

Ask HN: Anybody here active on folding at home ? - jacquesm

Folding at home is <i>the</i> example of a community effort.<p>Users are donating copious amount of CPU time (and power) to the Stanford University project in order to help with the study of diseases, I figure at this moment that value of that donation is roughly 250K cpus each consuming about 100 watts, at 10cts per KWh about $2500 every hour, or about $22 million annually (the 250K cpus is a 2008 figure).<p>At this moment the list of diseases studied is:<p>- Alzheimers<p>- Huntingtons<p>- Cancer<p>- Parkinsons<p>- general antibiotics<p>- Osteogensis imperfecta<p>Folding@home promises that the results and datasets will be made public:<p>"Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles that analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site. "<p>Currently there are 69 papers listed that use f@h results, according to http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers , quite a few of those are not accessible to the general public, of a small sample out of the 69 papers listed 7 were accessible and 10 were not.<p>There is only one dataset available for download:<p>https://simtk.org/home/foldvillin<p>So far it seems that Stanford is not living up to its promise to share the results of the folding at home project.<p>What are your thoughts on this?
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epall
The difference in power consumption between an idle CPU and a maxed-out CPU is
appreciable. I stopped doing Folding@home, distributed.net, etc when I
discovered my old AMD 2500+ sucked an extra 30 watts when pegged. That was a
desktop chip! I suspect it's even worse with the new mobile=>desktop chips
these days. If electricity is free and you don't care about inhaling more
mercury due to coal burning, go ahead and run it all you want.

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habs
Whenever I go for a walk, I normally leave folding@home running. If you have a
particularly powerful GPU you can run folding@home using your GPU, which
yields better results. If you're interested in GPU folding, I would recommend
checking out Bit-techs features on folding ( [http://www.bit-
tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/06/15/what-is...](http://www.bit-
tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/06/15/what-is-folding-and-why-does-it-
matter/1)

[http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2009/08/03/how-to-build-the-
bes...](http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2009/08/03/how-to-build-the-best-folding-
rig/1) )

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sbhat7
I have been running <http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/> which has similar
goals.

Some of its stats are - <http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewGlobal.do>

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mr_dbr
What exactly has Folding@home achieved in the time it's been running (about 8
years now)?

It's a nice concept (using idle CPU time to help cure diseases!), but the
papers on the F@H site doesn't exactly inspire me -
<http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers> \- quite a few seem to be about
the F@H itself (like "N-Body simulation on GPUs"), they're hardly
"Folding@home cures suchandsuch disease"..

Then again I'm not a molecular scientist, and I don't understand half of the
words in those titles...

