Folding Forum

Had a quick check through one of the 2 computers she has folding, 1.3mb is the average bandwidth usage per day for a points per day figure of ~240 [this is on the slower computer which has the cpu usage set at 50%]. This was over a 14 day period so the figures should be fairly accurate, although she did seem to be getting a lot of smaller [<1mb] work units [likely due to the 256mb ram flag?].
I got these figures from trolling the logs for bytes information both sent and received.. I am assuming that (### expected) refers to bytes expected in download.

Will check the other computer tonight [the workhorse of the 2] but so far it looks like the news is good for bandwidth usage

If Algore can run a house that uses 5 times what mine does, and get away with it because "he's working to better the environment", then I have little guilt for dedicating one computer to run fah 24/7 in order to beat a disease. I own seven PCs (4 desktops and 3 laptops) in various parts of my house, typically only two are on at a time, whichever one I am working (or playing) on and the one running fah, which is on all the time. As a Cancer survivor, it is a small price to pay to dedicate a PC to maybe getting to a cure for a disease.

Interesting.

Here you're discussing about the electricity and efficiency of our contribution.

In other forum some guys are trying to convince the others that F@H is a farse or that it's "sold" to the Pharmaceutic industry..

I need to translate more parts of this toppic.

By the way, thank you so much for this toppic.

In other forum some guys are trying to convince the others that F@H is a farce or that it's "sold" to the Pharmaceutic industry.

That would be impossible to prove. All of the results are published openly, and the documents are available to read on the project web site.

But a wise man cannot reason away what a fool believes.

There is no doubt that some companies in the pharmaceutical industry will make use of the results that FAH produces. The research is published in the public domain and those papers are freely available to anyone (perhaps for the publishing cost, depending on the policies of the scientific journal in which it is published).

The concept of "sold" implies that a particular company pays Stanford University for the research in order to keep it proprietary. Since FAH is funded partly by Stanford and mostly by public grants, the proprietary rights are not granted to a specific company but are open to anyone that can use the information. Those companies may be able to develop proprietary information from the information in the papers, but that research would be performed by each drug company independently (and in completion with each other) based on the fundamental scientific information that FAH has already discovered and published. Show your friends the list of papers: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

Your friends may be correct about other Distributed Computing projects, but not FAH.

Recently I uninstalled BOINC and installed Folding@Home, several reasons. I had a folding@home client folding on my wife's computer for the last few years, not a big issue. Enough background. Lets see, my system is a dual core proc with a CUDA capable video card. The client installed is the latest, but does it run on both cores or the GPU? NOPE. Why? Because that requires MORE clients! I have a choice between two different clients for my CPU and two clients for my video card. I wasted hours over the last few days trying to find out which of the two CPU clients I should be using, I still have not found the answer. I have not found a single set of instuctions that tell me how to get the client I have to run on the GPU or even detect it!
Reason for not folding, how about user abuse? Teams are begging for people to fold, they get people started discover others are getting a lot more points, and try to find instructions on how to setup your "client" on thier system. So what idiot (please don't take offense, it is a simple statement of fact as I see it) designed your system? Why can't the installer detect your processor type, identify how many cores are in it, detect your video card and install a single correct client?
So the answer to the question of "reason for not using F@H" is simply bad implamentation or as I prefer to say "User Abuse."
I support the goals of F@H, but this is stupid. Is multi-threading beyound your programers?

Yes I am frustrated. The latest and greates client is faster than version 5 that my wife has been using for some time, but come on. This is silly.
Is there a single place I can go to install a single client that will use both cores and the GPU or even get instructions on how to setup the your current client, that answer is NO. There is no single client and no single set of instructions. You are using the same basic tech that Seti@Home was using in 1995!
You want more folders, design a user friendly interface with a single instance that basicly hides the inner workings. I and many others (I know several people that quit folding for these reasons) don't want to spend several days reading worthless FAQs that side step most of the questions they proport to answer and point off to a utterly worthless wiki. One of the reasons BOINC is so popular is that it is very easy to use and get good performance out of it.

SMP and GPU clients are still betas and can be found on the High Performance Client page : http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther

The official guides to install them are available here : http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Guide

BOINC is easy to use, but not truly optimized ... FAH has a different approach : there is an easy to use client, but that won't use the full potential of your machine (uniprocessor client), and some highly optimized clients (SMP and GPU) that require more babysitting to work, but that are much more powerful.

I second that.

BOINC is easy to use, and so is the FAH classic client. You won't find any "user abuse" if you use either of them, but you also will not use your equipment to the max. In time, the FAH SMP and GPU clients will mature and be easier to use. In time, clients like them will be added to BOINC.

There are some excellent reasons why some people should run BOINC and some excellent reasons why other people should run FAH. We encourage you to take all the facts into consideration and make a decision that works for you.

Thank you for your forthright comments on FAH. I'm sure Stanford will take them into consideration as they develop future versions of FAH.

If I were to make any effort to recruit my college, I would need a solution to a tiny but important problem. Basically these computers are on 24/7 usually doing nothing (even though that is wasteful of energy) but we want F@H to run in the background only when nobody is logged into the machines. We don't want people in the AutoCAD or Photoshop classes to be complaining that their rendering times are suffering.

On another note, I wonder if you told someone their machine is running F@H would they falsely perceive the computer to be running slower than if they weren't informed? Idea for Blind experiment maybe?

Run fah as a scheduled task. Only start the task when the computer as been idle for 20 minutes, and stop the client as soon as it becomes active (mouse move or keyboard click). Run the task under an Admin account not used by anyone else, that way it can run other than on a student account.

If configured to only run when idle, there is no way it could interfere with PC performance.

it would be a lot easier to combine all the smp/up/gpu clients because some machines are dual core, others aren't. future purchases maybe more cores and compatible GPU. hopefully the win smp client will do away with those awful things MPICH and Deino MPI too.

I appreciate that you want to maximize the donations, but even one core per machine is a big help. I've even used that as a selling point. Hey look, fah only uses 1 core out of 4, so you can leave it running 24/7 and never see a performance hit (in a regular office environment). I'd never do that where they use AutoCAD, but you get the idea.

I'd like to see if I can appeal to some devout Christians and appeal to their sense of moral duty so they can evangelize f@h to fellow church attendees. As long as they aren't the type of Christians who despise medical science for what they perceive as playing God. Or the other type of christian, the kind that hate science all together for suggesting things like evolution. Some people want to tell the entire world about jesus. I want to tell the entire world about f@h. We got something in common there.

theteofscuba wrote:I'd like to see if I can appeal to some devout Christians and appeal to their sense of moral duty so they can evangelize f@h to fellow church attendees. As long as they aren't the type of Christians who despise medical science for what they perceive as playing God. Or the other type of christian, the kind that hate science all together for suggesting things like evolution. Some people want to tell the entire world about jesus. I want to tell the entire world about f@h. We got something in common there.

Um OK, so you are looking for some very specific answers to 'reasons not to fold' addressing religious people, there are some teams with names that suggest they are along the lines of the type you are looking for, Nerds for Jesus (I'm assuming this isn't irony) for example maybe you could get some of those specific answers from them.
kiore.

well i have been a member of a folding team for about 6 months now. and the biggest reason i can see for not folding is the total lack of support when someone has issues getting things correctly setup. So i am the point of frustration that I am actually thinking about giving it up. I would think more people here would be slightly more serious about what we are doing. well I hope things get better around here or i am sure I wont be the only one ready to give up.