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Mixed news

2020-08-02: Minecraft@Home, Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti)

The first round of Kaktwoos processing is nearing its completion. A small number of hosts caused many errors with faulty hardware or software configurations which caused the failure of a handful of workunits. Due to these failures; several thousand new tasks have now been submitted to allow any previously failed workunits an additional chance to succeed.

All historically submitted data is currently under re-evaluation as a subset of these completed tasks has outputs which don't appear to be nominal. The re-validation of tasks will reach completion shortly, and soon a follow-up will be posted detailing the tallest cactus found during this round of Kaktwoos processing.

The Kaktwoos (kak-two-s) project was initiated by computing a small set of tall 'candidate cacti' using the single-chunk cacti stacking application Kaktoos (kak-tus). The initial cactus seed search assumed stacking began at an elevation of y=63 blocks from bedrock which is the basis of assumption for the Kaktwoos multi-chunk cacti scanning work. You have likely volunteered resources towards this effort over the past few weeks.

Now, onto the exciting news: the Kaktoos application (note the missing 'w') shall be launching on BOINC.

This application will exist to scan for individual chunk seeds which produce tall cacti (7 blocks minimum) with generation elevation of y=62. Using a lower elevation parameter for Kaktoos will hopefully allow us to discover additional naturally-generated 22+ block tall cacti with Kaktwoos.

For those wondering, the next set of tasks will produce many more resultant 'candidate' cactus seeds than the previous y=63 run. We expect 120 million generated seeds despite the required minimum height of 7 blocks we chose to reduce output drastically. This dataset will be used for quad-chunk stacking (Kaktfours anyone?) and is much more challenging to manage due to the lower probability of finding 22+ block tall cacti and increased development overhead. We could theoretically find much taller cacti with this method, with a caveat of requiring significantly more processing power. Don't worry though; there are other projects brewing which will take priority. If you are a 'stacktus' superfan or a member of the 'big cactus community', you also needn't worry; there may be even more permutations of Kaktoos and Kaktwoos inputs to try which should keep us all busy along the way.

Finally, and for reference, the tallest known cactus found by MC@Home (in Minecraft: Java Edition v1.14.4) is 22 blocks, and 24 blocks tall if using a superflat world with the desert preset. We distinguish these heights as we consider "cactus naturalis" (cactus of normal generation) cacti to be the true tall cacti, as opposed to "cactus fma vi" (cactus of superflat generation).

2020-08-01: MLC@Home, [TWIM Notes] Aug 1 2020

This Week in MLC@Home
Notes for Aug 1 2020
A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home.

News:
Happy 1 month anniversary! MLC@Home launched June 30th, so yesterday marked the 1 month anniversary. Thanks to all contribute! We took a preliminary look at Datasets 1 and 2,and the results were encouraging. We are able to differentiate the nearly identical machines in Dataset 1 and Dataset 2 based solely on the learned weights, and we were able to plot the weights in 2D weight space, and see some separation/clustering. This leads to come interesting follow-on questions and suggests maybe loss isn't the only way to evaluate a network (thread here) Linux armhf/arm64 support is in progress. 32-bit client it up and running in testing. Follow along with progress here: Linux/armhf and Linux/arm64 support status thread. Dataset 3 continues in internal testing. Should be ready in a few more weeks. The deadlines for new and follow-on WUs has been moved to 4 days instead of 2. This should help the boinc client make some better decisions about scheduling work. However, many already queued work units still have the 2 day deadline, so this will not go away completely. New server will likely take at least several weeks.


Project status snapshot:
Tasks
Tasks ready to send 62154
Tasks in progress 21940
Users
With credit 382
Registered in past 24 hours 13
Hosts
With recent credit 1305
Registered in past 24 hours 21
Current GigaFLOPS 23473.01

Dataset 1 and 2 progress:
SingleDirectMachine 9670/10004
EightBitMachine 9618/10006
SingleInvertMachine 9675/10003
SimpleXORMachine 9633/10002
ParityMachine 269/10005
ParityModified 15/10005
EightBitModified 506/10006
SimpleXORModified 3106/10005
SingleDirectModified 3078/10004
SingleInvertModified 3156/10002

Thanks again to all our volunteers!

