Help find a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff

I loaded WCG on my new laptop a couple of days ago. Next month’s point total gonna be through the roof!!!

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The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
(We don’t need no water, let the cancer disease burn)

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Burn cancer fluffer , burn!!!

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Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:

Member Name           Points    Monthly
                   Generated     Change
mbplatt          258,853,930  5,482,081
KlaymenAO        226,938,869  7,358,755
1695814           95,323,012    722,350
Wannabe Actuary   78,910,813    741,309
Macroman          64,062,591    344,523
SpaceLobster      16,896,422    765,290
Breadmaker        12,450,875    155,514
meepbobeep        12,142,341    104,937
GoA_Kenny          1,925,891    145,277

Statistics last updated: 7/31/24 23:59:59 (UTC) [4 hour(s) ago]

Available WCG Projects:
OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Africa Rainfall Project
Mapping Cancer Markers
Smash Childhood Cancer
Help Stop TB

WCG discussion forums can be found here .

Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:

                        Monthly
Name            Credit   Change
1695814     38,657,534  952,866
GoA_Kenny    8,838,795  412,849
Breadmaker   5,051,989         

Looks like Breadmaker forgot to put his buns in the oven.

Typical Folding@Home Projects

COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads

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I may not have installed FAH properly on my new laptop; I will reinstall it. :roll_eyes:

ETA: Deleted and reinstalled - and it’s running!!! :+1:

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I had v8, which I wasn’t sure was even running. It’s been uninstalled and I went with v7 instead.

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You should’ve had a V7. :hsmack:

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FAH is making my laptop run kinda hot even when I have it in Light mode. :confused:

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Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:

Member Name           Points    Monthly
                   Generated     Change
mbplatt          264,040,718  5,186,788
KlaymenAO        233,872,000  6,933,131
1695814           95,653,949    330,937
Wannabe Actuary   79,677,462    766,649
Macroman          64,454,236    391,645
SpaceLobster      17,276,032    379,610
Breadmaker        12,611,621    160,746
meepbobeep        12,317,425    175,084
GoA_Kenny          2,103,275    177,384

Statistics last updated: 8/30/24 23:59:59 (UTC) [19 hour(s) ago]

Available WCG Projects:
OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Africa Rainfall Project
Mapping Cancer Markers
Smash Childhood Cancer
Help Stop TB

WCG discussion forums can be found here .

Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:

                        Monthly
Name            Credit   Change
1695814     39,403,089  745,555
GoA_Kenny    9,292,878  454,083
Breadmaker   5,060,459    8,470

Typical Folding@Home Projects

COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads

Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:

Member Name           Points    Monthly
                   Generated     Change
mbplatt          267,479,783  3,439,065
KlaymenAO        240,600,011  6,728,011
1695814           95,873,576    219,627
Wannabe Actuary   80,275,484    598,022
Macroman          64,887,296    433,060
SpaceLobster      17,276,032           
Breadmaker        12,780,534    168,913
meepbobeep        12,445,104    127,679
GoA_Kenny          2,213,414    110,139

Statistics last updated: 9/29/24 23:59:59 (UTC) [24 hour(s) ago]

Available WCG Projects:
OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Africa Rainfall Project
Mapping Cancer Markers
Smash Childhood Cancer
Help Stop TB

WCG discussion forums can be found here .

Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:

                        Monthly
Name            Credit   Change
1695814     40,198,058  794,969
GoA_Kenny    9,688,348  395,470
Breadmaker   5,068,054    7,595

Typical Folding@Home Projects

COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads

1 Like

Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:

Member Name           Points    Monthly
                   Generated     Change
mbplatt          271,972,555  4,492,772
KlaymenAO        246,986,852  6,386,841
1695814           96,554,884    681,308
Wannabe Actuary   80,837,970    562,486
Macroman          65,395,921    508,625
SpaceLobster      17,276,032           
Breadmaker        12,921,301    140,767
meepbobeep        12,578,253    133,149
GoA_Kenny          2,277,509     64,095

Statistics last updated: 10/31/24 23:59:59 (UTC) [1 hour(s) ago]

Available WCG Projects:
OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Africa Rainfall Project
Mapping Cancer Markers
Smash Childhood Cancer
Help Stop TB

WCG discussion forums can be found here .

Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:

                        Monthly
Name            Credit   Change
1695814     40,955,160  757,102
GoA_Kenny    9,941,170  252,822
Breadmaker   5,096,902   28,848

Typical Folding@Home Projects

COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads

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In other news…it’s going to start raining in Africa soon…

text & pics

ARP restart update

The ARP project will be restarting by Monday November 4, following the technical pause it entered in December 2022.


