Folding@Home vs. Coronavirus

Other Chit-Chat
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Now that we’ve lost or postponed three four six regionals and two district events to concerns surrounding the coronavirus, I’m confident in a few things:

  • We have computers
  • Some of us now have free time we didn’t expect
  • We’re ready to get this figured out and get back to robots.

If you have an itch to do something, you may want to consider that Folding@home is working on understanding the 2019 coronavirus, and it does so by using your spare computing cycles. They have Windows, macOS, and Linux versions, so just about any non-mobile device can run it.

Also, a longstanding team of FIRST people running the client (consider the team URL still says usfirst.org) is in the top 1000 of the 229k teams. So I guess it’s outreach too, if that’s your jam.

I’ll be spinning up the extra hardware I have on deck, and I hope you’ll consider it too.

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Got it going on my old desktop. I tried to get it going on a Chromebook I had lying around but it looks like it won’t be very much help. Still, I’ll probably try to get as many computers as I can working on this.

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Not that I’m discouraging anyone from running folding@home (I have in the past). But please be mindful of how much electricity your hardware is using. Depending on your situation, you might be better off donating $5 directly folding@home or the CDC so that they can run these same programs on efficient supercomputers. The alternative may possibly be tacking $10 onto your next electricity bill to do less efficient computation of the same kind of program.

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That’s a fair thing to evaluate. Folding (or any other distributed computing application like BOINC, which I also run on a lot of devices) does mean more electricity and heat. Since we’re still in winter here, I view the additional heat generated from my devices as a beneficial side effect. But the math may be very different for someone in summer.

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So, a desktop from 2012 was able to make it pretty high up on the leaderboards.

I know there’s people in FRC with way better hardware. To all of you, please try to beat my score. I know we can make a difference and actively do something about this. (Do take note of Caleb’s comment above though)

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Is it?

We could apply the same reasoning to FIRST in general.

Involving students in a distributive computing, citizen science project certainly has costs, but it also has clear benefits that outweigh the costs.

I know of at least one former student that is pursuing a career in computational astrophysics and that they have attributed their interest in this endeavor to a class project on black holes and astronomy in which we used BOINC for einstein@home

It was eye-opening - Inspirational even - that our class could contribute to real science through BOINC.

I’m also fairly confident that more waste heat was generated in that same interval of time by students on their phones and social media or Clash of Clans.

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Right, and FIRST backs up their efforts with studies on its effectiveness. I think distributed computing apps studying these viruses are in the same boat right now, but it’s fair to give this at least a dose of consideration (before proceeding onward to install and start crunching).

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I don’t know much about this, but think about how much computing power is sitting untapped while schools are closed and on break.

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I ultimately agree. It is definitely worth consideration. It is not very efficient, but the point is to inspire students.

There is certainly academic value in studying the thermodynamic costs of computing. When bitcoin was just getting off the ground my AP Physics C class built a computer specifically for mining and earned 0.41 bitcoins - when it was around pennies per bitcoin - and determined that we (ahem… the school district) lost money in the endeavor. I justified the experiment with our principal as a Thermodynamics lab - The Thermodynamic Cost of Computing.

Had we, however, not had our wallet in Ft. Gox or lost our password, It was an investment that would have paid off.

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