-- The MLC@Home Admins

2020-07-31: yoyo@home, Enhancing ECM range

I'm enhancing the ecm search range for B1=43e6 up to 2000 digits. Some test workunits are already send out with the name ecm_es_*test* and a short deadline of 1 day. Together with this the credit formula was changed.

2020-07-30: MilkyWay@home, New Runs for MilkyWay@home Nbody Simulations (07/29/2020)

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to let everyone know that new Nbody runs have been put up on MW@home. The last set of runs started converging nicely, so we are confident this next set of runs will converge as well. The names of these runs are:
-de_nbody_07_29_2020_v176_40k__data__1
-de_nbody_07_29_2020_v176_40k__data__2
-de_nbody_07_29_2020_v176_40k__data__3

Please let us know if you have any trouble with these runs. Thank you all for your continued support.

-Eric

2020-07-27: World Community Grid, Behind the Scenes with World Community Grid's Active Projects

Interested in learning more about our monthly calls with the researchers for each active World Community Grid project? You can get updates on our website, in our forum, and via email.

2020-07-25: MLC@Home, [TWIM Notes] Jul 25, 2020

This Week in MLC@Home notes for Jul 25, 2020

A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home.

We've more than doubled the number of host participating in the project, up to 1100 active hosts! Relatedly, MLC@Home Is now listed on the official BOINC project page We've started processing some of the data, for Dataset 1, and hope to have some preliminary results to share later this week Datasets 1 and 2 are continue crunching away, see the live status on https://www.mlcathome.org/ Dataset 3 is in internal testing, and will be even larger. Expect a more complete writeup of what these results are soon The project has secured a Raspberry Pi 4, and will be working on an ARM client. No timeline available yet. You can now follow MLC@Home on Twitter: @MLCHome2 Lots of discussion on the forum related to validation errors for a small number of results (less than 1%), but are being addressed as they are uncovered, see the forum threads under "Issue Discussion" A new server is being ordered!


Current work status at time of posting:
Tasks ready to send: 81035
Tasks in progress: 15139

As always, you can see the current project status on the project main page at https://www.mlcathome.org/.

Thanks for contributing!
-- The MLC@Home Admins

2020-07-25: MilkyWay@home, Scheduled Internet Outage July 28th,2020

Hey everyone,

On July 28th, our server will be temporarily inaccessible due to a scheduled campus-wide internet outage. As such, job queues may not update for the day. However, everything should return to working order by the next day. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Eric

2020-07-25: Moo! Wrapper, Account deletion enabled

Deleting your Moo! Wrapper account is now possible. It can be requested from your Account page or by going directly to https://moowrap.net/delete_account_request.php page. Your account will be deleted automatically after email address* verification that tries to make sure you are you. Note that this process will permanently delete your account and you will lose access to it. There's no way to restore an account so please be sure before requesting deletion.

*I know email verification requirement can cause problems for some users that can't receive emails. This includes emails protected with the Outlook services because MS/Outlook never accepts any email from our project server. Even their support services is not able to help figure out why that is. So if you are affected with this (please also check your Junk email folder) you can either try to complain to your email service provider or, preferably, switch to some email service provider that works. For Example Google Mail should work. Note that changing your email address will mean you have to wait a week before account deletion is possible due to security reasons.

2020-07-25: BOINC, Welcome QuChemPedIA@home

QuChemPedIA@home is a new project, based at Universit

2020-07-24: GPUGRID, New paper 2/2: GPCRmd uncovers the dynamics of the 3D-GPCRome

The second paper is

Rodr

2020-07-24: GPUGRID, New paper 1/2: PlayMolecule CrypticScout: Predicting Protein Cryptic Sites Using Mixed-Solvent Molecular Simulation

Two recent papers which came out with results from GPUGRID.

First,


PlayMolecule CrypticScout: Predicting Protein Cryptic Sites Using Mixed-Solvent Molecular Simulations
Gerard Martinez-Rosell, Silvia Lovera, Zara A. Sands, and Gianni De Fabritiis
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 2020 60 (4), 2314-2324
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.9b01209


In this paper (and the corresponding live system) GPUGRID's computations are used to power a search for elusive (transient) pockets which may become drug targets.

Thanks for the contributions!