Project: Africa Rainfall Project

Published on: 31 Oct 2024


Background

The Africa Rainfall Project (ARP) aims to simulate rainstorms in sub-Saharan Africa to improve regional weather forecasts. The goal is to run a weather simulation at a high resolution (1 km) for the whole region for a period of one year. Providing accurate weather predictions is crucial for self-sufficiency of the local farming community. By comparing results obtained through computing rainfall data from various sources using the World Community Grid, scientists can create increasingly more accurate forecasts, improve future simulations and in turn weather predictions.

In December 2022, the project was put on technical pause due to capacity limitations of their storage system, hosted within the national HPC setup in the Netherlands. To read more about the details of this storage limitation, and the detailed steps needed to restart the project, please see our previous April update.

ARP Restart Update

Previously, the ARP team hosted on their servers at TU Delft all scripts, data, and compiled applications required to prepare the inputs for new workunits. The ARP team would make those new inputs available to us for download, so that we could prepare the next generation of workunits and index them in BOINC. The output of completed workunits sent to us by volunteers, and then from us to TU Delft, were necessary but not sufficient to prepare the next generation of workunits. A series of preprocessing steps that reference the original meteorological data and surface temperature data must be run, and this is the pipeline that is now hosted on WCG servers in order to restart ARP1 after the ARP team kindly provided all scripting code and data, as well as helpful documentation. As a result, WCG is now in a better position to work with weather modeling scientific teams in the future. We have been also discussing a possible extension to a GPU version of WRF software with our lead scientific expert Lloyd A Treinish.

Each sub-problem of the ARP1 project sent to volunteers as a workunit, is differentiated from other sub-problems by location, and by time. Each workunit simulates the weather within a sub-region called a domain, and there are 35,609 overlapping domains totalling the sub-saharan region for which we are simulating the weather with NCAR’s Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) application. Each of these domains, in order to complete in a reasonable time on volunteers’ devices, simulates the weather in “generations” which are simply 48h increments, labelled from 000 to 183, that total to a year of weather simulation for the region.

Because the output of the previous generation is used as input for the next generation, the frontier must eventually synchronize across all domains for the overall computation to progress. Some domains can lag behind, and some clusters of domains that are far enough away from each other can generate some of the next generations’ inputs without waiting for their distant neighbours to catch up. In the past we have lost the wisdom of a previous generation, but restarting the simulation from the initial conditions or a checkpoint is possible and we would typically assign a higher priority to those workunits in BOINC until caught up.

Figure 1. Progress on Weather Forecast Simulation for each sub-region of sub-Saharan Africa. The start date of the one year simulation is 2018-07-01 and will end when calculating data for 2019-06-30.

We are now able to use the results we had been accumulating during the storage transition at TU Delft and begin generating the inputs to the next generation of ARP1 workunits again. In most cases, we will be able to pick up where we had left off at the leading generation (the bulk of which being between 130 and 140) and over time, due to the scripts being fully automated now, we will be able to prepare a steady stream of ARP1 workunits.

Thanks to the ARP team for their continued partnership with the WCG. Thank you to all the volunteers who helped process the first phase of the project, and thank you in advance to all those that will help us bring the ARP project to a successful finish.

WCG Team

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World Community Grid

Dr Kosciolek highlights the Microbiome Immunity Project, which predicted over 200,000 protein structures before AlphaFold, using WCG’s volunteer-powered computational network. The predictions, validated against AlphaFold, have led to significant scientific contributions, including publications on protein structure and microbiome research. He emphasizes the importance of WCG in advancing understanding of the microbiome’s impact on health and immunity. Dr Kosciolek thanks WCG volunteers for their vital role in supporting this research.

tl;dw: one paper published; one in the works.

I’ll post the monthly update on WCG points when I can log in to WCG.

image

I’ll post the update on F@H points when I can log in to WCG. :man_shrugging:

IMPORTANT: There will be an extended WCG downtime from December 7th, 2024 to January 3rd, 2025.

We have determined it is not feasible to migrate the BOINC infrastructure to another site during downtime, and we are still waiting to hear back from UHN personnel who manage our DNS records to see when we can switch the website and forums over to the alternate site.

As users pointed out in the forums, it did not really make sense to start pushing new ARP1 workunits given the imminent downtime, and we stopped producing new MCM1 workunits today to hopefully give the bulk of outstanding workunits a chance to be uploaded. When we power down, after all traffic to the upload servers is stopped, deadlines for outstanding workunits will be extended to cover the downtime.

With the improvements to the cloud environment, we have been informed that the issue with the network agents in our cloud environment causing the website and forums database instance to become inaccessible on the network until hosting intervenes (cause of this past weekend’s outage and many previous outages), will be fixed.

