Download This Virus | Hacker Noon

Donating Compute to Fight COVID-19

@knewman: I’ve been struggling to think about how I can help in all of this given that I know about as much about medicine or biology as I do about power tools (embarrassingly little). It’s also hard to be “socially distant” and do something useful at the same time 😄. My mom, for instance, knows how to sew, so she’s joining a community group sewing emergency facemasks. I know compute, so I was excited to hear that I can redirect my many home computers and servers at something useful: [email protected] 

Kevin’s heads up in #general quickly got us thinking about how we might do even better putting PEAK6 machines to work too. 

What is [email protected]?

Downloading Viruses for Good

And that’s pretty much it. You can configure how much load and when to run, but otherwise, the FAHClient runs in the background picking up new work as it’s assigned. Also, you might notice the client idling a bit before getting assigned work. There were over 400,000 new downloads of the [email protected] software last week, so a lot more scheduling is going on and they’re working on making sure all this compute gets put to use. 

Better with a Pinch of SALT

Now, installing the [email protected] client on a few machines is pretty easy, but what if you have to install it on a lot of machines? At PEAK6 we’re all about automation and repeatable builds, deploys, patching, etc. It allows us to quickly deliver our software as well as easily maintain all the parts and pieces that make up the various systems supporting our trading platform. It’s also really cool.  

In Salt, configuration is expressed in a Salt State module or YAML file that describes how the system should be configured. Here’s a quick example of folding-at-home.sls: 

{# Folding At Home Defaults #} 
{%- set fah_client_version = ‘7.4.4_amd64’ %} 
{%- set fah_control_version = ‘7.4.4-1_all’ %} 

fah: 
  pkg.installed: 
    - pkgs: 
      - fahclient: {{ fah_client_version }} 
      - fahcontrol: {{ fah_control_version }} 
 
  service.running: 
    - name: FAHClient 
   
  file.managed: 
    - name: /etc/fahclient/config.xml 
    - user: fah_user 
    - group: fah_group 
    - mode: 644 
    - source: 
      - salt://ubuntu-common/files/etc/fahclient/config.xml 

The first three lines call out variables for the versions of the client and
control software. The next defines a state call `fah` with three
specifics: 1) the packages to install, 2) the services that should be
running after the install, and 3) a managed file, which in this case is a [email protected] configuration. Once we have this state defined, we can apply it throughout our environments as needed, pretty cool huh? 

Works in Docker / K8s Too

It’s 10PM, Do You Know What Your Computers Are Doing?

We do! After automating out the [email protected] deployment on March 22, we had a pretty good showing even though it was our first run of it. The stats show us in the top 10% of donors for the day with a rank of 198,009 out of 2,294,579!  

Finance by Day, Folding by Night 

PEAK6 Capital Management is a market liquidity provider. That means we commit our energy, time, talent, and capital, to provide orderly and transparent stock and option markets. These markets create the liquidity customers and the overall market desperately need especially now with all the volatility and disruption caused by COVID-19. 

A Quick Note on Security

As a quick note, we set up the [email protected] project using the same restrictions and heavily audited profile we apply to our end-user desktop group. This is neat because other than installing the software, there are no extra firewall, proxy, or security configurations you’ll need to tweak in most
cases. [email protected] is pull-based with the client configured to direct communications to trusted servers at Stanford and digital signatures to verify the validity of all folding input and output. There is a remote access feature for expert users to enable across many clients, but out of the box, this is disabled and locks down communication to localhost. 

References