Cryptic pockets are protein cavities that remain hidden in resolved apo structures and generally require the presence of a co-crystallized ligand to become visible. Finding new cryptic pockets is crucial for structure-based drug discovery to identify new ways of modulating protein activity and thus expand the druggable space. We present here a new method and associated web application leveraging mixed-solvent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using benzene as a hydrophobic probe to detect cryptic pockets. Our all-atom MD-based workflow was systematically tested on 18 different systems and 5 additional kinases and represents the largest validation study of this kind. CrypticScout identifies benzene probe binding hotspots on a protein surface by mapping probe occupancy, residence time, and the benzene occupancy reweighed by the residence time. The method is presented to the scientific community in a web application available via www.playmolecule.org using a distributed computing infrastructure to perform the simulations.


List of most-contributing users:


User Rank Credits
101936 1 4639746
14310 2 4450949
483287 3 3535477
103037 4 2362054
500240 5 1986559
25378 6 1969784
504924 7 1945416
100499 8 1834758
73475 9 1796967
125700 10 1755579
126468 11 1651313
306281 12 1638950
62100 13 1542475
21233 14 1536750
535400 15 1364758
13127 16 1161000
509733 17 1035000
28899 18 973950
543022 19 971404
89682 20 946350

2020-07-24: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Saturday, July 25, 2020 [ Completed ]

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Saturday, July 25 beginning at 16:00 UTC.

2020-07-24: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Saturday, July 25, 2020

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Saturday, July 25 beginning at 16:00 UTC.

2020-07-23: World Community Grid, Synthetic Compound May Be Useful for Developing Zika Virus Treatment

As the OpenZika research team wrapped up their work on World Community Grid, they identified a promising compound in the ongoing search for Zika treatments.

2020-07-21: Minecraft@Home, Server outage resolved and supporting our infrastructure

Between 23:54 UTC yesterday (2020-07-20) and 15:35 UTC today, we suffered from a catastrophic SQL failure which forced us to restore from backup.

There may be some credit issues where the system granted more or fewer credits than you expect for work done during this time.
I can't apologize enough. If our BOINC deployment was architected for scale rather than for low cost, we could've avoided this.

There are several enhancements to our infrastructure and upgrades we'd like to make, such as migrating services to Kubernetes and potentially using a managed SQL service.

You can help! Please consider visiting our Patreon page, reviewing the current set of benefits, and making a contribution of any size; any amount helps - patreon.com/minecraftathome

All contributions go towards covering infrastructure cost and quality-of-life improvements to ensure the project's longevity.

2020-07-21: Minecraft@Home, Server outage and supporting our infrastructure

Between 23:54 UTC yesterday (2020-07-20) and 15:35 UTC today, we suffered from a catastrophic SQL failure which forced us to restore from backup.

There may be some credit issues where the system granted more or fewer credits than you expect for work done during this time.
I can't apologize enough. If our BOINC deployment was architected for scale rather than for low cost, we could've avoided this.

There are several enhancements to our infrastructure and upgrades we'd like to make, such as migrating services to Kubernetes and potentially using a managed SQL service.

You can help! Please consider visiting our Patreon page, reviewing the current set of benefits, and making a contribution of any size; any amount helps - patreon.com/minecraftathome

All contributions go towards covering infrastructure cost and quality-of-life improvements to ensure the project's longevity.

2020-07-21: PrimeGrid, Katherine Johnson Memorial Challenge starts July 24th

In honor of the life of Katherine Johnson, PrimeGrid will be running a 7-day TRP-LLR challenge from 24 July 20:00 UTC to 31 July 20:00 UTC. Will we end this subproject's 3-year prime drought?

Also make sure to read Hidden Figures, a book about Katherine Johnson and some of her contemporaries, for the book club meeting!

Doubts? Disputes? Dubieties? Discuss in the forum thread for the challenge: https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=9217

2020-07-20: RakeSearch, First workunits of new search will be generated soon

Dear folks!

In next few hours the first, small and test bunch of new workunits will be generated. Later we will tell more about this experiment.
Thank you for attention and participation!

The RakeSearch project team.