To keep up to date on any issue, please check Jurisica Lab - WCG

That reminds me…

…here’s a delayed update:

Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:

Member Name           Points     Monthly
                   Generated      Change
mbplatt          276,247,846   8,768,063
KlaymenAO        251,758,347  11,158,336
1695814           97,011,325   1,137,749
Wannabe Actuary   81,575,060   1,299,576
Macroman          65,776,343     889,047
SpaceLobster      17,276,032            
Breadmaker        13,103,550     323,016
meepbobeep        12,744,201     299,097
GoA_Kenny          2,358,489     145,075

Statistics last updated: ??/??/?? ??:??:?? (UTC) [? hour(s) ago]

Available WCG Projects:
OpenPandemics - COVID-19
Africa Rainfall Project
Mapping Cancer Markers
Smash Childhood Cancer
Help Stop TB

WCG discussion forums can be found here .

Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:

                          Monthly
Name            Credit     Change
1695814     42,175,971  1,977,913
GoA_Kenny   10,247,503    559,155
Breadmaker   5,115,360     47,306

Typical Folding@Home Projects

COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads

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Updates, In backwards order:

December 9, 2024

  • We are working with the backups of the BOINC and website/forums databases offsite to prepare the Mapping Arthritis Markers project for the launch in January.
  • While we have the opportunity, we will look into optimizing the MCM1 and MAM1 applications. One example, we will create an encoding for the fields in the MCM1 configuration file and further compress the already tiny configuration file for MCM1, rather than send it in plain text as before. This update will also be used to streamline the configuration file across individual projects.
  • We are also exploring the potential for a GPU version of MCM1 and MAM1 projects, and future applications for searching for biomarker signatures.
  • We are working on tiered caching across the download servers where workunits that have been loaded into BOINC recently will trigger a write of the input files to a distributed in-memory cache, backed up by the local disk of the download servers.
  • For ARP1 project, we will be merging all file downloads into a single archive. Previously, even the individual files were getting transient HTTP errors/interruptions frequently and had to wait in queue. We did fix that bug before we went down. This should resolve the bug that was interrupting larger downloads and uploads multiple times, and we are also exploring other optimizations that should improve workunit distribution.
  • Hopefully, these changes will result in a more efficient file transfers, less I/O pressure on NFS and the storage server, and therefore more throughput under load, which we will need as we look to GPU-enable these and future applications on the grid.

December 6, 2024

  • We are making final preparations to power down. Before powering off all VMs and the storage servers, we will kill all traffic at the load balancer so we can allow the filesystems and databases to settle before taking a final backup.
  • When we kill traffic at the load balancer overnight on Dec. 6, there will be no access to the website, forums, BOINC scheduler, BOINC uploads, or BOINC downloads.
  • We have transferred database backups for BOINC and the website/forums, as well as all source code offsite. We will be transferring the final backups overnight as well.
  • Today (Dec 6), we have been taking snapshots of all production VMs and sometime this evening we should have all instances that make up our backend infrastructure backed up as snapshots, ready to deploy from resilient storage if there are any issues powering up our instances when we are back online in January.
  • We will be working on the new project (Mapping Arthritis Markers), long-standing issues with device synchronization between the website and BOINC databases, server status page, real-time stats API, and a new look for the forums as well as new badges during the downtime. We look forward to sharing the results of the data center refresh with you in the New Year - thank you for your support and happy holidays!

December 4, 2024

  • The WCG shutdown date has been moved up from December 9th, 2024 to December 7th, 2024. We were informed by email on November 21st, to shutdown by December 9th because there would be no cooling by that date. Hosting earlier this week asked us to bump the date up to the 7th.
  • We have determined it is not feasible to migrate the BOINC infrastructure to another site during downtime, and we are still waiting to hear back from UHN personnel who manage our DNS records to see when we can switch the website and forums over to the alternate site. If we do hear back, this will take place between now and December 6th, 2024.
  • As users pointed out in the forums, it did not really make sense to start pushing new ARP1 workunits given the imminent downtime, and we will stop producing new MCM1 workunits tomorrow to hopefully give the bulk of outstanding workunits a chance to be uploaded. When we power down, after all traffic to the upload servers is stopped, deadlines for outstanding workunits will be extended to cover the downtime.
  • With the improvements to the cloud environment, we have been informed that the issue with the network agents in our cloud environment causing the website and forums database instance to become inaccessible on the network until hosting intervenes (cause of this past weekend’s outage and many previous outages), will be fixed.

November 26, 2024

  • IMPORTANT: We have been notified of an extended downtime at SHARCNET facility for construction lasting from December 9th, 2024 to January 3rd, 2025. There will be no power and no cooling during this time. We are exploring temporary migration to another site. We will provide an update on what downtime if any can be expected to start on December 9th, 2024. Overall, this upgrade should provide further improvements to the WCG capacity.
  • Bandwidth has been improved thanks to hosting staff at SHARCNET. In addition, we have more and better hardware devoted to handling downloads and uploads, and a more competent load balancer.
  • ARP1 will resume in limited quantities over the next few days. We will make an effort to focus on extremes as suggested in the forums and test the imposed rate limits on workunit production as well as total bandwidth of all clients and number of connections per client for ARP1 file transfer specifically.
  • Forums were down earlier today for an extended period, they are back up now and we apologize for the slow response.