Why are they not appealing to the major cloud providers at this time to use any spare resources couldn't they set it up so that the cloud providers could count using resources as donation to a charity?

Gotta say the instructions are pretty awfully lacking. You go to the download page and you download the client and there's nothing that tells you what you're supposed to do after you download the client.

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 and after downloading the client I had to do:

    $ sudo update-rc.d FAHClient defaults
    $ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb
    $ sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient start

I edited /etc/fahclient/config.xml so that gpu v = 'true', but It doesn't seem to be using the NVIDIA GPU after restarting the client. Any hints?

Has FAH approach solved any other real world problems? Has its findings accelerated understanding of any particular disease or helped significantly in developing a cure?

I wish that Folding@Home was on BOINC. It has an awful interface/uses a local webserver to control it. I'm glad they're doing something, but they should make the experience more user friendly, I usually stop out of frustration with starting/stopping.

A friend tried this in the last week and was frustrated that there seemed to be no way to limit CPU/GPU use to only work relaed to Covid.

Is there a way to limit work to Covid?

wow their UX is atrocious.

* Download page doesn't explain why there are 3 packages and which you need

* On installing first & clicking next it pins all CPU cores to 100%

* The package that presumably controls this silently fails to install - on a brand new up to date ubuntu install.

...so now I'm stuck with a service pinning everything to 100% (while in use) and no way to control it. Uninstalled.

I'll stick to BOINC.

(edit: tried the terminal route - seems to fail because of python-gnome2 dependency). You'd think they'd get their stuff to work with Ubuntu...it's at a mere 50% of nix marketshare.

Next scam: cryptomining app that pretends to help finding a virus cure.

Go to the apple store and set up the mac pro in each store to fold.

Saw that on Heise (German IT magazine) a few days ago. Setup on Arch Linux is really simple (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home), but with our electricity costs over here it's more expensive than what I'm willing to contribute - my CPU compute node [2*2687W] at home draws 500W on FAH, which translates to 112US$ per month (80W idle, but it's mostly powered down anyway). Else this & BOINC would be a really nice way to utilize my unused hardware.

Maybe they should reconsider the integration with BOINC. That would give them access to one of the largest distributed clusters.

So how is using home electronics an efficient use of electricity (and money) for doing these tasks? What are the economics of this? Wouldn't it be more efficient to donate the money you'd spend on electricity and equipment?

There used to be a FoldingAtHome application for the Playstation 3 that I ran for a while. It's a shame it never made its way to other consoles because they're properly underutilised during the day, for me at least.

This is wonderful and gives people a constructive way forward instead of feeling useless.

Does bring hope that after this they could tackle other uncured viral infections like herpes for example.

This website does an absolutely terrible job of explaining itself. The layout of the homepage is awful and starts with a random video, then a request that I start "folding at home" - whatever that means, followed by more nonsense language to anyone who, like me, arrived at the site with very little context.

The first thing on your site (after the navbar) should be an explanation of what your product is/does in as few words as possible.

CORONAVIRUS – WHAT WE’RE DOING AND HOW YOU CAN HELP IN SIMPLE TERMS https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-d...

Yesterday I was looking for that, there is also fold.it users create their own proteins [0][1], those proteins passed to researches for validation or maybe they still validate through rosetta, even some users automate protein generation via lua scripts. Yesterday I wanted to check/contribute source code but its closed:( [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvlNo3nMfw

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit

[2] https://fold.it/portal/node/986352

If this was a war effort we’d probably get Microsoft to push out a patch to windows 10 to let users opt into it securely? Or does the computing power of 100M+ home PCs still pale in comparison to a few cloud providers?

What guarantees do we have that some for-profit pharma corporation will not take the information discovered by this, patent it and profit at our expense? As it is, the public already funds most of the early research into drugs and yet almost all the resulting IP ends up owned by big-pharma.

Previous link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473937

I doubt that this is going to help much, if you could fold your way to a virus cure, surely we would have seen cures for a bunch of other common viruses.

Why not use smartphones these days?

Just plug your iPhone in at night, and the app will run in the background, when it detects user inactivity.

sounds like a great new idea for phone scammers; try to con people into downloading their covid research project.

This makes no sense to me that they do not have a windows version ... Majority of PCs in the net are windows based ...