Sunday, April 19th 2020
Folding@home Client Update Includes Option to Prioritise COVID-19 Projects
In response to popular demand, we have created an update to the Folding@home software that allows you to prioritize COVID-19 projects. We encourage you to upgrade as the new software includes important bug fixes and security updates. Downloads are available here. Please also join me in thanking the Center for the Science and Engineering of Living Systems (CSELS) at Washington University in St. Louis for funding the development of this software update.
Our top priority for this release was to add the COVID-19 option as quickly as possible. We also took the opportunity to fix many of the issues raised by our volunteers, but did not address those that would have caused significant delays in the release of the new software. To better address important bugs in the future, we've organized a team of volunteer developers who are sorting through and prioritizing our issue tracker on GitHub. They are already making huge strides.
Looking towards the future, we are also working on a new Open-Source Folding@home software. This new software will improve the performance of Folding@home and make it easier to get the community involved in its development. By tapping into the massive amount of technical talent available in the Folding@home community, we believe we can produce better software with a more engaging and productive user experience and update that software more often. More information about the availability of this new software will soon be announced on this blog.
The TechPowerup! team is currently ranked #29 with 618 active Folders. If you want to donate some spare cycles you can download the client over at the Folding@Home web page and download the installer for your client. When setting up the client make sure to enter your TeamID as 50711 to help us rise the ladder to world domination. This is an easy way to contribute to the largest computational medical cure research project ever completing vital research on COVID-19 and various other diseases.
Source:
Folding@home
Our top priority for this release was to add the COVID-19 option as quickly as possible. We also took the opportunity to fix many of the issues raised by our volunteers, but did not address those that would have caused significant delays in the release of the new software. To better address important bugs in the future, we've organized a team of volunteer developers who are sorting through and prioritizing our issue tracker on GitHub. They are already making huge strides.
The TechPowerup! team is currently ranked #29 with 618 active Folders. If you want to donate some spare cycles you can download the client over at the Folding@Home web page and download the installer for your client. When setting up the client make sure to enter your TeamID as 50711 to help us rise the ladder to world domination. This is an easy way to contribute to the largest computational medical cure research project ever completing vital research on COVID-19 and various other diseases.
5 Comments on Folding@home Client Update Includes Option to Prioritise COVID-19 Projects
It'll be interesting to see how far they'll get with the open source F@H client too. Looks like all of this heightened attention is proving fruitful for the project overall.
I wasnt able to find the answer, and seen few question on their twitter, how the actual data/discoveries coming from F@H are handled and who owns them. I would hope they are "open source" and somehow it should be prevented to be patented but I assume its far from reality.
My gripe is that in the end some lab may just rush with patent for cure/vaccine and hike the prices (because thats capitalism right? and we dont already have overly expensive medicaments...btw shows why patents sucks imo) leaving all the people that contributed with all the data processing to be milked.
Another worrying factor is that they are US based (and i hope it wont be the US lab that come up with the cure) and so their mr tool-in-chief may just ban export and play some stupid political/ego/twitter game (you never know what idea can come out of sick mind) preventing export of cure or put some tariffs to milk other countries etc. He already tried to buy out that German lab (the one that come up with tests i think) and lock out everyone else, luckily it was prevented...
I guess our best hope is that either some EU lab or something like Korea/Japan come up with cure first. But either way, given the global impact and all the international effort finding cure, once discovered it should go into public domain, so everyone everywhere can just start manufacturing it as needed.
From history, with Polio vaccine it worked well when Salk chose not to patent it.