2020-07-20: BOINC, New BOINC project studies machine learning

Welcome to MLC@Home, a new project dedicated to understanding and explaining machine learning models. It's based at the CORAL lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). It supports Linux/amd64 and Windows/x64.

2020-07-19: iThena, The problem with the stability of the systems...

The last few days we've had problems with the stability of the iThena system.

The problems are related to storage.

Sorry about the problems!

2020-07-19: WEP-M+2 Project, 12-digit factor of P2203 has now been found by the project...

...251128 times - still no sign of any larger factors

2020-07-18: Minecraft@Home, That was fast

The origin of the panorama image used in the Minecraft main menu from beta version 1.8.1, released in September 2011, has remained a mystery until now.

In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host for Minecraft@Home, in a sheer stroke of luck, found the world seed, 25357015387625.
This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into the last 24 hours.

The specific host which located the seed belongs to the user vanos0512.
Thank you to the 137 users who contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs over the last 24 hours. You all accomplished this.



Here are the details if you want to generate this world for yourself:
Minecraft version: Beta 1.7
Either of these two valid world seeds: 2151901553968352745 or 8091867987493326313
Co-ordinates: x60, y76, z-67

See the video released by EarthComputer announcing the finding.

2020-07-18: QuChemPedIA@home, Scientific publication and new WUs

Dear crunchers.

First of all, thank you very much for your help and for your interest in our research.

We are proud to announce the imminent publication of our work on the generation of molecules with AI. You can already read the first draft here : https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-36676/v1. It's a raw version with almost no formatting. We have a more polished version that should come out in few weeks. The article will be in open access, the molecule generator in open source and the data in open data. Open Science!

Our exploration of chemical space continues and we have just generated more than 2.5 million small molecules. I know that some people are waiting eagerly for the return of the short WU and here they are! As before, many calculations will be considered invalid because of unstable molecules, but this is the price for unbiased cartography of the chemical space. The first results are very encouraging and we hope that these 2.5 million new molecules will help to provide extremely useful tools for many chemists.

Sincerly
Benoit

2020-07-18: MLC@Home, MLC@Home and CORAL

Exciting news!

MLC@Home is now a project of the The Cognition, Robotics, and Learning (CORAL) lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

This brings many benefits, not the least of which is lab space to run equipment, new ideas for research to conduct, and a place to collaborate with other researchers who may not be members of the BOINC community. Most importantly, being backed by a university research lab provides some assurance to you, our volunteers, that this project has both academic merit and a purpose beyond a single researcher and their goals. Over the next few days I'll be updating our website to reflect the new affiliation.

As always, please see our main website, https://www.mlcathome.org for details on the current research, or join us by attaching your BOINC client to this URL: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/

2020-07-17: Minecraft@Home, Enjoy the scenery

Minecraft@Home is now over one month old! To celebrate this milestone, I present a new research focus; the panorama project.

If you were here during beta-testing, you might have received a very early version of panorama tasks, and the eagle-eyed among you may have seen the application details on the server status page.

The panorama app is a CUDA-only app for Linux and Windows with an Nvidia driver version of 418.96 or higher.

This project attempts to find the world seed of the iconic panorama image which appeared in the background of the main menu of Minecraft between 2011 and 2018. The first phase of this project will only last a few days, and we shall update you with their progress in the coming weeks.



Right now, the application is quite substantial. Unlike the OpenCL applications for the Kaktwoos project, if you allow BOINC to run tasks always; you may experience some stuttering or lag in your desktop environment while running these tasks. These tasks do not have checkpointing support, but run in around 1 hour on an average host to mitigate the majority of lost cycles.

As always, you can change which projects of which you decide to participate in your user preferences.

Let us know if you have any questions, and as always join the discussion over on the Discord server.

2020-07-16: WEP-M+2 Project, P2203:150000000 wu's (of 10000 trials each equiv.) processed!

Thanks to all the users. (Please keep crunching!)

2020-07-15: SRBase, planned server outage tomorrow (done)

Some postponed updates need to be installed. The server will not be available in this time (~10-20min)

2020-07-15: SRBase, planned server outage tomorrow

Some postponed updates need to be installed. The server will not be available in this time (~10-20min)

2020-07-14: LHC@Home, Interruption to CMS@Home, Wednesday 15th July

We need to interrupt the CMS project tomorrow to deploy a new Workflow Management Agent. This means that jobs will not be available from sometime tonight. We recommend that you set your CMS machines to No New Tasks as soon as possible, to avoid tasks terminating with an error if a job can't be fetched.
We anticipate jobs will be available again late Wednesday (European time). I'll update this thread when it is OK to proceed.

