm recruiting all the scientists I can to help setup simulations.

Thanks for the update Greg, we appreciate it. Sounds like you're making some progress wading through the swamp.

gbowman wrote:By all means, if you see opportunities to take initiative, please take them. Some folks have made enormously valuable introductions to tech firms, for example. I'm prioritizing getting more work servers and work units up.

Good to have some clarity. Thank you!

gbowman wrote:By all means, if you see opportunities to take initiative, please take them. Some folks have made enormously valuable introductions to tech firms, for example.

I'm glad you're making an effort to appear engaged / offering opportunities here, I really am. But from experiences I've heard about from staff/board on other nonprofits... please be mindful this particular request can lead to a nasty pitfall.

No question, it's invaluable to have FV's (friendly volunteers) telling RFTFs (rich folks and tech folks) about this great project they know about called F@H - but it can open Pandora's box, if you don't make it very clear that FV's should never mistakenly give the impression they're asking on your behalf.

• "Okay, tell me more about it" leads to the RFTF realizing FV doesn't know the nuts and bolts... but since they think FV is your rep, they think F@H itself is a charlie-foxtrot in the making.
• "Really? Here's my contact information, I'm ready to write a fat check / commit a bunch of resources" leads to dead air if FV can't figure out the proper contact (or even someone who will listen). Even if "John Smith is the designated contact" is clearly posted on the 7th post of a forum thread every insider knows about, that doesn't mean FV will know where to find it.
• "Okay! Thanks to [unintentional misinformation], I'm ready to commit [resources]" might get your RFTF pissed off when they figure out how to contact the right person... only to find out [resources] wasn't what you needed at all. That is, if the real F@H rep doesn't openly treat them like a stupid noob because they keep pushing to give you something you don't want/need (since they're under the misimpression that they were asked for it).
• Etc. I've heard enough horror stories to bore you far more than I already have.

I have contacts in Amazon and Microsoft and some local data centres, I'll reach out. I may get no if they have their own crises but who knows.

Can we get an estimated compute capacity of FaH in TFlops now please.

I will also reach out to a few journalists keen for a good news story.

Just please tell me we can keep this thing fed though? Are work units hard to make?

Just tried writing to mr. Gates to ask for support.

If we can get an approximate user count / growth and approx computational capacity that would be amazing and would help with layman understanding and good news stories that the world is desperate for right now.

I was on the verge of starting a thread, when I spotted this. I would echo most, if not all, of what eosunknown (a canon camera user, perhaps) has said. I have come back to folding after a break. Boy, does it seem complicated to use now. I loaded it a couple of days ago on the laptop and other than (what I now find to be commonplace) 'looking to connect to something' problem taking a fair time to find whatever it was it needed to form a connection, all has seemed well on there.
However I have spent a couple of days getting anything to function on the desktop. On the FAH website it says on one page "Maximize Your Effort". Well, all my effort was spent trying to something to actually happen. Visiting the help files on the forum gave some clue what might be going on. Then I found it had timed out on 'Nvidia drivers'. I uninstalled, and reloaded, but still no success and fiddled and fiddled and fiddled. I have just come back to it thirty minutes or so ago, uninstalled (clicking uninstall data this time) and reinstalled. What do you think? Well straight on, in and working.....almost..... It has been looking for 20 minutes now for a connection. All the 'usual' errors have appeared in the log. I wonder how many would-be folders have just given up and gone back to playing frogger, or whatever the game of the day is these days.
Silicon Valley is only fifteen miles up the road. Is there no one there who could be charitable and sort the problems out?

Actually, I wouldn't rush things. This "hype" may die out in a few weeks just like hypes tend to do. By that time, if you took big money from a big sponsor, this sponsor would probably like to know what is going on and where it's money is at. If you took some cloud infrastructure, the sponsor may take it away as soon as covid has gone away or even earlier, so you will need to go back to square one. I feel like staying independent is important for a long term project like this, covid will not last forever, other research will stay.