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  1. #1

    Question How about harnessing this Maple leaf computing power?

    They united lots of computers for this project in Canada.

    http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ciss/

    As that event is now over, how about seeing if them would do it for this project??? Howard, have you explored this at all???

  2. #2
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    Well, you figure we got quite a bit of firepower for one of the youngeer and smaller projects out there. Its a lot harder to get actual sites going with the CISS projected which they admit to. With internet distributed computing, Howard needs to do relatively little... setup a site, give out the client, record the results that are sent back. If people want to set up clusters and whole site, all the more power to the project and Howard involvement is only very minimal in that.

    The CISS is definitely interesting and potentially worthwhile, but its much harder to schedule the time to commit the resources while internet distributed computing can run at any time and its not critical that all machines are running at the same time.

    Best,

    RuneStar
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  3. #3
    That project was basically a one-shot. What about approaching the people that set it up and get them behind this one?

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    After thinking about your message in my haze from my nap I realized what you were saying.

    I think it would be better if they extended that collaboration outward, which seems to be the ultimated goal, for not just this project or that project but equal access to all projects based out of Canada. Of course we start running into similar issues of how to schedule this time. Today we may be just running Howard's projects, and might even run for some months at that, but eventually someone else is going to request access to that computing power.

    BOINC from the SETI@home people seems it might be a manner in which to partially address that in that you simply need to choose which project to run without having to worry about installing and running this project and that project. The difficulty lies in overcoming the comfort level of people. Once I get settled with one project, I may or may not want to switch to another project. If we put in a mandatory randomizer, we start losing people who don't want to run all these various projects under the sun, even if its for their country. It might be fine for something on the university level, but even then you might expect bias for certain projects even if they don't originate out of their own house, so to speak.

    Short-term it could work simply accessing their computing power. Its just how long they are willing to commit. DF doesn't require any mission critical response time so to speak but it does require some amount of dedication to be worthwhile the effort. So it could might be worth the extra effort to woe them for the extra computing firepower dependant on how much firepower they could throw in and how long they could dedicate it.

    RuneStar
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  5. #5
    How many dc projects are originating out of Canada? I didn't know there was any except Distributed Folding. And the computing power I read in the article isn't decided by individuals but institutions. Universities turning over their idle computers to the effort. If Howard and his professor were to make their case that they're a Canadian dc project that could sure use the muscle power, I think they would have a chance at getting it. When there (eventually) are other Canadian dc projects bidding for the computing power, it's more politics at that time and Distributed Folding should be in a strong position with a history as well as by working on meaningful science with at least a strong possibility of success. Distributed Folding's position would have been much better if they had been the clear winner of CASP5, but with a little spin control, it could be pitched that part of the problem is they needed more computing muscle to put behind their effort. If I was Howard and his professor, I would work to get their university's chancellor to write letters to their nation's MP of parliament (or whatever is their version of the US President) plus all the politicians that represent their area. The letter would ask these politicians in patriotic terms to get behind Distributed Folding so it can at least have a strong showing in CASP6, if not win it for the land of moose, Mounties, and Molston beer.

  6. #6
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    As far as I know, there aren't any Canada based D.C. projects. As far as we know. That doesn't preclude any in the works and Howard is definitely not the only one studying protein folding. And who knows, there be other D.C. projects in the works.

    If Howard and crew could tap into even a fraction of that computing power, then he would be in good shape for future parts of this project. DF2 anyone? Its not inconcievable the next generation project from Howard and crew could be competing with Stanford. That would be interesting to see how two similar projects compete. If U of T can continue to provide the same level of feedback to the participants, then a DF2 competing with F@H would potentially thrash them.

    Right now, the command-line client is a lot better and nicer than F@H, and this new screensaver knocks the socks off of their screensaver just playing with it now in beta. Throw the feedback with the partipants...word gets out that you have a project team that is willing to address the needs AND wants of the community and a DF2 has a chance to pick up a lot of disgruntled F@H people.


