Response to folding question

Again, we have a guy with one hell of a lot of money buying a load of high end hardware that anyone can do - apart from the PS3 brigade, how many people who fold can't build a computer? Exactly.

The only clever thing he has done is the networking to make managing them easier! And I do admit I am rather impressed by that.

With your car, we have another flawed analogy. If I buy a computer, tweak it, overclock it, then get to game on it, woop! I have spent money, tweaked it and now get to use the benefits. If I buy a car, tweak it, tune it, then get to drive it, again woop! I have a fun car to drive that is my personal baby.

As to whether you could create a killer £5k folding rig, of course you can, you can build a computer! It is not like it is very hard to do, it took me maybe half and hour to get everything running but that is because I am an ass and didn't read the instructions.

As to "practicing", building a computer is hardly rocket science - it is just like giant Lego and my first one probably took me a couple of hours. Overclocking certainly take practice, at least squeezing the last drops of performance out of a system but none of the "folding farms" I have yet seen actually use overclocked components.

edit: Unicron posted whilst I was writing so I am off to read his thread now too. In response to "I hope that you are realizing that you can't just barge into the folding forum and post your frankly unfounded and inaccurate opinions and expect anyone to agree with you. Maybe you didn't expect people to agree with you, and if not then I have no idea why you would want to voice such a strong opinion among dozens of dedicated folders who do so much for the project." I don't expect everyone to agree with me at all, that is why I asked. I want to know why people do it as I have said. As it turns out, most of my opinions about it have so far turned out to be correct and this thread has only served to cement them.

edit2: Unicorn, you certainly seem to have put a lot of effort into getting your farm going and again, I am impressed with your effort however, whilst I do agree that your process has not been quick, you can still get essentially insta-gain from folding.

Your farm does seem rather more interesting than most though

 

What instructions are there to read?

Why do we fold? I fold to help find a cure for cancer, parkinsons and everything else that's caused by misfolding proteins.
The points are only their to give people something to show for their work that's immediate. It take hundreds if not thousands of hours to simulate less than a second of this work.
Why do we invest all this time and money on equipment & electricity? Because we can. Sure I could give the £6k I spend on electricity to a charity that works on this but 80%+ would be swallowed in admin & the rest wouldn't do half as much as I can do with my kit.

A lot of good work has come out of the results we produce, without these results we'd be miles away from a cure (after all you can't have a cure without knowing what is the cause).

Building a folding farm is so different from building just another computer, lots of work goes in to the stability & hardware/software/driver choices. We work on maximum efficiency and reliability not just how fast can it run if it's only on 2 hours at a time.
How many people on these forums with overclocked machines can say their machine has been on 24/7 for months on end, running at 100% on all major components and not crashed?

You've got a half decent rig in your sig, why not join us, see if you like it and it interests you?
It's worth it for the banter alone.

 

There are instructions on how to get the GPU client working and fahmon, both of which are helpful (particularly fahmon as that is a bit more complicated).
As I said in my first post, I have joined you!
Has this actually got any actual results yet?

edit: they have! http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers well, some research papers at least.

 

Didn't see that in the first post, welcome aboard.

FAHMON is nice and easy to use locally or over the network. Across multiple sites is fun (although works well). IT's even easier when you know you can drop the client folder on to FAHMON and it does it for you.
Look out for issue 70 in the shops next week with loads of folding guides

 

Heaven Forbid that you consider folding, in a competitive spirit, to help in the search for a cure for parkinson's or Alzheimer's! What a silly idea.

 

It's obvious which side of the argument I fall on so I won't belabor my points.

I have made a deliberate decision to spend my money on Folding instead of frivolous hobbies. I could much more easily have bought a car, 6 jet skis, or one hell of a ski boat. None of which would have anything like the daily upkeep of my farm. I will quote myself on my blog atlasfolding.com.

That's why I do it. If my reasons aren't sufficient for you then so be it, people have different perspectives on things, but if you think I do it just to see a big number at the end of the day you're quite mistaken.

The Stats:

My farm's current draw is approximately 11,000 Watts continuous.

There is 33,400 Kilowatt Hours of energy in a gallon of gasoline. [Reference]

My farm then uses the electrical energy equivalent of 7.92 gallons of gasoline per day, 55.44 per week, 1,663 per month, 19,960 per year.

American Airlines alone consumes 95 gallons of kerosene per second [Reference], which means that American Airlines exceeds Atlas Folder's annual energy use every 3 minutes.

A Boeing 767 consumes 9,000 gallons of jet fuel (kerosene), which is 10% more energy-dense than gasoline to travel one-way from New York to Las Vegas [Reference] carrying a load of 181 [Reference] partygoers looking to fritter away their weekend. It burns 9,000 gallons carrying them back. 18,000 gallons of kerosene in air travel alone for the 181 people; this says nothing of the amount of energy that they consume while gambling in Las Vegas.