2020-07-13: Asteroids@home, Uploading problem fixed

Problem with uploading results to the server is fixed.

Radim Van?o (FoxKyong)

2020-07-12: iThena, iThena CNode (non-beta) badge - badge graphics proposals

A few days ago, Thena CNode beta badges were frozen.

These badges were introduced in this message:
https://root.ithena.net/usr/forum_thread.php?id=24#212

The old iThena CNode badge (beta stage) will no longer be updated.

Maybe you have suggestions for the next generation of badges for iThena CNode?

You can submit your suggestions and/or ideas in this thread in the forum.

2020-07-12: MLC@Home, New testing WUs released

As the first round of 50,000 networks finishes training (what I'm referring to as "dataset 1"), I've released a few new test WUs for the next round ("dataset 2"). If these go well, I'll release the next 50,000 networks to train, that should keep keep the WUs flowing a bit more consistently.

2020-07-09: BOINC, Rosetta@home expands COVID-19 research

The computing power supplied by BOINC volunteers is allowing Rosetta@home to do exciting new research in the fight against COVID-19.

2020-07-08: Minecraft@Home, Kaktwoos 2.03 and Badges!

You may have seen many workunits just disappear from existence today.



Worry not! We realised there were far too many workunits scanning duplicate seeds, so we've scaled back the original workunits to the correct seed ranges (no in-progress results were touched, so none of you should have lost any credit).

We have located some promising seed candidates which were missed from processing and can be used as an input to this job, so they are currently set as the highest priority.

Also, we now have badges! If you view the forums, any comments in threads, or on the leaderboards; you will see the new badges.
We're open to suggestions for future badges, so please leave us some comments on this thread.

2020-07-08: Asteroids@home, Server outage resolved

I am sorry for server outages which was happening recently. There were several factors which often caused lack of free space and some services crashed and I had to do an emergency shutdown on Saturday in order to fix everything so I couldn't inform you about it except for Twitter. There is still a hardware problem with one of servers which I have to fix but the server is not being used now so project should be stable now.

Radim Van?o (FoxKyong)

2020-07-07: MLC@Home, Windows support lands, and updates on dataset and progress

Today MLC@Home is proud to announce Windows 64-bit support[!
Windows support joins the existing Linux 64-bit bit support already available.

After 1 week, MLC@Home contributors have finished over 100,000 workunits, and trained over 14,000 neural networks. That's tremendous, thank you all for your support; and there's a lot more just on the horizon, so keep crunching!

-- The MLC@Home Admin(s)

2020-07-07: MilkyWay@home, New Runs for MilkyWay@home Nbody Simulations (07/07/2020)

Hey all,

The last set of N-body runs we set up started converging to compact progenitors due to an overly restrictive data histogram. We have fixed the data histogram and placed new runs up on the server:
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__1
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__2
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__3

Please let us know if these runs cause any problems, and thank you all for your support.

-Eric

2020-07-06: Minecraft@Home, Issue with latest app version: kaktwoos 202

Our sincere apologies to all users, it seems our last update to kaktwoos (version 202) failed.
We're working to restore normal service shortly.

2020-07-05: iThena, iThena Cnode application - new credits settings

According to the forum post:
https://root.ithena.net/usr/forum_thread.php?id=39&postid=658#658

I'm going to introduce better credit for Thena CNode tasks.

I will initially set 2 credits per task.

New settings will only be visible after a certain period of time.

The current tasks still have the old configuration. However, the new tasks will already have higher credit values.

The update of the historical "cnode beta" series badges has been disabled.
These badges will no longer be changed.

2020-07-05: MLC@Home, Stats are now exported; requires consent

The project is now exporting stats for stat aggregator sites. I've also enabled stat export consent which defaults to "no". If you would like your stats exported, please check the "Do you consent to exporting your data to BOINC statistics aggregation Web sites?" option under "Project->Preferences".

Thanks again for your support!