    At any rate, it seems it might make it easier for Howard et crew to get extra funds if they are linked up nation-wide. Its one thing being a single university, but you get something going nationwide, its harder to ignore funding requests.

    Whatever happens, its my hope that the feedback with the D.C. community continues as it has. I realize as the project grows, Howard may not be able to personally respond, but it is my hope that the crew that comes to help out is as knowledagable and especially open-minded as him.

    TTFN,

    RuneStar
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  7. #7
    I wonder if Howard's university is even giving its full support to DF. Are all its idle/semi-idle computers helping out DF? If not, that should be the first objective for Howard and crew. I mean if they cannot even enlist the full support of their own university, it makes it doubtful they'll get even mild support from other Canadian universities. So will someone on the DF staff tell us if DF is fully supported by their university? Supported as in the chancellor issuing a directive for all networked computers at their university to be enrolled in this project.

  8. #8
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    The worst that can happen if Howard applies (if Howard has to apply directly, and we can't) to have DF taken up by some willing to help out their fellow Canadians with DC projects - is that they say no.
    Go for it. All the extra cpu cycles we can gather will make each protein get run through faster, and we'll have more time for Howard to test out this same horrible protein with new approaches that will hopefully increase the folding speed or even better; increase our ability to come up with better protein structures with significantly fewer folds.
    And of course, we want to toast the other teams in Casp6..

  9. #9
    Hi all, and Happy New Year!

    Ads I have mentioned previously, this project essentially has zero funding - not even my salary (!) (but don't worry, I still get paid..). It is run entirely on hardware our lab owns that was not specifically purchased for this project. We are not directly supported by the University either - they are not running it on all their spare machines, although it IS running on many machines in our own hospital institute (thanks to 'Larry the Foot'). We hope that with the relative success we have seen so far, both in the growth of the project, and the results so far, that we will be able to get some funding to add a couple people to the project soon, although clearly we are good on the hardware side for now (finally).

    We have worked out the details for the next algorithm we want to try and I'll be coding it in the new year now and hopefully have it ready for the next next changeover. We expect it to improve the sampling but won't not until we try of course. The new infrastructure will also allow us to then try a few other related approaches as well. This new client, when ready, will work a little different than the present one - it will make a bunch of structures, then make a bunch of slower, energy minimized ones. It will also do a few extra new steps. Our most important goal, in terms of the users, is that we continue to maintain minimal communication with the server, and continue to award structure credits 'fairly' (so if some are expected to take longer to generate, they will be scaled appropriately). However, in order to improve the algorithm in the direction we wish, be aware that it may become necessary in the future to connect to the internet (and our server) at least once every 24-48 hrs. This may not be feasible for some people and but unfortunately this will become necessary if we wish to perform more intelligent searching of conformational space in a reasonable amount of time. We will keep you posted on when such a change will be occurring, for the present time nothing has changed yet.
    Howard Feldman

  10. #10
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    Happy New Year Howard et crew and to all the fellow participants too.

    Its my hope that if we finally get to the point where we are more frequently changing clients that as many as will remain with the project as possible. However, before people start panicking, let's worry about that hurdle when we get closer to it. =)

    TTFN,

    RuneStar
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  11. #11
    Howard,

    How about you give us your university's chancellor's email address and we ask him on your behalf to get his institution behind this project? A little prodding by us might just do wonders.

  12. #12
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    Originally posted by Scott Jensen
    Howard,

    How about you give us your university's chancellor's email address and we ask him on your behalf to get his institution behind this project? A little prodding by us might just do wonders.
    Why not organize a petition of sort and we can deliver a large number of "signatures" all at once? There's some websites out there you can set up such petitions.

    Best,

    RS½
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  13. #13
    Hmmm. I think a few well-written emails from us to the Howard's chancellor might be better at this stage.

  14. #14
    U of T is a BIG university (50,000+ undergrads alone, 10,000 or so faculty, etc) so frankly, I doubt, even if I got someone important interested, that there'd be much penetration. No one person has the power to influence everyone else like that.
    Howard Feldman

  15. #15
    Howard,

    We're willing though to give it a try ... saying you don't think the Power That Be will get upset. Saying that, give us your chancellor's email address and let us at him ... or her ... or it.

