Decentralized Folding?

[mikeestacio]

I know it's going to take some work and now is not the time to do it but has there ever been a discussion about converting F@H to a decentralized system? Would it be possible?

[JimboPalmer]

The Assignment Servers are at Stanford, the Work Servers are at all the Universitys.

To avoid man in the middle attacks, the client knows the IP addresses of the Assignment Servers and only uses those 2 IP Addresses.

The Assignment Servers in turn call the Work Servers by IP address, again DNS would encourage man in the middle attacks.

Until they got 10 times the volunteers in one week, this worked very well. Now adding more Assignment Servers would require a new client. (3 really, Windows, Mac, and Linux)

[bruce]

What makes you think it's centralized? It's not. Our scietists establish the projects that will be accepted. The researchers are associated with graduate programs at a number of educational institutions. https://foldingathome.org/about/the-fol ... onsortium/

Results are placed in the public domain. We do not participate in private/Corporate research.

No, the assignment servers are NOT at Stanford. Twenty years ago all the servers were there.