PG announcement about Big Advanced Projects

[Tobit]

True but I could do SMP with a dual core, didnt buy it for that... I was looking at those a bit ago on Newegg, looks like a 4 processor board and 4-Opteron 6212 Interlagos might last till next year?

Your dual-core isn't going to generate very many points when you factor in the bonus system. My 12-core Opteron will still make 42K PPD on regular SMP units come Jan 16th when I get cut-off, down from 87K PPD but I am still going to continue to fold.

[bruce]

Yet F@H keeps growing 6 Petaflops obvously they are doing something right. viewtopic.php?f=16&t=20011

They just might have a surprise on their hands over the next 3 months. My team captain just announced that he will quit in December because of this change....

I've been around FAH for long enough to have seen a number of changes. Whenever a change is announced, some people are happy about it and some are unhappy. I, for one, have seen changes that didn't benefit me personally but did benefit science. I've also seen suggested changes that I would have liked that never were implemented. FAH is not about what any one person wants or does not want.

Some percentage of the unhappy folks threaten to quit, and some will actually quit. That's the nature of a volunteer organization and the nature of people's reaction to change. Nobody can prevent people from leaving, but that's not the point. The real question is whether FAH will be doing more science once the dust settles or not. I, for one, believe that collectively we will be doing better science, even if some of us see a change in our personal PPD, either up or down.

[slugbug]

One of our team's folders recently decided to quit folding altogether for financial reasons and sell off his 12 Core i7 computers. There are many people like him who built Core i7 computers strictly for running -bigadv work units and the bonus points you could earn. With a 50% or more loss in daily points I can see more people doing the same. Please remember that folders are volunteers.

[road-runner]

Thats is true Bruce, I actually would have figured we would have found a cure for something by now also... I just get upset when they change it to where we have to get new hardware, I wasnt ready to upgrade yet...

[Jesse_V]

I actually would have figured we would have found a cure for something by now also...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F@H#Biomed ... gnificance and http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers for some ideas of F@h's accomplishments. It really is remarkable how much the project has done, and what it is working on. Without a shadow of a doubt, considering that it's a DC project, I consider F@h a great success. The project has resulted in significant shifts in the understanding of protein folding, as well as unique insights into how some of these diseases operate. "Cures" (as in vaccinations, new disease-countering drugs, etc) would very likely require a lot of effort outside of F@h, but taking into consideration F@h's work, I think we've made some impressive progress. I look forward to further results. I for one have no intention of leaving. I'm powering disease research using my computer!

[Grandpa_01]

Leave, hell I will be upgrading sooner. and will save money on electricity doing it. Thanks VJ now I have an excuse to give my wife for that 4P system.

[Tobit]

One of our team's folders recently decided to quit folding altogether for financial reasons and sell off his 12 Core i7 computers. There are many people like him who built Core i7 computers strictly for running -bigadv work units and the bonus points you could earn. With a 50% or more loss in daily points I can see more people doing the same. Please remember that folders are volunteers.

Respectfully, Pande Group never asked him to make this kind of donation. He did this of his own free will to maximize his points for your team. There was never, ever, any guarantee made by PG that his points would remain the same over time. I am truly sorry he feels this way but projects evolve and rarely stay the same for long periods of time.

[Duboisi]

Those 12 threads machines are hardest hit. Wonder if it is feasible to have a BA12 for p6900 class with preferred deadline to 2 days. Then BA16 for 2684 class (2 days) and 6903 class (3.5 days) and 6904 class (4.5 days). 12 threaded machines are already considered as niche market marchines with significant increase in investment over 8 threaded machines. This would be fair to reflect investment of the various machine types at least for the near future.

[spitter3]

Leave, hell I will be upgrading sooner. and will save money on electricity doing it. Thanks VJ now I have an excuse to give my wife for that 4P system.

Please tell me how you can justify this with your wife????

"They now need supercomputers, we need to upgrade"

That's not going to work for me.

[Grandpa_01]

Easy my wife thinks I have too many CPU's folding now when I tell her they just raised the minimum core limit to 16 on the bigadv and none of my rigs will fold them so I need to upgrade to a single 4P rig, and it will use allot less electricity because there will only be 1 rig running, her reaction will be that sounds good to me. Hopefully she will not ask how much it is going to cost.

