Folding@Home needs a reality check, possible a less=more plan.

[D.Record]

Howdy,

Im been participating with folding@home since 2003, and i donated 813 WU's or 125,732,757 Points just over the last couple of months, but i don't think i can donate any more, its because of implications of the cost of electricity for domestic users.

I came back in to this hobby with some enthusiasm and joking maybe i could run more GPU's, and its true i could run 4 maybe, but as electronics engineer i should have remembered the power consumption implications that hide away even for just 1 GPU.

The folding@home community had a boost in recruitment over covid, but has dropped to dedicated donators who are made up supporters who use it to either show off there processing power while donating, take advantage of systems idling away, or users that use cpu's to donate micro amounts and have been for 20 years.

It seems to me, and forgive me if im mistaken, that the science community that depends on the donations have come to accept that GPU users are just making use of wasted processing time, but the fact is that the WU's are gpu intensive and the cause higher power demands.

I feel the bonuses are linked with performance profiles for each hardware, and so when a system performance is restricted the bonus level of points falls, and is based soly on turbo completion of WU's.

If a user has a micro hyro power generator on there land, and they can use some of that power to power a computer its a win win senario, but most users can not achieve that, wind power and solar power at domestic setups can not power the levels often needed for 1080 TI system.

Power is expensive, and computer hardware is using more of it. People can debate that newer cards can generate more PPD than smaller GPU cards, but the cards are still using more power than the smaller cards.

I propose that the science community is going to need to plan for less, and forgive me again if this already the case, because originally WU's were completed by CPU's, and over the years CPU's have improved in efficiency while delivery more processing power, but in comparision of GPU's the amounts of ppd is small.

I think its a similar challenge to money donations when people pay by card. People are given the choice to donate 50p or not. I reason that most people find 50p to much so they donate occasionally, but if the amount was 5p most people donate more often. Say a 1000 transactions at 5p x 1000 = £50, or 5,000p. Whats more 50p or £50.

Im going to look at building a micro folding@home system and if i can, say a 50W an hour power consumption. Imagine if every house hold in the world could donate less than 25W to 50W toward folding@home we would record levels of distributed computing power.

Perhaps we need even smaller wu's ?

Thanks to AI and its high computer hardware & power demands, it could change the status quo of what we sore as normal for computer hardware standards for the considerable future.

Any how, good luck eveyone.
Dave Record

[muziqaz]

You are free to not participate, same as others are free to not participate, or use whatever they like to use. FAH will not ban the use of power hungry hardware. FAH will not downsize, just because someone's electricity bill is high. Smaller Wus will achieve absolutely nothing, since people will still fold them on GPUs, and just finish more of those smaller WUs with the same electricity usage as before. Instead now, those smaller WUs will smash the servers to oblivion, and those will use more power than normal.
No one is going to plan for less. Researchers are under deadlines, and grant money obligations. Not a single grant provider is gonna come out and say: hey guys enjoy the money, and relax, send out one Wu per day, we have time... and money...

[D.Record]

I agree that people are free participate or not, and i did say forgive if im mistaken, okay i see now there is implications thank you for pointing them out.

I did not imply banning GPUs or restricting them, that was not my point, my point was that higher power consumption expectations stop as many users donating processing power, which forgive me again if thats not the selling point of distributed computing.

I find that new users to folding@home with GPU run to a simple problem, which is the card goes turbo and the temperatures go through the roof of whats normal, they either learn to throttle it back, they stop participating or they end up with a hardware failure.

I think the bill payers of the electricity bill notice first that there is a problem, and then its a question of how much is too much.

My reasoning was that more users, more combined computing power than just the mega folders alone....

Im not sure your helping the argument by talking about grants, the donators are not paid so many pence or cents per WU, but hey thats not bad idea getting paid.

To fairness, your not a normal small contributor muziqaz, you completed about 20 million points in last 24 hours, you had 6 clients running over the last 7 days. You could be a IT admin, researcher, receiving benefits, living in minnesota, since your using multiple systems, which makes me wonder who is paying for the electricity. You have been around since at least 2004, your a hardcore donator.

Let me ask you this retarical question muziqaz, if you were pedaling a bike which turned a generator, how much power could you generate and for how long? I believe its hard work.

Back to the future 3: "Mardy, Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles."

There is not that many daily users folding@home right maybe a few thousands..... out of something like 8.30 billion people on the planet.... something like 2.19 billion households in the world... something like 6 billion internet users...

Do see the point of distributing computing.... its the combined power of multiple users, compounding affects of small contributions which combined together. Heavy rock pushed with the help of many people = rock moves easily. Bittorrent example, multiple sharers = equals faster download.

You get the point right, its also a sustainablility issue.

Im just saying is there better way.

Peace out!
Dave

[muziqaz]

Better ways would be to make sure nVidia and the rest of the followers stopped going for performance at all costs designs. FAH has no say in what hardware is available. There were days when nVidia and AMD cared about perf/watt. This went through the windows really quickly, and those days will never come back, as long as corporations keep buying those products.
There are always better ways...in alternative universe where corporate greed does not exist