Ham Talk Live! Episode 209 - How Hams Can Help COVID-19 Research

Two guests will be on Ham Talk Live! this week (4/23) to talk about two different ways hams can help with research to fight COVID-19. Dr. Scott Wright, K0MD, will be here to talk about how plasma donations can help with a project he is overseeing at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Then, Sam Rose, KC2LRC, will be here to talk about Folding@Home, a way to help researchers make virtual molecular models of proteins to better understand diseases. Folding@Home has shifted all their distributive computing resources to COVID-19 research. Learn how you can install a simple program on your computer(s) to donate use of the processors in the background to help find a cure.

Tune into Ham Talk Live! Thursday night at 9 pm EDT (Friday 0100Z) by going to hamtalklive.com. When the audio player indicates LIVE, just hit the play button!

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Help find a CURE?? Not just a treatment...? Good luck with the ever growing mutational forms of COVID-19. There is no scientific basis to assert that Folding@home will find a 'cure'.

There are now hundreds of groups worldwide that are doing the 'optimization' problems that 'Folding' seeks to do. Google, in particular, is doing an amazing job. They have value, but none claims a 'cure' to my knowledge.

The main CON to distributed-via internet activities is the huge use of power across many,many thousands of computers. This is simply NOT 'free'. And frankly, users NEED to be assessed on the power useage (that is, 'cost') per month by the SYSTEM, not just THEIR laptop (for example).

To power all those 'in the background at night' computations....How many barrels of oil? How much CO2 generated? How many trainloads of coal?

Keenly, we need to know what 'Folding @HOME' plans, or is doing, that is either unique in its approach, or is only duplicated in effort less than a handful of times by the many, many, other efforts across the globe. Replication is good, but too much is a waste.

If you want me-- a generic user-- to 'feel good' (and maybe even donate money) about Folding@home, then tell me its value versus its cost (see above) .

And PLEASE don't make claims about a CURE. There is NO reason to believe that will be the outcome.

73
Chip W1YW

 

Cool. something to run while WSPR is going.

 

As some of us live off hydro-electric power, I would not endorsing all the sentiments of W1YW. However, I would mention that due to efficiency considerations, Folding@Home is not an activity for everyone. The biggest benefit for Folding@Home is volunteers with high-performance PCs, especially the graphics card. What does high-performance mean? There's an old meme in the PC enthusiast community - "But can it run Crysis?", which means "Is it the best possible hardware?" This should be the mindset of would be Folding@Home volunteers.

Details of what Folding@Home does:
https://foldingathome.org/covid19/
https://foldingathome.org/diseases/

My EOC F@H stats:

 

Folding@home does not do 'cures'. It does not SUGGEST 'cures'. It does not TEST 'cures'.

That is the main issue: LOOK AT THE OP of this THREAD...."help find a cure."

It in no way produces C-U-R-E-S.

AT best, it 'suggests', by analogy , and when it works, how your golf ball is wound up by elastic. It will not predict the best golf ball you can make from elastic, nor how far it will fly.

AND let's get real: the percent of 'citizen scientists' running Folding@home 'off grid' is... 1%? less than 1 %? 1/10 of 1%?

Any way you spin it , it still is a huge aggregate user of energy, and not a direct path to ANY cure.

 

Here's what happens when unsubstantiated 'cures' for Corona are promulgated....

From the lead story on CNN--

"According to a federal criminal complaint filed Thursday and obtained by CNN, the FBI launched an undercover operation and made contact with the doctor in early April after receiving a tip from the public indicating Staley was attempting to sell "Covid-19 Treatment Packs" to the public.

In an advertising email message reviewed by the FBI, Staley's purported medical package included dosages of hydroxychloroquine, antibacterial drug Azithromycin, antianxiety treatments, intravenous drips, and the use of a medical hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Staley offered to sell the items as a family pack for $3,995, according to the criminal complaint.

During the recorded phone call with an FBI agent posing as a customer, Staley indicated the drug hydroxychloroquine "cures the disease" associated with coronavirus, according to the complaint."

 

My apologies. Treatment. I shouldn't have used the vernacular.

 

Ahem.

 

I live in a part of the world where power primarily comes from hydroelectric sources, so no off-grid generation involved. (However, I am 100% solar power for Field Day.) Apparently 16% of the planet is powered from hydroelectric sources (Worldbank), so more than the 0.1 - 1% that you suggest.

Not quite sure the source of your vehemence regarding this topic. Folding@Home is not claiming to have any curative product for sale. To quote from the Folding@Home COVID-19 page (my emphasis):

"Our specialty is in using computer simulations to understand proteins’ moving parts. Watching how the atoms in a protein move relative to one another is important because it captures valuable information that is inaccessible by any other means. Doing so can reveal new therapeutic opportunities. We are also collaborating with other labs and groups outside the Foldingathome Consortium to solve COVID-19 asap."​

If someone is not comfortable with the value proposition of these simulations, they have the freedom to not participate.

 

Watch yourself with that cough! It just might be ...?

Actually I agree with what W1YW has said so far. The Press is absolutely riddled with false claims of cure and treatment, all unfounded.

I seem to remember around yr 2000 there was something like this "distributive computing" (or more correctly, "distributed processing") for some other exercise that in that case required large scale number crunching, but that was back in the days when the average computer was a Pentium 4, and very powerful computers were RISC. Computers for analysing molecular structure and displaying 3D models have moved on a VERY long way since then!

I fear someone (or company) somewhere is looking for notoriety, and with something that is not actually needed because it's already well catered for (thanks mainly to the intense research into the AIDS virus - it's interesting how computer technology advances to keep up with its requirements!).

 

The power source argument is fatuous--use that hydro power to replace the wasted carbon fuel, don;t divert from it.

