When will the folding at home project finish?

[ollie1983]

Please excuse me for the bone questions, I am completely new to folding, having only recently learned about distributed computing and began folding on my own gaming machine only yesterday.

Since then I have been discussing the project with my father law whom is a (formerly very senior) retired doctor and he is keen to get into the act, only we will build or buy a dedicated monster folding machine for the job.

My only question however, is how long will the folding project continue? It began in 2000 as I understand but it there an end game or end goal in sight? And if so, when do you think this will occur?

My father in law has participated in a similar project many years ago where a collection of people ran their PCs flat out for 6 months, but the project was then completed. I have tried to explain that I don't believe Folding at home is going to be a task that will be completed as rapidly.

I have numerous hardware questions but shall post them in another more relevant section.

Thanks

[bruce]

Research projects never "end"

When research finds the answers to a question, it almost always generates new question.
Also, FAH started some 15 years ago on very small proteins. Hardware advances and software enhancements have made it possible to study somewhat larger proteins, but they represent only a small fraction of mid-sized and larger proteins that they'd like to study.

[ollie1983]

Thank you, so in theory a modern rig could be usefully employed for the next 10 years and still make a worthwhile contribution in that time?

[bruce]

Yep.

[bruce]

The Pentium series was introduced in 1993 and if you still have one, it still runs, though its throughput is dwarfed by more recent hardware and most serious Donors consider its results to be not worth the electricity to run them. In fact once FAH incorporated software that would run on GPUs, even the production by current generation CPUs is avoided by many.

Then, too, the generational progress of GPUs seems to move much faster that the generational progress of CPUs so it's hard to predict what you'll want 10 years from now.

[toTOW]

As long as FAH (and partner labs) will get funding and grants for their research, the project won't end ...

[Wrigley]

Research projects never "end"

Yep, finding the answer to one thing always leads to more questions which means more progress!