During the year my farm will produce approximately 250,000 Folding@Home work units. Putting a value on the WUs is impossible as their perceived value clearly varies from person to person (hence this discussion).

Jason Farque
(aka Atlas Folder)

 

People appear to disagreeing with your stance in every possible post thats not yours in this thread, and you believe your 'correct'?

On an aside how can your opinon be correct?. The two words are a complete contradiction. An opinion is "a personal view, attitude, or appraisal" dictionary.com, so surely thats never correct or incorrect, merely a personal standpoint on something.

It may be a finicky point I raise but after 3 pages of posts trying to put our points across you still believe your 'correct'. Synonym: 'right' thesaurus.com

And what really took the biscuit is that if your 'right' ergo, all these fine people who have posted against you with a different opinion must be, by default, 'incorrect'. Synonym: 'wrong' thesaurus.com

Don't after posts that clearly have taken some people a while to write turn round and go "well chaps, after all of that I guess I was right all along"

 

An opinion is what someone believes. I still have the same opinion that I had before which is that I believe the money would be better spent elsewhere. What this thread has helped me to do is understand better why people disagree with me, something which I think is very helpful so I thank all the people who have posted constructive replies.

 

Thank you all, for not letting this thread descend into an unpleasant flame-war.

 

I say we close it before it does, though...

 

There's no reason for it to, we're all mature here!

 

Agreed with all three of the above. It seems to have basically finished anyway.

 

The reason I have recently started folding is because it is the most efficient means of giving to charity that I could think of. Most major charity organisations employ staff, have subcontractors for various areas of their work and administration overheads. All of these extra costs are necessary and I'm not having a dig at more conventional forms of charity, its all good obviously. My point is that every cent of my leccy bill will be going directly into a few million calculations which aid top level research aimed at developing treatments for diseases which all too often ruin lives as well as take them.

Obviously I'm also interested in tech and enjoy the challenge of putting together systems in innovative ways to make them as efficient as possible. I'm also a physics student and the computational science involved is both cutting-edge and (to me) extremely interesting.

I may not have the deeply personal motivation that many folders have but whether you arrive at the decision to try and lessen suffering through rational or emotional means, it is still a noble goal.

I do find it a little sad that some people seem to have such little faith in humanity that they can't believe that people would undertake folding as a selfless act. And no, that last sentence was not aimed at anyone in particular (I'm on night shift, its 6am here and I've been awake for 24 hours so am possibly rambling )

 

^reported, but on the off chance that that is not just advertising, what are you trying to say?
ur 3nl15h m4k35 n0 53n53 70 m3, sry (I am not very good at this am I?)

edit: OK, there was a post by a new user with a couple of advertising links, and some very bad text speak English saying something that I didn't understand.

 

?

It reads fine to me, no need to drag this thread up though

 

I agree with Deadpunkdave on efficient use of mony for research. At my age you see your friends and others dying from these causes, in the last 4 years I have lost 7 to cancer, one last night, 2 to strokes,and I have 2 in homes thanks to Altzimeur's, That is why I donate part of my pension to folding. I enjoy building things,and whilst I have the capability to build computers it is a challenge to get the sofware side of it going, it keeps my brain active though.

 

Very sorry to hear that Taffy, I hope that the ability to help combat these diseases helps you through.

 

Thanks DPD for the sentiment, the friend that passed away yeterday had cancer of the liver, I have known him for about 11 years, and spoke to him every monday to friday on my amateur radio, yes I will miss him, he worked on the Decca navigation system,set up in France 2 days after D day

 

Here's constructive I fold because I chose to for all the reasons posted postively above and thats my choice I sacrifice family holidays and a lot more and will continue for as long as i possibly can.
Science could eventually save a lot of people from suffering in there quality of life.
I have already lost a god son to Brain Cancer did not even make his 4th birthday we had to have it early.
My Mothers new Husband who I gave my Mum away to at a wedding at a Sue Rhyder home died a week later younger than myself and 12 hours aftre my son was born.

Enough said its late and a couple of beers dont ease the anguish!

 

i fold both for the science and also the competition.
there may not be a prize for moving up through the ranks but never the less it is somewhat enjoyable.
i haven't bought any extra hardware but being a tech i tend to have alot of hardware lying around from various idea's that never quite got finished.

as for not being as efficient as a "local supercomputer" if you look at the top500 list for super computers you will see that 90% of them are clusters which is pretty much what is accomplished by using distributed computing, u might also want to note that the number 1 most powerful is the FAH project.