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    And barring that.. who are "Larry The Foot"'s IT heads in the various sections of the university? If giving us their email addresses is a local sin - then challenge us to create a request to join the DF team that would win them over - and let us try our skills at persuation on yet another group. (After all, we've helped build up our own teams through gimics as "your system sucks.. mine does twice the folds that yours could ever do.. (challenge)" to "please donate your wasted cpu cycles to DF and help provide some hope for future cures to a variety of diseases" Or even more creative approaches. *grin*

  17. #17
    The U of T chancellor is currently "Hal Jackman" although he's leaving in July. The main web site is www.utoronto.ca but good luck finding any contact info for him. There's also the U of T president http://www.utoronto.ca/president/ but not sure what the difference is really...

    Just to clarify, Larry the Foot is IT here and the SLRI (part of mount sinai hospital) and has nothing to do with U of T, we just have it running on local hospital computers (and then only on a few floors which are directly part of our institute).

    I highly doubt you can get anywhere with this route but I certainly won't discourage you from trying, so let me know how it goes and good luck.
    Howard Feldman

  18. #18
    OK, troops, listen up!

    Howard has given us the green light. Now first order of attack is finding out the email address of this soon-to-be-leaving chancellor. Information diggers, have at this! Find that email address. It's out there. Report back when you find it.

    And we might as well hit that university president at the same time so round up that email address at the same time. And along those lines, let's get the rest of the chain-of-command from Howard's professor to the chancellor. Howard, if you could help with this that would be great. Email addresses would be great, but just their names would greatly help.

    Now let's not expand out this campaign out any further than this at this moment. To recruit in other universities, we first need to get Howard's university behind his project. Without it's overt support, our chances with other universities will be that much harder.

  19. #19
    Unfortunately no emailadress for Hal Jackman aviable on that website
    Name: Jackman The Hon. Henry N R
    Department: CHANCELLOR, THE
    tel: click
    fax: click
    For privacy reasons i made link to the numbers
    http://www.utoronto.ca/phonebook/searchtips.html
    Member of the Los Alcoholicos

  20. #20
    Hmmm. There's got to be one. I cannot believe a chancellor doesn't have one. Any other information diggers like to give this a try?

    If none succeed, how about a snail mail address?

  21. #21
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    While we are researching contact options, we should decide WHAT we want to write to the president of the college.

    RuneStar
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  22. #22
    I say we keep it real simple. That we ask the chancellor to issue out a directive to all colleges and departments at the university to enroll all network/internet connected computers into Distributed Folding. I'd even go so far as including in that directive that no university-owned computer can be used for any other distributed computing project. And if we really want to push it, ask him to write a letter to all students and faculty to get behind this project and have it appear in the university's newspaper.

    How's that?

    What I don't suggest is that we create up some type of a form letter. Form letters get ignored. Individually created letters carry more weight. In other words, it's alright to agree with what we should be asking for, but it is not alright to agree on the exact wording.

  23. #23
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    That's wierd. I found a bunch of information and swore I committed it to the board earlier yet it didn't show up.

    I'll have to get all the information again, but of special note, I discovered that the President of the college is also involved in the Physics department which is a definite plus of the science side of things.

    RuneStar
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  24. #24
    Runestar,

    Did you try to post that information again?

  25. #25
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    I completely forgot, sorry. I had company for a couple days and it totally went out my head. Let me gather all that info again.

    TTFN,

    RuneStar
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  26. #26
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    Possible ways to contact the President of U of T

    Be sure to read everything carefully. I am NOT responsible if you screw something up in attempting to reach Dr. Robert Birgeneau. Also, double check for misspellings I may have failed to catch.


