Folding Forum

What happens when a faulty or overclocked CPU calculate wrong in Folding@home ? Just wondering

I remember an answer given earlier (perhaps by bruce or VijayPande.) The calculations are checked "on the fly" and a very high percentage of errors cause the WU to abort and to be reissued to someone else. Additional error checking is done when the results are uploaded but Stanford does not publish how many errors are detected at that stage, but it's probably very small.

The app "knows" roughly how a protein should look. If you come out a few hundredths of a percent off per loop, and run 250,000 loops, you'll be way out of bounds for how that protein can possibly look. Things such as one coordinate crossing another in an impossible manner would also trip an Early Unit End (EUE).

No scientific paper is published based on a single trajectory, whether that trajectory is correct or incorrect. That's about like a drug trial that "proves" a new drug is safe and effective by testing it on a single person. Many results can also be compared to in vitro test results or In vivo test results. In any case, an anomalous result would be easily identified.