Folding Forum

At the current rate of folding, when will there be nothing left to fold? Will there come a time when we will temporarily have nothing to fold because we're waiting for someone to prepare a new project?

I know that a few other distributed computing projects have run into this problem. Fortunately F@h hasn't so far. If you look at the server page you'll see that there's a significant number of WUs waiting to be folded. If the scientists stopped adding new projects, I have no idea how long it would take the servers to go dry. I suspect that specific platforms would have problems before others, since some WUs are designed to run on certain platforms and not others.

The protein folding problem continues, so theoretically there will always be more work to do.

At the current participation levels, I don't think there's any danger of running out of work. The only time I've seen anything of the sort was a few occasions where there were no more bigadv WUs to do, but that was an unusual case because bigadv has few projects compared to other project types and at the time any i7 could run bigadv, meaning there were far more clients requesting those WUs than expected.

I know Dr. Pande said a while ago that the project could scale up to something like a million donors or clients (can't remember which, quick forum search didn't find it) without too much work on their end. At the current level of ~158k active pieces of hardware, we're well below that figure, whatever it was. And I'd imagine that if there were a sudden surge in popularity and that figure was approached, they'd find a way to take advantage of that rather than letting hardware sit idle. While the work they've done so far is impressive, it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to all the potential knowledge out there.

Maybe foolish but you have to admit some of us donors can make it a PITA.

Don't worry - we have a LOT things planned. Part of the reason we're doing a huge core re-rewrite is so we can expose all of the new features being incorporated into OpenMM - including polarizable force fields, custom bonds, etc.

Will we see that rewrite any time soon?

Soon.

PG will undoubtedly tell us when it is ready. ETA's don't work. Most things take longer than expected and giving a date just gives an opportunity for people to complain when the deadline passes.

Jesse_V wrote:The protein folding problem continues, so theoretically there will always be more work to do.

Scientists cannot predict that we'll ever run out of work. There are a lot of proteins that are too big to study with today's hardware -- and then there are interactions between proteins to be studied, etc.

That doesn't guarantee that you'll always get an assignment, though. Every research project starts with a proposal which is reviewed by several people before it's approved. Thus it's POSSIBLE that new projects might not always be approved before older ones end, but I've only occasional gaps when a there was a lull in projects for a particular platform.

codysluder wrote:Will we see that rewrite any time soon?

Soon

Is "Soon" a registered trademark of the Pande Group, or may I use it myself?

csvanefalk wrote:Is "Soon" a registered trademark of the Pande Group, or may I use it myself?

I'm pretty sure it has a special meaning here, and it mainly means that it's sooner than "not soon". Those are the two ETAs. If a moron in a hurry can differentiate between your "soon" and the PG's "soon", you're probably fine. It might be safer to say something like "within one week", or "by Christmas", etc.

Exciting times ahead, soon

proteneer wrote:Soon

Hopefully not relevant

Well, its still better than Duke nukem forever time!!