supdood, we don't pick the research application for World Community Grid projects - that's a decision our research partners make based on what tool is most relevant to the problem they're addressing. PS. the onboarding time for Vina would've been about the same anyway, since that's an application that has also previously run on World Community Grid.

Cmdrd, we’re glad to see so many volunteer computing initiatives rally behind COVID-19, it’s certainly going to take multiple efforts to tackle this pandemic. Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home are leveraging different computational research techniques - predicting the protein structure of the virus, whereas OpenPandemics which will be predicting which chemical compounds dock against COVD-19 protein targets. Both approaches are valid and valuable.

Hi Falconet,

Scripps is considering docking against multiple ligand libraries, including clinically tested compounds. We don't yet have an estimate of the project's likely duration - it depends on many factors including overall number of work units, average runtime per work unit, volunteer interest in the project, etc. We'll have a better idea closer to launch.

Good question about the tools development. Large scale, high-throughput computational research efforts like this require a ton of work for researchers to prepare and organize their input data, and even more work to store, process and analyze the output data generated. These tools aim to ease that burden by streamlining these pre and post processes to make it easier to carry out computational drug docking experiments in the future.

Finally, scientists believe that future pandemics caused by newly emerging pathogens are unfortunately likely to become more common. The OpenPandemics project can therefore be leveraged to address such future outbreaks too.

Many thanks,
Juan

I noticed that Github had a GPU accelerated version of Autodock that was being worked on. It seemed to only have 3 main contributors, but one of the contributors was from Scripps, and another from a German university. Regarding your comment that "At launch...CPU" Is there an intention/hope that the GPU enabled version will be ready soon enough to do some good on this project?

I have a few questions that I don't see asked/answered yet:

1. About how long until launch? Days? Months?

2. Will IBM/whoever do a large publicity/press release like around March 22nd when all the news feeds talked about Summit and IBM? WCG is an IBM project. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/307998-ib...t-could-fight-coronavirus Just googling "IBM" for several days pointed towards all kinds of news articles about Summit.

3. I thought I read somewhere that this new WCG project will help/complement Summit. If this is true, how, exactly will WCG and Summit work together?

4. What are the timeframes for milestones and how many Phases? Is the project looking to finish Phase 1 by May 30 and Phase 2 by August 30, for example? Once each phase is complete, what is the timeframe to get an "answer" from all our work on if it solves some problem?

5. Is this project performing the same calculations/models as Summit? If not, can you elaborate (for us computer-tech, but not bio-tech folks) on the differences?

6. If every member on WCG were to run this project exclusively 24x7, how would that compare to the compute power of Summit trying to help cure coronavirus? For example, would WCG be 3x more petaflops than Summit running?

7. Is IBM planning on donating any computing power to this project to keep it a little competitive? :) IBM surely has the IBM Cloud and the raw compute power to donate some machines, cpus, etc. for this project as well as love the free publicity. I don't mean their employee's laptops crunching data...I mean actual bare metal machines that IBM will donate towards this great endeavor whose sole purpose is to crunch 24x7. How awesome would it be if IBM donated 100 bare metal machines with 80 cores each, crunching this project? :)


I'm super excited to join this project. I'd love to hear more about the GOALS and TIMEFRAMES so as to set my/our expectations on what end result will come from all our efforts.

I meant to ask this question. I am really concerned that WCG will not be able to handle the load.

1)Everyone across the globe is extremely interested in fighting this disease that is destroying not only lives, but the world economy and way of life. There will easily be millions of people (out of the 7.8 billion on this planet) signing up for this project if it gets any kind of press release via a Google search.

2)According to the WCG site https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewGlobal.do there are 775k "members" on this site. Eons ago it used to also say "active members" which I think was people who returned a result within 30 days. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but my belief is the number of "active users" on WCG is very low compared to the 775k "members" that could be representing people who signed up 8 years ago, returned 11 results, and never came back. If I had to guess, I would say there are no more than 20,000 active users on WCG. I'm not dissing WCG, I'm just highlighting a lack of stats.

3)I know several very "high up" folks in companies employing over 4000 people. These companies are interested in running WCG for coronavirus. 4000 employees means 4000 laptops plus maybe 500 laptops for people who have 2 machines and a few dozen QA servers. Total machines available PER COMPANY would be about 4500 to play it safe. Multiply this by the 4 companies I can easily influence and you have a possible 18,000 new machines within 5 days of launch. Multiple 4500 by 20 other companies and you've go an additional 90,000 machines crunching plus the original 18,000 and we are basically at 100,000 new machines. Add in 10% of employees who go home and install WCG on their home machines and that's another 10,000 machines for a grand total of 110,000 new machines crunching, hitting the site for uploads/downloads. It's GREAT...but is WCG prepared? Heck, even if I'm wrong and it's 25,000 new machines by Day 5 that still seems like a big influx to WCG. But I'm all ears if a WCG admin wants to give us some stats.


I hope my numbers are correct for optimism of participation. This could be an amazing feat of human unity as well as a huge boost for the popularity of WCG and in general distributed computing. Facebook has 2.5 BILLION active users each month. Imagine if 1% of them were to install WCG and run any project...that would be 25 MILLION new users. 0.1% would be 2.5 MILLION new users.