There is no vehemence. I am taking exception to espousing hope via an impractical path.

If I was intelligent enough to expatiate on the issues, you may assume I am intelligent enough to understand it is my 'privilege' to opt out.

I very much take issue with the assertion you quote from the website. The 'valuable information' is readily and most certainly accessible to the scientific community through OTHER ongoing optimization efforts . This isn't 100,000 citizen scientists all taking pictures of an eclipse for personal accomplishment. It is an effort with no REPORTED coordination with other like efforts --which most certainly and multiplicitously duplicate the approach and likely the algorithms used.

IOW, it is LIKELY a multiple duplication of what's already being done, on supercomputer systems that are far more time and energy efficient. So even if YOUR time is not valuable, the wasted power cost of tens of thousands of likely machines--real costs in money, and carbon, is just a waste. It serves no useful scientific purpose-- without coordination; without any unique value; without a not-overly replicative approach .

SETI@home, a prior project of the same bent, is an alarming example of hundreds of millions of power dollars, spent over the course of over 18+ years, with no scientific value to show for it.

None.

Period.

The key issue, unnamed here or elsewhere, is the timeline. The world needs therapies and prophylactic solutions in weeks time, not years. That means go with what you have 'in the can', using what you have in novel ways. There are plenty of anti viral, immune building, and antinflammatory tools that are most certainly going to produce an impactful solution, but hardly a cure.

By analogy, we can live with the flu, we just can't afford to die from it.

73
Chip W1YW

 

"When you go to war, you don't get to go with what you want. You have to go with what you have."--Donald Rumsfeld (former Secretary of Defense)

 

Please consider the topic of this post was to communicate how folks can donate computer time (and the associated electricity), to potentially help the world understand more about COVID-19.

Regarding SETI@home, a negative result is still a result. Whether this result was worth the cost is subjective.

Unlike SETI@home, Folding@Home has a track record of producing useful data. Their COVID-19 coordination currently appears to include the following and the data is open for anyone to use:

• Chodera Lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• Huang Research Group at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  
• Pande Lab at Stanford University
  
• Voelz Lab at Temple University
• Washington University in St. Louis
  
• Diamond Light Source (an X-ray crystallography group in the U.K.)

Other COVID-19 molecular simulations appear to be going on with:

• COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium - Various ongoing projects, many not related to chemistry. (Doesn't seem like the generated data will be open to all to use.)
  
  • "Conformational free energy landscapes of SARS coronavirus spike glycoproteins" looks like the only overlap with one of the Folding@Home COVID-19 projects
• Exscalate4CoV EU initiative - drug design project
  
• Rosetta@Home - University of Washington - Similar projects to Folding@Home

Be cautious with your expectations about relative efficiency. Folding@Home users are not consuming megawatts of electricity running redundant air-conditioning, redundant uninterruptible power supplies, redundant power supplies, redundant networking, redundant storage, etc. that are found in data centres. Intel processors found in desktops and servers have not seen significant improvements in efficiency in the last decade. While old computers, including supercomputers, may not be as fast as the newest technology, they generally don't consume as much power or create as much heat as the newer systems. (The current generation GPU in my PC is capable of about 50.5 GFLOPS per watt of power used. The Summit supercomputer, currently the worlds fastest, uses last-generation Tesla V100 GPUs that are about 49.66 GLOPS per watt of power used, and that is before adding all the infrastructure electrical consumption.) Per calculation, a supercomputer is likely not more efficient than a PC - it just gets bigger problems completed faster.

That therapies are needed now, does not diminish the reality that all the computational simulations may provide useful data for the mid to long-term fight with this disease.

 

No one cares about Folding's 'track record': It has no track record in a competitive forum where many other science based teams are pursuing the same thing. Instead it cherry picks background tasks that few have interest directly.

The point is it has NO VALUE in arriving at a CURE for CORONA. That's not what it does.

As for a TREATMENT, its like starting your own trans continental freight service using all the cars that have no present duty cycle. We have Fedex. We have DHL. We have UPS. We have AMAZON. We have ESTES. We have YELLOW. We have ...you name it. We have many others. Another carrier is a waste.

It's a PROJECT, it's not a defined nor unique path to a Corona SOLUTION. It is needless duplication IMO. Any TREATMENT that COULD come out of 'folding' is already --most likely--arrived at by many other optimization Coronaprojects.

Do you think that the short list you gave is the only list for Corona? IMO--multiply by about 40: in PRC alone you likely have 100 teams working on just that. Personally, I am aware of at least 6 fractal based folding projects in PRC, as a retired editor for a scholarly journal. That was BEFORE Corona...

Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

IMO, FOR CORONA, 'folding' takes our blind ASPIRATION for science, and a need to CONTRIBUTE, and roles it into PROJECTITIS.

Dangling out a nebulous aspiration for knowledge will no longer be acceptable in a post-corona world.

The best WE can all do is help others on Corona by helping ourselves: don't get infected; do chores/communicate with/ for the 'sheltered in place'; buy an oximeter and learn how to use it so you know enough to STAY OUT of the ER/ICU unless you have have advancing COVID pneumonia.

(High density environments like cruise ships and nursing homes are special cases, with solutions not clear).

If you see you oxygen declining (while you have WALKING COVID pneumonia in earlier stages), then the treatment regimens (we are bound to see within a few weeks) are going to keep most Corona cases as outpatient and with flu-like recovery rates.

IOW the TREATMENT at earlier stages will take us out of this health care mess .

When that happens we will be tolerating Corona in an open for business economy.

First comes treatment regimens with vetted and successful track records, the process of which is happening as we speak, and whose outcomes will be apparent by early May.

 

I would also suggest, sitting further apart in the multiple user shack photo, and maybe perspex screens might do more good.