There was a recent HN discussion on whether this kind of approach has ever produced an effective treatment for anything. I believe the answer was Never, but lots of papers have been published.
Assuming that's the case, I don't put much stock in this giving us a means of fighting the pandemic.
Well science goes frutstratingly slowly, especially in these fields. According to wikipedia the project has helped in 118 papers.
The idea of the single scientist singlehandedly solving everything is mostly a myth. Most of the time, people rely on hundreds of previous papers before making their own contribution. Taken together, all the minimal steps make a significant leap.
Folding@home can very well be part of this effort.
No, its unlikely to help produce an effective treatment, at least not in a useful timeframe.
If you're considering spending a dollar or two a day on electricity to contribute to the F@H project, consider donating that amount instead. Charity Navigator has a good list of well regarded charities that are working on covid-19 response: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...
That's science though. You have to just try and learn as much as you can, from as many different directions as possible, because we have no idea which approach will lead to useful discoveries until it does.
This is a rather cynical take. It's hard to know the results of basic research on future therapies. Is it likely that this one project is going to find the smoking gun cure when there's hundreds of teams around the world trying all sorts of alternative approaches for medication and vaccines? No. But is this contributing to the sum of human knowledge about the virus? Yes.
I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something.
Edit: I’d be glad to be proven wrong with a link to an FAQ or some part of the docs.
If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like:
CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':
libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
directory
Take that missing library over to the Ubuntu Package Search[0] and it will lead you to ocl-icd-opencl-dev
apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev
Restart fahclient and you should see something like:
This doesn't fix the problem, since ocl-icd* and nvidia-libopencl* provide libOpenCL.so.1 and FAHClient looks for libOpenCL.so, so you need to add a symlink, in the same directory.
I think I got it to work by editing the config file at /etc/fahclient/config.xml and adding: <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>, then restarting the client. Took me some googling and trial and error though, so I agree this should be made clearer.
I followed every instruction to configure ROCM and OpenCL in Ubuntu 18 with my Vega 56 card. All the samples and such work but Folding@Home refuses to believe its there. It might be nice if someone at FAH actually tried using it on Linux.
Thanks, I've tried again after reading your reply and, indeed, it managed to pick up a GPU job rather quickly. I did disable the CPU slot, don't know if it's a coincidence but a couple days ago when I tried this first it spent several hours only running CPU work w/o any GPU.
So is someone sitting there, monitoring the results of this C19 folding operation as they come in and then when they see exactly the right result they shout eureka! and dance around the room? Then they shout "Get this to the lab, stat!" After which the lab starts churning out thousands of vials of antidote and everyone gets cured?
Responded cheekily with this link in a reply chain but wanted to bubble it up... you can earn a form of cryptocurrency from folding work units: https://curecoin.net/
Edit: it's run out of Washington University (St. Louis School of Medicine) so it's definitely neither a firm nor viral. Mods should change the title.