Folding@Home COVID-19 / Coronavirus

I decided to not contribute to fah for a while for the following reason:

My machine is not stable enough (have to clean the fans). Occupying all 8 cores and the gpu leads to a shutdown after 15 minutes. Of course that’s my fault, as I did not clean the fans since I configured the machine (in 2013) …

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I put the folding power to light as I fear to damage something if I let the processor continuously working at 100%.

I have three 8-thread 1-gpu towers working at full. One is an out of the box i7 Dell, one is a spare-parts i7-3770K, and the third a comparable spare-parts 8-thread xeon.
There are also couple of NUCs (small intel boxes I use for the entertainment center) going and my macs sometimes do cpu work units. They are all about 80 watt cpus, and I guess the gpus take about as much power, nothing newer than radeon 78xx class. The Dell is amazing, runs at full power 24/7 and you can barely hear it, owing to the great thermal solution inside. The only problem I had was a particular out-of-band windows update which occurred a couple weeks ago had the machine freezing randomly. Finally after a week of that nonsense another update came through and the os is back to normal. Phew! I thought it was having some thermal emergency, but it was just my buddy Gates. I kept the machine going thru the ordeal as the temps were nominal. My spare parts machines have the same processing oomph, but are louder and run at the borderline of the hot cpu throttle. Core temp gets to about 85°C where the Tcase specification is about 10 degrees cooler. Tjunction can go up to 125°C, so while 80-85°C brings up the little fire flames on SpeedFan, the cooling should keep it running as long as the ambient temp stays reasonable (It’s not always reasonable in California, but it is mostly mild). I can run the core sensor up to 90 before throttle, allowing the cpu to manage threading and load-balance to assist cooling and maintain an even temp among the cores. Thermal emergency shutdown happens at Tcore=100°C, leaving about 10 or 15°C before actual transistor junction meltdown. Currently our climate is in a short heat wave up to 33°C (90°F) and the systems seem to handle that just fine. It has gotten as hot as 53°C(127°F) here, and I have run the 3770K at 4.5GHz in super hot weather but with a liquid radiator. Currently on regular heat-pipe/silver-plated copper fins coolers, the best I can do is 3.9-4.2GHz turbo. I love the radiator but only when the machine is remote as the push-pull fans are super loud.
Cleanliness is very good for the systems, as dust is inevitable. Even the oddly-silent macpro cylinder needs to be opened and cleaned with compressed air every couple of months (when you notice the top of the machine has a “dust-stache”).

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Team 243401 PIXLS.US is on the cusp of breaking 2,000,000 points! Well done, folders.

FoldingAtHome-wus-certificate-243401 (3)

Once we hit the two million, let’s celebrate with some \huge \color{red}p\color{yellow}i\color{red}z\color{yellow}z\color{red}a\color{yellow}!

folded-pizza-300x239 #foldingathome #jointhefold

JOIN THE FOLD!

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And do not forget to post some pizza pictures from the celebration :yum:.

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Every good pizza deserves beer.

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2,000,000 Points Pizza Party

Canon 90D in 120fps mode.

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Entered the select club of visible contributors: now ranked @ 472,369! (a couple of days ago, I was just N/A)

The graphs tell the story:

I know the last reply was seven months ago, but the science is compelling/the future flows from the flap of a butterfly’s wing.

I just found out if you have an official passkey generated for your email address, you earn more points. The passkey is a 4 word hexadecimal (32B) number repeated, eg. aa11bb22cc33dd44aa11bb22cc33dd44. What I’ve done is taken this artist’s rendition from klick Health :


and used GIMP to overlay my passkey in two 4x4 arrays:

and printed a hardcopy for whenever I setup a new folding client.
passkeycard.xcf (2.2 MB)

Thanks for sharing.
So you have to reinstall the client? (In your case, clients, I believe)

You just need to add the passkey in the web client identity popup or FAHControl, and it will instantly adjust the points of the current WU you are folding. If you prefer to restart your FAHClient, you can add the passkey flag to your executive command --passkey abcd1234 or the /etc/fahcontrol/config.xml file.

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I am on world community grid since July 2020.

Also doing some SARS-CoV2 modeling.

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I’ve just found out about the team, so I’m switching. In the past year, I accumulated 42˙327˙815 points by submitting 739 WUs.

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Thanks for joining the fold! I have just replaced two tired OpenCL Radeons with a couple of CUDA Tesla K10 units. Seems much more efficient, although I had to rig up some turbo fans to blow through the fins as they are passively cooled.
Edit: nothing a bit of polyamide and aluminum tape can’t handle. :mechanical_arm:

Am I now the only one folding for pixls.us? Folding@home stats report

Yes. I disengaged my systems the day I recieved my second shot of that icy Moderna juice.

There are many people who’re still unvaccinated, and will remain that way for a while – and there are other research projects (cancers, Alzheimers etc.) that you can support.

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Not sure if folding at home is still useful now:

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Maybe the two (massive amounts of donated computing power from individuals and new algorithms) can be combined, and researchers will be able to model more molecules, or model larger molecules, or model more accurately.

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Since the RoseTTAFold code is open, maybe Folding@Home can use it in the future in place of their current algorithm.