Folding Forum

Hi,
I have been participating in FAH calculations for almost two months now and I'm actively trying to win new folders to the projects.
And, interestingly enough, the main obstacle in finding new ones, in my experience at least, is not the technical complexity of FAH but the lack of more thorough information from the project administrators on the Covid-19 projects. In general the people I talk to want to know:
How long the projects may go on - and I believe it is a legitimate concern as we haven't heard from any of the scientists how long the calculations may take. All of those who don't want to participate laugh in my face and tell me that the scientists are not saying how long, cause they know that even with that huge 2,5 Exaflops it is going to take years - well it would be great if I could contradict such statements.
How many Covid-19 projects there are and which are the most promising - I believe people would be more willing to join if they got more structured info in this area.

Do you think that some of the above issues could be addressed in the near future?

Folding@Home project as a whole has been going on for decades now.
COVID19 happened couple of months ago unexpectedly. None of the researchers were prepared for this. So everything they do is on the fly, trying to sync with other labs, and see what's what.
Majority of previous projects had months and months of planning and preparation before they were even started on FAH. So with those researchers new what they want from specific project they are preparing. With COVID, they had no time to prepare, so they are getting things to us as they go. On top of that they have their own projects which have deadlines to cater too.
COVID related work will keep coming until there is a vaccine and until all the info has been gathered about the structure of the virus and possible solutions to it. That might take months, years. Once (if) FAH eventually learns everything there is to know about COVID, that will be available to everyone who wants to work further on this (develop vaccines, etc), actually whatever mini projects related to COVID are completed, they are shared with other scientific institutions, who can prepare other methods to work on it.
Although we hope we can find a cure for the illnesses and viruses mentioned in front page, more realistic expectation should be, that we uncover a lot of information which paves way for further studies.
The main incentive for everyone to join now is that when all this is set and done, you will be able to tell everyone: Hey, I was part of the biggest scientific push to find solutions for this virus. I was part of Folding@Home project, and I wasn't sitting idle and hibernating while forced to stay indoors.

muziqaz wrote:Although we hope we can find a cure for the illnesses and viruses mentioned in front page, more realistic expectation should be, that we uncover a lot of information which paves way for further studies.

Exactly. I think with science you have to understand the fact that a big part of any discovery is the time spent not finding what you are looking for. It may not be useful to you right now, but someone else may find the published data very useful and at least you are trying to cover all the possible paths because you can only make an educated (pun intended) guess of your direction. Science is quite a lot about making these high-level educated guesses/assumptions and then testing if you got it right.

Welcome to the F@H Forum Tom_dev_Poland,

In addition to has been said, F@H is also contributing to the Moonshot project which is a global efforts among scientists to combat COVID-19 and this is time critical.
F@H Contribution: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/covid-moonshot
Moonshot Project: https://covid.postera.ai/covid

I've been folding for a little more than a decade and I've always wanted to see what my WUs had done for a percentage of an actual medicine. When a big company is behind a commercially made medicine, would it come from a FAH server farm?

When the work units became more available and the machine could fold all the time I've averaged about 40 WUs per day and only 1.5 million merit points daily (one GPU) and FAH takes several years to come to fruition..

The "chain" from FAH science knowledge generation to medicine/cure is extremely unlikely to be a clear/direct one - though I would like to see that happen someday, and maybe the current crisis may be one of the better chances of this happening

The papers written from the FAH science and the direct use of the data by "anyone/everyone" may well provide critical steers to many medicines/cures over time by shaping the depth and range of knowledge, from helping pharmaceutical researchers understand specific compounds today, all the way through to helping primary/elementary school children begin to get an understanding of the beautiful complexities of molecular sciences and get them excited about STEM subjects - they may be the ones who in future actually find "The Cure" for everything.

Any attribution of discovery to FAH is imho likely to be anecdotal at best ... but it is still making a difference whether attributed or not

There are several recent articles referenced from https://foldingathome.org/news/

andreassen51 wrote:I've been folding for a little more than a decade and I've always wanted to see what my WUs had done for a percentage of an actual medicine. When a big company is behind a commercially made medicine, would it come from a FAH server farm?.

The good news: All Folding@Home results are freely available to anyone to use, they are public domain. (It is worth mentioning that if you already run a large pharmaceutical company, it will be easier for you to use those results; you are not building from scratch)

The bad news: If you put items in the public domain, you cannot impose any rules on how they are used, nor on attribution. So while you are doing good, you may never know what good you are doing.

If F@H imposed some Copyleft license on our results, we might know more about how our results became products, it is also true fewer products might be made. I can live with not knowing, if that means more people get to live.