We could add TeraFLOPS of computing power to the BOINC platform developing a Coronavirus vaccine. But many people have trouble with installers. Let's release an updated standalone app for BOINC!
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We're in touch with the Folding@home team and hopeful they'll approve our release soon: https://portableapps.com/blogs/johnhaller/2020-03-14--folding-at-home-co...
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Folding@home is not the only project working against the current worldwide health crisis. Rosetta@home has already made contributions to help researchers in their efforts to fight the novel coronavirus that's causing this pandemic and I'm sure they could also use more compute power as they continue their work. I would very much like to see a BOINC client release on PortableApps.com so people can offer their help to the Rosetta@home project as well.
Also, while I know they're working on improving the situation, last I heard so many more people have recently started running the Folding@home client (since the start of these recent events) that the Folding@home project's servers have actually been having difficulty keeping up with them all. While I'm sure that this is just a temporary issue and will certainly be remedied shortly if it hasn't already, it can't hurt to give the PortableApps.com community a BOINC client for portable Rosetta@home contributions.
Also, BOINC is open source and I don't think you would need permission to distribute a PortableApps.com release.
Please post here this portable folding@home at least without approval, crisis times have approvals secondary priority.
Regardless of the reason, we are not going to post software illegally to this site.
PortableApps is quite right in taking that stance, coronavirus panic or not.
Use Portable Apps on both Flash Drive and HDD/SSD.
Posting my reply here too that i posted on other thread:
Please Mr T. Haller, it is no time for politics and please release working version if you have it as it is matter of life and death and formalities and approvals do not matter anymore.
Portable would be really a easier as official install version is quite a mess with data storage.
Word is on verge of catastrophe and quicker vaccine is found then less damage people get. I recommend promoting this app in front page until cure is found or at least crisis will be over somehow.
Good luck with setting bureaucracy more important than finding cure. Unbelievable. I try to contact others who could build both F@H and BOINC portable so it could provide easy fast access to lot of people.
The world will be here tomorrow, next week, next year and next decade.
The Corona Virus won't have the number of casualties the seasonal flu has each year for decades.
Vaccine won't be found with Folding@Home or BOINC.
It will be a commercial company with deep pockets and many talents to find it.
The seasonal flu resulted in 34,000 deaths in the US last year. COVID-19 is projected to cause 100,000 to 200,000 deaths this year. It was projected anywhere from 200,000 to 1.2 million before the lockdown measures were implemented in internal CDC documents. COVID-19 is crossing the 1,000 deaths per day in the US threshold today. Please don't spread the long-disproved misinformation that COVID-19 isn't as bad as/is no worse than the flu.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you T. Haller for releasing F@H now, sooner that i excepted. Thank you.
The numbers of deaths in the USA from Flu complications are ~60K in 2017-2018:
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/influenza-and-pneumonia-death-...
I don't want to get into a debate. Corona virus is a challenging situation for most western countries, no doubt about it.
My main idea in my post is while it is changing no one needs to do any drastic move like breaking any law or guidelines.
Regarding the Flu, of course I included the steps taking against it. For the USA to have 60,000 deaths form Corona it means it will have the death rates of Italy. Only fools make prophecies, but since the awareness to Corona is climbing, measures are getting better my estimation is it is unlikely to happen. Maybe it is a wish, I don't know.
I have a lot of knowledge in the area working in the field of Statistics, Estimation, etc... on stuff just like this.
My partner is also internal Doctor, so I have access to real data on the subject so please don't categorize people. It might be that you don't know enough about them to judge from distance :-).
Anyway, it is good you gave people the ability to use F@H.
The numbers you found were for 2017-18. The CDC estimates just over 34K for 2018-18, which is right in line with what John's indicated above.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
Gord is correct. It varies a bit by year due to the particular strain as well as how effective the flu vaccine is that year. The flu vaccine was only about 50-50 last season in the US yet it still helped keep the numbers lower than they would have been. Those 34,000 deaths were over the entire flu season, we're only scratching the surface of COVID so far.
I have multiple friends in medicine and helping with acquisition of PPE here in the US. They're terrified. My nurse friends say it's taking far longer to get people off oxygen than with previous coronavirus strains. I have an otherwise healthy friend in his 30s in ICU right now because they still can't get him off oxygen. In the US in the last 24 hours, we've entered the 1,000 deaths a day range. NYC's hospitals are severely strained, they're already requesting volunteers. We have 6 days of ventilators in the New York State stockpile at our current burn rate. We have body bags being loaded into refrigerated trucks today. And we're not hitting peak hospitalization for another couple weeks. This is something we have not seen in any of our lifetimes.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
We know about the challenge of the Covid19.
