Folding Forum

Hey all --

I've been a FAH admirer for many years now. I have a question, hopefully it's not too provocative

With the amazing speedup of folding that GPUs and SMPs give you, I'm wondering what room there is for the humble folder who has neither a fast GPU nor quad core processors. Is there any point to contributing to FAH as a uniprocessor donor?

The analogy I am imagining is a bunch of people spraying water into a pool using firehoses, while the humble uniprocessor folder uses an eyedropper to put water into the pool. The latter's presence or absence isn't really going to make much of a difference.

The reason I am asking is that I'm wondering whether uniprocessor donors would have more 'bang for their buck' on other projects which haven't fully exploited GPU/SMP architectures yet.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi,

Yes uni-processors are worth folding each client has it's own "value" for the project. Each client provides a piece of the overall puzzle, no client can do all the calculations that are needed. That is why there are different projects for different platforms.

Unfortunately, there are some simulation that can't be run on GPU or PS3, due to hardware limitations (in therms of memory available for example). This is why we still need the CPU clients to do them

For example, explicit solvent model can't be used on GPU and PS3 ... but it's what Gromacs does very well on CPU (Fahcore_78 and similar). Double precision can't be used on GPU and PS3 too ... and it's what uniprocessor Double Gromacs core does (Fahcore_79 and similar).

You may not get incredible points and WU output but you are donating precious WU's. Besides, it's fun to be competitive and watch your stats grow... even if on a small scale.... although I must say I'm jealous of toTOW's 24hr average :\

Uniprocessor's are the only clients that my systems can handle. Don't have the money to upgrade at this time. It's great to be able help out with such a worthy cause, even with my small systems.

You won't see me on top off any charts soon, but I'll wave as you pass me by.

With thousands of CPU clients folding away each day, these are still very important to the project. Not everyone wants to run the demanding high performance clients.

The Project even used the CPU clients to do some important folding lately, using the -advmethods switch, and some bonus points Amber projects.

The CPU client will continue to be valuable for a long time to come. And the log ago announced points system adjustment will help to make the CPU client even more valuable, eventually.

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... pe=osstats

The statistics show that the clients for the GPU and PS3 are relatively few in number, compared to other platforms. The uniprocessor sill represents a major fraction of all FAH clients.

i thought that this chart also separated uniprocessor from SMP clients but can't find it. The uniprocessor clients outnumber the SMP clients by far.