Atlas Folding

I had a wonderful time in San Jose and got to see a lot of really amazing technology both in hardware in software.  The high performance computer market is poised to genuinely explode in the not too distant future.  In case you haven’t heard, that what Jen-Hsun Huang is actually brandishing in my previous post is a mock-up of a GT300 and not the real thing.  It’s been something of a dust-up on the GPU sites.  Personally, while I suppose I do feel a bit duped since I had spent considerable money to be sitting in that chair when I took the photograph, I really don’t care.  The tech is real and is coming and will benefit the science.  Besides, I’ve been to enough trade shows in support of my own company to know that sometimes things just aren’t quite ready in time for the show.

Perhaps the highlight of my trip was the early evening visit that I was able to pay to the Pande Labs.  My friend John Van Arnam who is a post-doc student at Stanford was kind enough to show me around a little bit, introduce me to some of his friends and take me by the Labs.  Afterwards we had sushi followed by gelati with his lovely and charming wife.  What more can you ask for really?

Boo!

It’s been hard for my family to watch my father’s decline since the end of the ACR16 trial (now named Huntexil^TM).  While my father is stoic, it is apparent even to people outside the family that his chorea has worsened without the drug.  It often seems hard or even impossible for him to focus on a conversation now.

So it was very exciting for us to receive word through the HDAC forums that NeuroSearch is making the drug available for “Compassionate Use” in Europe and the United States for persons that have gone through the trial.  This basically means that anyone that has trialed the drug can continue to receive the drug until it is made available via prescription.  It is up to the pharmaceutical company to decide whether to charge for it or not, but NeuroSearch is offering it free of charge to those qualified.

To get the details on the status of this availability here in the United States I phoned Denmark very early this morning and was forwarded to the Clinical Project Leader for the Huntexil trial.  After calling me back an hour later I was pleased to find that she was very gracious; she spoke to me for several minutes regarding the status of Huntexil for Compassionate Use.  I was told that NeuroSearch has never gone through the American process for getting a drug certified for Compassionate Use and that apparently there were multiple ways of getting it done; they were not yet sure of which was was best for this drug.  It is unfortunate news that the process has not yet begun, but I was encouraged a bit by her saying that I was the first person to have contacted her from the United States and that it was significant to her and that she would redouble her efforts on getting the drug approved here in the USA.

If you are reading this and have Huntington’s disease or someone in your family does, I encourage you to go through the drug trial for ACR16 if you are able (especially now that you will soon be provided continued use after the trial under Compassionate Use).  Slow enrollment in the trial is causing the American process for drug approval to drag out years longer than it needs to.

Here is the list of sites in the United States and Canada where the trial is taking place, and if you would like some help getting started with it just drop me a line, I’ll be glad to help.

My father, Tony, has always had a scientific mind. When he was young he built model rockets for which he mixed his own fuel. He and his friends would judge how good the fuel mixture was by how big a hole it could blow in the vacant lot (his younger brother Roger still contends that one of his rockets was responsible for burning down a local charcoal plant some 50 years ago, but dad says there’s no proof). Tony’s always been inquisitive, industrious and very smart and he did his best to impart that to me. I like to think he did a pretty good job.

Tony is able to walk with the aid of a rolling walker. Even with his walker he walks stiffly, knees locked, so that if his brain suddenly tells his leg muscles to let go he might be able to catch himself before he collapses to the floor; he still falls twice a day.

So when my mother presented Tony with the possibility of entering a clinical trial for a new dopamine stabilizing drug known as ACR16, my father handled it the way that I expected that he would. He decided that he’d like to be involved. The trial duration is only 13 weeks, so even if he doesn’t get the placebo and it actually does help to reduce his chorea it will be only fleeting. But for Tony any relief from the constant wrestling with his own body would be only a bonus.

No, the reason that my father is enrolled in the trial is the same as the reason I run my folding farm. To fight back, to do something. To help science overcome Huntington’s Disease so that people as yet unborn won’t have as hard a time as he and others do. Because my father wants the human race to succeed, to get better, to overcome our bodies’ inherent frailties by using our minds.

Watching my father willingly go hundreds of miles out of his way to find himself in a room full of family and strangers to struggle and fail with a coordination test as basic as sticking out his own tongue has been very humbling.  The experience has forever changed they way that I perceive myself and this project. It has been quite simply demonstrated to me that no matter how big, fast, or expensive Atlas Folder ever gets, it can never be as significant as the sacrifices made by people like my father Tony.

There’s a scene in the film “Ocean’s 11″ where Brad Pitt’s character is asked if he’s suicidal.  He replies, “Only in the morning.”  That’s me.

I’m not a morning person. Ask anyone that knows me. Heck I’m not even particularly civil until I’ve had two cups of coffee or it’s after 10:30am. Sometimes not even then. Nevertheless I was up at 6:00am this morning to meet the electricians who were upgrading the power in my little server room. I stood and watched and chugged coffee wishing I had a donut and talked to them about it all…  The upshot is I won’t be throwing any breakers for a long, long time — 12 20-Amp circuits.

Next I received four more GTX295 boards from newegg to put into a new shelf, and then after lunch the sides to my 19″ rack arrived!

That gave me a lot to do so tonight I took Atlas Folder down for a few hours, neatened the system up, assembled and mounted the new power strips, put the sides on the rack and built up the new shelf system. This brings my total count of GTX295s to 15 — 13 in the rack and 2 at home (30 GPUs total), plus a single GTX260 (it’s so cute!) and mom’s PS3.

So here are some new photos, one of FahMon showing just the GPUs and SMPs running in the rack.  186,000+ PPD at that point in time. Some photos of the new and improved rack and a screenshot of the web interface to the APC power strips.  Being able to see current draw is just too handy.

For those that care, you can see in FahMon that I’m running with the -advmethods switch on and have quite a few of the GPUs executing FahCore_14 on P5900 WUs.

Overclocking tomorrow!

The Huntington’s Disease Society of America has a Research News piece up about a clinical trial for a Huntington’s Disease drug called ACR16.  My mother, always on the prowl for ways in which help my father Tony, spotted it and talked to my dad about getting in.  My father accepted the idea and has enrolled in the trial which has a duration of 13 weeks.

ACR16 is a dopamine stabilizer which has shown to improve Huntington’s patients’ voluntary motor functions such as gait and balance, hand functionality and parkinsonism. My father will have a 25% chance of being in a placebo group, or a 25% chance of being in one of three different dosage level groups of the drug.

I’m hopeful that my father will see some benefit from the drug, but of course you can’t know for sure. My biggest fear for my dad is that he will get the drug and it will help him significantly — because after 13 weeks it won’t be available to him anymore and watching him regress would be very hard. His attitude seems quite good about it though, and being the practical engineer that he is he’s just hopeful that his contribution will help others in the future.

Me too.

Today AtlasFolder will pass DiverGuy on my folding team HUNT-DIS to take the number one position.

While I’m proud of my contribution to Folding@Home I feel I have to take the time to thank DiverGuy and mwbrownibm on the HUNT-DIS team for their longstanding and important contributions to the cause. Both of these gentlemen and others on the HUNT-DIS team have been folding since before it was cool in order to reach their point totals and I want them to know that I sincerely appreciate all that they’ve done for the cause of Huntington’s Disease and Folding@Home in general.

Thank you guys very much!