    From the President's Office webpage is the <b>OFFICIAL e-mail address:

    president@utoronto.ca </b>


    I found this interesting tidbit I missed before BTW: "He became the 14th president of the University of Toronto on July 1, 2000, at which time he also joined U of T's department of physics." So it looks like he took on the two roles at the same time.


    <b>Possible but unconfirmed e-mail addresses:</b> (Note these are constructed from the formats e-mail addresses are based on that I viewed):

    robert.birgeneau@utoronto.edu <based on utoronto.edu addresses>
    birgeneau@physics.utoronto.edu <based on physics.utoronto.edu addresses?


    Here are some <b>phone numbers</b> I found also:

    From the Office of the President:
    President's Phn: 416-978-2121
    Fax (Office): 416-971-1360

    For Robert Birgeneau under Physics department: 978-5264 & 978-7135 (messages)
    These are both listed as location "G" in the Physics faculty directory. Not sure what that refers to.


    In the UTOR e-mail directory, I found this address. I am UNABLE to match this address to any person or office! I don't find any matches for any other Birgeneaus that may be there. MC could be an intial or an abbreviation... I was thinking maybe master of ceremonies if it is an abbreviation...: <b>mc.birgeneau@utoronto.ca</b>


    Also, I suggest you might also want to contact the Public Affairs office. It might be useful to contact them FIRST and use them as a stepping stone. Generally public affairs are interested in getting their college/university promoted. With Distributed Folding being out on the Internet and Howard's recent interview, these are quite possibly good ways to get a foothold into what we are attempting to achieve:

    Susan Bloch-Nevitte
    Director, Public Affairs and Advancement Communications
    (416) 978-5947
    s.bloch.nevitte@utoronto.ca

    Joanne Withers
    Assistant to Director and Supervisor, Information Services
    (416) 978-5367
    j.withers@utoronto.ca


    And of course there is always the postal service:

    Office of the President
    University of Toronto
    Room 206
    27 King's College
    Circle
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    M5S 1A1


    The only other thing I can think of is getting on campus and getting ahold of a physical staff directory phonebook.

    Hope that gives you a good start...

    RuneStar&#189;
    The SETI TechDesk
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  27. #27
    Howard,

    What's your thoughts on who to hit first?

  28. #28
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    Well, my thoughts are if you can get the marketing (PA) people in on it then President is likely to give more weight to the information and request. Of course a 3-pronged approach, we the participants, Howard and crew, and the PA office all approaching him would seem almost certain to peak his interest.

    I have no doubt he'd realize the science angles as he's heavily involved in his own field of science. I am willing to bet he catch on to the distributed computing concepts especially compared to clustering.

    But it never heards to make sure the nail is firmly in the coffin... whatever coffins have to do when things around here.

    All things considered, IMHO, it would look a little better if Howard started the approach internally and then we came in behind him. Howard may end looking a little silly if the President of the University asks Howard why he didn't attempt to approach him about it if he felt so strongly about it.

    Incidentally, I wonder if Distributed Folding comes up on a search on their website...?



    Oh, incidentally, on the PA site, there is a nice link on how staff should handle interview requests.

    RuneStar

  29. #29
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    This is bad...

    the best percent results I got was 57% and that link only contained a reference to Distributed Folding and Folding@home was listed right before that... and this is on U of T's own websites...

    I found a bio on Chris Hogue here: http://tubs.sa.utoronto.ca/speakers_hogues/index.htm but there is no mention of DF. It does mention his creation of CN3D. I don't remember that it's mentioned he wrote it through the DF website. Am I missing that or is the website missing that info?

    At any rate, there is only reference directly to Distribtued Folding in the first page of results and overall there was only an exact match of 3.

    RuneStar
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  30. #30
    Runestar,

    The only thing you didn't mention was the Men In Black conspiracy behind all this.

    Howard, could you explain this ... ummm ... these unusual facts unearthed by Runestar?

  31. #31
    As I said before, U of T is a BIG university. Very big. Our project is just one of many going on around campus all the time (although the only DC of course), and I don't really expect it to receive any special attention. I'm still not clear on what you guys think we can gain from contacting the president/public relations. The Hospital has its own media relations department, and the hospital has already tried to promote it to the media (and failed evidently ).
    Howard Feldman

  32. #32
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    I'm just the informant here.