My wife is doing what you describe, not a friend, a wife. So?
I don't understand what is your argument or is one those cases you argue like in the case of 64 vs 32 and in the end you will delete my comments?
See my response to Gord above and see we have seen numbers which if we normalize to the current population of USA means we would have had more than 100,000 deaths from Flu. It happened in the 70's.
USA won't get into the 100,000 range with Covid19 unless it will do something really stupid.
But again, what was your argument?
Mine was the number of casualties form Covid19 won't make the world collapse, do you argue in the contrary?
My argument was in response to FCCX who showed some panick and urged you to publish something ignoring rights of others. Do you think Covid19 situation justifies that?
If not, what's your argument?
What's your claim, we should have panicked back then, in 2017-2018?
You know what, my claim is as following, no need to be panicked.
FCCX, It is far from the end of the world.
The number of casualties from Corona won't be more than a 3-5 years of the number of deaths from Flu.
Since the past 5 years hasn't collapsed the world Corona won't as well.
Hence no need to do extreme things such as ignoring rights of owners of IP etc...
Stay calm, stay home, stay safe.
Are we OK now?
This is like pure removing the context from the claim.
Moreover I wrote those are the numbers of 2018-2019, so I really don't know what's your claim.
I didn't claim Corona is like Flu, my claim is we have seen things like that before and the world hasn't collapsed.
Have a look at this image - https://i.imgur.com/JaChFQa.png.
Taken from American Journal for Public Health - Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality: United States, 1900–2004 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374803/).
See cases in the 70's which if are normalized to current population of USA means more than 100,000 deaths.
Since USA hasn't collapsed then, it won't now. I also don't think you will get even close to that number with Covid19 in 2020.
Now, what's your argument exactly?
You seem to have attempted to derail the argument above to your point of view downplaying Coronavirus. This isn't like the flu in the 70s. The internal CDC estimates of US deaths was between 200,000 and 1,200,000 if we did not take drastic shutdown and social distancing measures. As to this being no worse than 5 years of the flu, the difference here is the speed. Five years of flu deaths within a few month period is catastrophic. The hospitals can't handle it, so we wind up with even more deaths, many preventable due to lack of supplies, tests, and staff.
No one is saying the world will end. I'm not advocating stealing IP. Please refrain from continuing this discussion further.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
This thread isn't about Folding@home (by the way @JTH: Thank you very much for releasing Folding@home Portable) or about influenza or even about COVID-19, this is a request for BOINC Portable, so...
@JTH: Are you working on a BOINC Portable release for people to contribute to Rosetta@home?
There is definitely some merit in having both BOINC and Folding@home.
From a quick bit of research I did a few days ago it seems Folding@home is primarily GPU-based, whereas BOINC has a larger share of projects that are CPU-only.
So Folding@home is preferable for the higher end machines, BOINC for the lower end machines.
While both Folding@home and BOINC can issue work units for both CPUs and GPUs, Folding@home tends to issue more GPU optimized work units and most BOINC projects tend to issue more CPU optimized work units, because of this many people run BOINC and Folding@home on the same machine and set up their clients so that they won't interfere with each other.
John I vote for BOINC portable.
I downloaded and tried Folding@home and was not able to get a single work unit completed. I was able to download 2 work units but despite leaving the program running it would become unresponsive after about 8 hours forcing me to close and restart the program. After 3 days of this it had not completed 50% of the work assignment. My laptop that is about 4 years old now and it may not have enough computing power to do any useful work for Folding@home, not sure if BOINC/Rosetta@home would work any better but I would like to try it and I like portable versions of software better.
I had the similar issues.
Please report this issues to folding@home.
Give them the chance to improve.
The easy way to report them is on github:
https://github.com/FoldingAtHome
Thank you.
Hello @Artos.
I open an issue in folding@home.
Can you report your bug there?
Thank you.
https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues/1366
BOINC Portable has now been released: https://portableapps.com/news/2020-04-10--boinc-portable-7.16.5-released
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you John.
I will try it now.
please change icon of boinc in
https://portableapps.com/news/new
It folding@home icon.