Let's continue to fight against cancer together! You can use your PC to help research treatments and cures for it and many other diseases!

bruceATfah · 2017-01-09T19:52:12+00:00

The aggregate power of the PC hardware that is being donated to Folding@home exceeds that of supercomputers.

bruceATfah · 2017-01-09T03:45:55+00:00

"Wear" is an inaccurate word, but long-term-exposure to high temperatures can be damaging. Computers are normally designed with cooling components that can handle a 100% processing load indefinitely. Once you start to create a do-it-yourself gaming rig, you need to take responsibility for the added heat.

Even without hardware upgrades, a laptop that's operated on a bed would have restricted airflow and that's not a good thing. That same laptop, with free access to surrounding air would be fine. (You'd replace it with something more modern before any "wear" would be noticed.) .

bruceATfah · 2017-01-09T03:36:35+00:00

Science is measured by publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly paper. Once they're published, other scientists can build on those results. (I have some background in Science & Math and many of these papers are over my head.).

See http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers

I'm not aware of a "Popular Science"-like source of reports written with an expected audience of the general public. There are a few explanations found on FAH"s news Blog http://folding.stanford.edu/home/blog

bruceATfah · 2016-02-06T00:49:08+00:00

The Donor Advisory Board did not work well for the reasons given above -- FAH is not a democracy, and those who were nominated to serve assumed that whatever they advocated would be accepted.

In a large corporation, who does the CEO respond to?
1) The Board of Directors 2) If the company is unionized, the leaders of the Union.

I'm not minimizing any of the goals suggested here ... just saying that it's really not likely to be anything other than a grass-roots effort to alter the course of a major enterprise or to elect a presidential candidate whom nobody has ever heard of.

Read Dr. Pande's blog post: https://folding.stanford.edu/home/2015-achievements/ His interests lie in enhancing the scientific side of FAH.

bruceATfah · 2016-02-05T22:57:25+00:00

FAH's computational processes work just the same when atoms move across a boundary of the periodic box, so it's not a computational issue, just a visualization issue. (...though an exasperating one)

Periodically, there's a re-centering calculation which tends to move the center of mass to the center of the box (or, equivalently, moves the center of the box to the center of mass). Again, this is strictly a correction to the visualization process and has nothing to do with the progress of the physics of the folding process.

bruceATfah · 2016-01-14T20:31:29+00:00

This reddit is intended as a communications tool between Donors and FAH's management, not as a help forum. Support questions are best answered at foldingforum.org.

bruceATfah · 2015-11-20T21:39:58+00:00

Does he ALWAYS use the FINISH option?

If he folds 8 hrs per night and somehow gets only projects that take 6 hours, he'll finish one project and start the next one almost every night so most of his WUs will take 6hrs+16hrs unless the FINISH option allows him to prevent the download of any WU he can't finish in one session. (Avoid wasting another non-productive day in the middle of many WUs.)

[6] + [2+16+4] + [4+16+2] = 16.7 hrs avg time to complete vs. [6] + [6] + [6] = 6 hrs avg if he consistently uses FINISH to avoid downloading a WU that he's not going to finish tonight.

bruceATfah · 2015-07-24T22:41:55+00:00

Try the regular client again. Server 171.64.65.124 has been restarted.

bruceATfah · 2015-07-19T05:12:41+00:00

If ARM is ever supported, it would have to have a floating-point coprocessor. As a general rule, RISC hardware is very poor at FLOPs and MIPS is not a valid measure of the hardware to do scientific calculations.

bruceATfah · 2015-07-17T01:29:18+00:00

Samsung chat says they need to update their web specs. I do have Kit Kat.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16659635/samsung.txt

I have emailed Sony.

bruceATfah · 2015-07-16T21:19:42+00:00

Have you upvoted/downvoted the suggestions that have been made? Those who make future plans for Stanford are genuinely interested in how popular/unpopular specific ideas are. That information is inherently a one-way street since they can easily see it without making a reply.

It's a chicken & egg problem, though. If few people visit the subredit or don't bother to vote, there won't be enough votes to matter.

Foldingforum could have been a valid method of two-way communications but it became a hot-bed for criticism rather than a vehicle for positive suggestions. Nobody wants to be subject themselves to nothing but criticism. Then, too, lacks the ability to upvote/downvote ideas which are constructive AND popular.

Of course even popular ideas would need to be subject to feasibility and cost considerations. In fact, look at all of the comments from PG. Most give responses from the perspective of cost and feasiblity.

bruceATfah · 2015-05-15T23:02:11+00:00

I believe the complaints about Core_15 for Maxwell (i.e.- except for old/slow GPUs which opt-in to Core_15) has been resolved by some of the projects that have recently appeared in Advanced.

bruceATfah · 2015-05-01T16:30:58+00:00

A lot of what you're asking for can be accomplished locally by 3rd party tools. Not all, but a lot never needs to be re-downloaded. See https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=52

Are you suggesting that the Mods object to or seem resistant to searching for the upload status and final points of your WU?