    However, it does seem that it is a glaring omission that your project is really nowhere to be found in the first page of search results. If I want to look up more information on the project, and I know its hosted at U of T, I'm not going to have a whole lot of luck finding it through the University's website. Rather odd that I would have better results using an external search engine than the University's own system.


    So let me ask you this Howard, what would you like to see out here for this project? Is it simply more people running it? I think Scott and some others are trying to start of by getting U of T to run DF on all non-essential systems.

    TTFN,

    RuneStar
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  33. #33
    Howard,

    Runestar is right. That's basically what we're looking at achieving. In my book (yes, yes, it just so happens to be a picture book ... but they're really nice pictures ), your university should get behind your project fully ... especially as there's not another dc project originating from it. Again, what we're seeking is for your university administration to put out a campus-wide directive to put your dc project on all their network/internet-connected computers. Once your university gets behind your project, our next goal is to get other Canadian universities to do likewise in like fashion. Once we get a lot of them, the next target can be universities that are not currently running their own dc projects to also get onboard.

  34. #34
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    To borrow something from the SETI world...particuarly the film "Contact" ... "small steps..."

    RS

  35. #35
    Precisely.

  36. #36
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    On the other hand, if you find a Canadian organization or University that is interested in DC projects - show them DF now - and let their acceptance of the project help win UoT over.
    (Threatening to have Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie sing the Toronto Song in front of their office probably wouldn't work..

  37. #37
    But what if it was sung by a good barbershop quartet?

  38. #38
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    Originally posted by Scott Jensen
    But what if it was sung by a good barbershop quartet?
    Naaw, Get a popular teen rock group... n'Sync?

    RS&#189;
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  39. #39
    What is the Toronto Song exactly? And can Trolls really sing when they're dead, or do you just mean dismembered?

    Anyhow, yes, of course it would be great if U of T issued a directive that all departments install and run our software, but like I said its a big place and no one, not even the president, has that sort of power to do that (even if you could by some miracle convince him to). You are supposedly the marketing Guru scott, and you have the sam contact info I do, so feel free to write a letter or e-mail or what not and try. I don't have any info on them other than what's on the web site. I don't even know who manages the main www.utoronto.ca web site, but of course I agree it should come up on their search engine. Although technically our domain is mshri.on.ca (Mount Sinai Hospital Research Institute) and not utoronto.ca, so technically none of our stuff is in their domain. If you find anything useful out or need me to go somewhere or see someone in person after you make initial contact that would probably be fine of course.
    Howard Feldman

  40. #40
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    Originally posted by Brian the Fist
    I don't even know who manages the main www.utoronto.ca web site, but of course I agree it should come up on their search engine. Although technically our domain is mshri.on.ca (Mount Sinai Hospital Research Institute) and not utoronto.ca, so technically none of our stuff is in their domain. If you find anything useful out or need me to go somewhere or see someone in person after you make initial contact that would probably be fine of course.
    Yeah, but there is that nice logo on the screensaver that says U of T... so....


    BTW for Scott and Howard, I had to look this up again because I remember seeing an I.S. contact while searching the site. Here's what I came up with:

    Website List
    http://www.library.utoronto.ca/directory/uoftall.htm
    - new_web@library.utoronto.ca


    Ahh... here's a really good link:
    University of Toronto: Network Services Group
    http://www.utoronto.ca/ns/

    Going to staff, its says:
    The Boss: Alex Nishri <alex.nishri@utoronto.ca>

    Peter Ip <peter.ip@utoronto.ca>

    Peter Ip however is the name I frequently saw going through the website when I was searching for contact information.


    To Howard, although the head Dean / President may not have the power, it might be good if you could get his okay to install it on all the open computers at least. Possibly you can get him to convince I.S. to possibly create a script to install on systems if its feasible.

    TTFN,

    RuneStar

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