[bruce]

I think we've made some impressive progress. I look forward to further results.

Scientific progress comes from a combination of work by Uniprocessors, GPUs, PS3s, 2- through 8-core machines running SMP, and big machines running BA. Yes, this will be a change for 8-core machines, but I've got a couple of HD1650 class GPUs that can't fold at all any more. The 8- and 12-core CPUs will still do an admirable job of doing important folding work -- work, by the way, which really really needs their help -- and the BA and SuperBA projects will be limited to just the most power machines, as they were when they were first introduced.

I think that was quite clearly stated.

Big Advanced (BA) is an experimental type of Folding@home WUs intended for the most powerful machines in FAH. However, as time goes on, technology advances, and the characteristics associated with the most powerful machines changes. . . . , as hardware evolves, it is expected that we will need to change the nature of the BA WUs again in the future.

We've seen server problems or WU shortages over the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure what the actual causes have been, but if FAH needs the top X% of the donor machines, the servers should be able to choose just the top machines for for the BA assignments and the next tier of machines should be chosen for the next tier of projects. That doesn't mean the next tier of projects are unimportant -- only that they're not on quite the same time schedule so they don't need quite the same deadlines. In fact, they do need more clients working on them.

I've seen comments from some folks saying they've voluntarily removed the -bigadv setting from their 8-thread machines. This forum supports people who have a primary interest in the points competition and others who have a primary interest in the scientific results. In either case, if you're willing to voluntarily remove -bigadv and migrate your hardware so that it adopt the upcoming change earlier than waiting until January, I think it's clear that it would be good for FAH.

[Jester]

Sorry for not being more clear in the post. It's 16 physical cores in terms of speed (to make the deadlines), but since the client just looks for logical cores (and can't tell the difference between logical and physical cores), the client hard minimum will be 16 logical cores (if we made the client minimum 32 cores, then there would be cases of people with 16 physical cores not working). Since this is a bit confusing to say, I tried to stress the speed needed (16 physical cores), but as before, the key determining issue will be making the deadlines (especially since some people often spoof the number of cores the client detects anyway).

We very much understand how upsetting any change is, especially since donors work hard to optimize their setups. That is why we tried to give advance notice, especially since people might buy new equipment over the holidays. Please keep in mind that BA is very much experimental and that future changes not just could happen but most likely will. We are making this change since as time marches on, pretty soon all new machines will be BA-capable, which defeats the purpose of the whole BA project.

Moreover, we understand that change is upsetting for donors, so we are trying to be much more conservative with changes to other parts of FAH.

That is the part that will prevent me from future upgrades, unless there can be some clear timeframe to go with it,
Think about it, instead of building and powering folding rigs say we all gave you a couple of thousand dollars each for the next year of folding (that would be a huge saving for me at least)
and you went away into the corporate world with all those dollars and wanted someone to set up 16 core rigs to fold Bigadv Wu's. what's the first thing they'd ask ? length of contract ?.. 12 months, 2 years ?
oh, no fixed length and we'll change machine requirements when we feel like it....... no chance....
but you expect your donours to do it ?
No thanks.

[clifford_cooley]

When ever you guys come up with a point system that fairly compares the processing power of all my PC's, let me know and I will over-look this bigadv door slamming issue in my face.

Until then I will continue reading (not participating) all the comments that will never fix the main issue behind it all.

[Nathan_P]

Leave, hell I will be upgrading sooner. and will save money on electricity doing it. Thanks VJ now I have an excuse to give my wife for that 4P system.

Please tell me how you can justify this with your wife????

"They now need supercomputers, we need to upgrade"

That's not going to work for me.

Sometimes you have to be sneaky, I got a dual cpu ATX board to replace my daily driver AMD x6. That way wifey won't notice the difference

[bruce]

This is the FAH support forum. Our purpose is to help people who are having trouble running FAH.

This has been nothing but a gripe session. I fully understand that some people are unhappy about the policy announcement, but your gripes are not going to change the policy.

I've given you plenty of room to express your frustrations, but I do draw the line when you are no longer talking about FAH or about the policy so I've removed some posts which had nothing to do with either FAH or with the policy.