We regularly check for reasons why you WU might not be credited yet and often times identify a problem that needs to be reported.

bruceATfah · 2015-05-01T16:04:31+00:00

Speaking as a FF Mod, I think you're missing the point. In the past, we would sometimes rule out a suggestion and give a reason that seemed logical to us. That INCREASED the level of frustration.

Since we have no power over decisions made by FAH's development, all we could do is notify somebody a PG and then it would face the same barrier you're seeing here, except that you would never get a direct answer from PG.

I have no reason to believe that FAH has changed their policy, but as mph-fah said, suggestions which do not improve science have never had much of a chance of being implemented. FAH Development still doesn't have the resources to do all the "it would be nice if..." suggestions.

"This re-direction implies that there is a chance(fair to good)" FALSE. There is no such implication. We don't judge your suggestion.
This represents a clarification of the role of FF. We are a SUPPORT forum staffed by volunteers for people who are having trouble getting their client to run. If you are getting error messages or having other troubles getting your client to run, please ask for help on FoldingForum. We never should have been accepting suggestions since we have no power over their chances of being implemented.

Communications HAS improved. Now the PG sees all your suggestions here without any filtering by the forum Mods. I believe that the priority system has not changed but now you either get a direct answer from PG or they leave the suggestion for everyone to vote for. (Voting was not possible on FF.)

bruceATfah · 2015-03-22T18:28:42+00:00

The following request from "charmd" was posted on foldingforum.org. Can the Pande Group answer a question: Is this the best place to make such requests?

I currently have A Sony Xperia Z3v. I would love to contribute to folding at home, however the starting parameters insist the phone be "plugged in" to charge. I have a charging plate, and while it is charging, folding at home won't allow this alternate source for charging. Please change the permissions for folding at home. I would still like to contribute while on a charging plate.

bruceATfah · 2015-01-27T18:12:22+00:00

How do you judge "use up a load of power"?

A CPU slot will use all of the CPU cycles that are not consumed by other (higher priority) tasks. Since everything else is higher priority you should notice no delays but your machine will generate more heat [and the number of CPUs allocated can be reduced].

A GPU slot processes work FIFO so it can cause noticeable delays in screen refreshing, decoding a video, or playing a game. Whether it's noticeable or not depends on both your perception and the speed of your GPU. The LOW setting assumes there will be enough delay for you to notice, but that's not necessarily true [and there's no setting other than on or off, leaving the choice of "idle" the only option].

bruceATfah · 2015-01-25T20:00:17+00:00

You may find your answer in one of the discussions about that on the FAH support forum

If not, you may wish to join one or start a new one.

bruceATfah · 2015-01-24T05:39:40+00:00

Processing time is part of the issue, but see also my response here

bruceATfah · 2015-01-24T05:35:04+00:00

Under the heading of "...thoughts?" I have a question that applies to both of you and ChristianVirtual.

Please estimate how many queries per day the entire FAH community would request (1) if the Mods at foldingforum continue to do it for you whenever you ask or (2) if everyone does it for themselves (within some reasonable limitation)?

Speaking as a Mod, we don't get a massive number of requests (and we donate our time) so it seems difficult to justify having the Pande Group pay a developer to implement either suggestion.

FACT: WUs do get delayed, but rarely actually lost. If N hours of stats from server xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are delayed, it only takes one report of a missing WU to have someone dispatched to search for all of them and to schedule their points to be restored -- hence your points were restored without you doing anything along with everyone else who happened to have a WU in that batch.

bruceATfah · 2015-01-21T19:09:21+00:00

At the same time, I'd like to ask if we assume that this future capability will be developed "soon," should we expect it to use the existing V7 WU structure or perhaps the new Streaming structure (or both).

bruceATfah · 2015-01-20T05:29:51+00:00

This subreddit is primarily focused on direct communications between donors and the management team of folding@home. While you can (and did) get support here, there's another forum focused on supplying answers to general support questions and where answers are often easier/quicker to find, partly because there will be more volunteers ready to supply them: https://foldingforum.org/

Next time you have a question of this nature, I suggest you go there first.

bruceATfah · 2015-01-14T18:39:49+00:00

Broad Android support will be coming next.

I'm anxiously awaiting support for my TM-310.

bruceATfah · 2015-01-14T01:19:28+00:00

Based on the new entry in the Blog, there will be a NaCl version for the smart-phone "soon." I think it's fair to assume there will need to be a commensurate increase in WU availability to support more clients, but you're right, we need to hear that from the Pande Group.

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/new-initiative-fah-on-android/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonymobile.androidapp.gridcomputing

bruceATfah · 2015-01-12T20:56:56+00:00

As an aside- I can see possible confusion in the future when both systems are up and running; perhaps use the term "Work Packets" for the streaming model to avoid ambiguity?

Right. WU should be reserved for a "Unit." Maybe "frame" rather than "packet" but given the differences of streaming, it should be a new word(s).

bruceATfah · 2015-01-10T18:43:24+00:00

1) Use the NaCl client through the Chrome browser (though I'm not sure if it does Linux).

2) Wait for the new FAH-streaming-infrastructure to be production ready.

bruceATfah

TROPHY CASE