1.5 BILLION PPD.... One user

[Demmers]

I fold with Team Atto now with my piddly GTX 1650. About 600,000 PPD.
I thought i'd have a look at the team numbers.
Looks like a couple of users have invested their entire lives savings into renting GPU's in the cloud. I say GPU's. More like, they rented a supercomputer.

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... &t=1066107

[pcwolf]

Just saw this yesterday, that 1.7 billion player came out of nowhere about to overtake my five years plus thirty billion in a couple of days.

Ouch

[BobWilliams757]

Yeah, I noticed it the other day. I think it's fairly insane to invest so much in cloud folding unless it's profitable. Even then it seems like a big chunk of money to throw at something all at once.

Being that most of these extreme cases are those on the crypto or coin based teams I can only assume they are hoping to cash in at some point and actually profit. But some people on other teams already fold some fairly insane numbers as well.

[enroscado]

I was also very curious, so I did some rough numbers (more like I went down the rabbit hole)...

At some point, that user was folding with 37 clients, averaging slightly over 40m PPD per client, therefore likely 37 5090s.

Cheapest 16 x 5090 I've found online go for ~$10/hour. 2 clusters = 32 => ~$20/hour.
Cheapest 4 x 5090 ~$1.5/hour.

So, 36 5090s would be ~$516 per day (best case scenario).

The user was getting ~3,000,000 Atto coins per day on his best days (~2billion+ PPD).

Atto was trading at around $0.0001 (now it's a bit lower). Traded at $0.0002 for a very brief period of time.

So, best case scenario, the user made $300 per day. Basically, not close to braking even.

Finally, the user's folding power varied significantly over time (not constantly folding).

Ergo, my conclusion, it is someone with access to a lot of GPUs for other tasks (AI/Machine learning), and put them to fold whenever the GPUs were idling.

As a side piece of knowledge gained, I learnt about Atto (and banano, etc.), which I knew nothing about before, and I think those crypto projects are pretty cool (distributing / rewarding with coins by f@h), as they end up adding folding power instead of just wasting electricity.

[toTOW]

Don't worry too much, it will be another shooting star ...

[Joe_H]

They have already stopped folding, at least for now. Possibly someone with access to a new bank of servers and was running folding to stress test them.

[Joe_H]

As a side piece of knowledge gained, I learnt about Atto (and banano, etc.), which I knew nothing about before, and I think those crypto projects are pretty cool (distributing / rewarding with coins by f@h), as they end up adding folding power instead of just wasting electricity.

Just a clarification, they do not get coins for folding by or from F@h. Those are strictly team awards, Folding@home neither provides, supports, nor endorses any cryptocurrency as part of folding. The project just awards points. There is a statement on this posted by the director of the project - https://foldingathome.org/2019/01/14/fo ... urrencies/