Folding Forum

I characterize this as a "crazy idea" only because it is full of complications and may be hard to pull off, but sometimes a really innovative thinker (like the late Steve Jobs) floats a "crazy idea" and challenges his people to make it happen. It's funny, but when determination meets practical considerations and skepticism, often the "impossible" has a way of happening.

We need to find a wealthy benefactor or a philanthropist who will agree to fund an annual "Folding@Home Crunching Competition". There would be three or four (possibly more) catagories of prize winners in this annual competition with a $1,000,000.00 "prize" going to the winner in each catagory. (I don't know who this wealthy philanthropist would be - I just know we need to find one.) The catagories should be designed to encourage participation and competition - with a not-so-subtle appeal to greed.

For instance, there should be a prize in the catagory of "Most persistent folder on a uni-processor machine" with this prize going to the folder whose single-CPU computer logs the most days, hours and minutes of continuous crunching over a 365 day period beginning at 00:00:00 on January 1st and extending to 23:59:59.59 on December 31st. (In the event of multiple winners in this catagory, the $1,000,000.00 prize would be split equally among all the winners.) This incentive would encourage folders with older uni-processor computers (like mine) to keep their machines running 24/7 crunching (and returning) work units. Since "quick turnaround" is important to the science, a prize which encourages folders to keep their machines running should be encouraged. A second $1,000,000.00 prize catagory for "Most persistent folder on a multi-processor machine" will encourage folders with really souped up hot rods to keep their rockets cranking out WUs. (There need to be two separate catagories here since there are still a lot of folders [and potential folders] with slower uni-processor machines, but every CPU cycle counts so we need to encourage participation from all computers and donors.

There should be a big award (maybe not a $1,000,000.00 prize but a substantial award) for the folder who completes (and returns) the most WUs over a 365 day period on both a uni-processor and a multi-processor box. (By setting up separate catagories, we encourage donors with slower machines and slower processors to participate as they have a chance of winning a prize - even if they don't have the fastest machine.)

Of course, there should be a "Team Award" for the team that comes out on top in terms of WUs completed and points earned. By establishing a separate team award - with a $1,000,000.00 prize going to the winning team - we encourage the formation of corporate teams, "college teams" (and even city or state teams) whose members are likely to set up massive multi-machine crunching farms. (If a team sets up a farm with a thousand or more machines all crunching and combining points, wouldn't that be great!?) This "team idea" could encourage nation versus nation competition as I have noticed folders from several nations, (i.e. Russia, China, Vietnam, and others), setting up their own folding teams. This is a "friendly competition" (between nations) that doesn't involve fighting, war, or bloodshed. For once all the nations of the world would be working together for the betterment of all mankind. (I love it!)

Dr. Pande has indicated that he would love to see more GPUs join the FAH community since GPU rigs (or machines optimized for graphics processing) can be "tweaked" to produce maximum FLOPs (and maximum WU processing) versus more standard CPU-based machines. (If a GPU type machine can outperform a typical uni-processor CPU or even the newer quad-core boxes by a factor of 3:1 or better, there definitely needs to be a prize to encourage GPU participation!) My understanding is that there aren't as many PS3's participating in FAH as there once was, but once we establish an annual $1,000,000.00 prize for the GPU-based game machine that crunches the most WUs and earns the most points, Dr. Pande might get those 100,000 [additional] GPU donors so fast that it makes his head spin.

There are other catagories I probably haven't thought of for which a prize could be awarded - and all the catagories don't have to award a million dollars. (There could be a $1,000,000.00 "Lottery Pool" set aside which would pick, at random, 100 folders who were active crunchers during the year - where "active cruncher" is defined as somebody who returned at least one completed WU in the past 50 days - and award each one of these 100 "lucky winners" a $10,000.00 cash prize. (An alternative here might be to randomly pick 1,000 "active donors" and send each one of these lucky winners a $1,000 check.) There are surely other "competition catagories" that truly creative people - who understand all this better than I - could think up. The idea is to create enough competition catagories (and enough prize awards) so that everybody will feel that they have some chance of winning in at least one of the catagories.

Is this a crazy idea? Yes! Is it impractical or "impossible" to carry off? Well, it won't be easy, but it's not impossible. (All we really need is a benefactor who will generously donate a $10,000,000.00 annual prize fund specifically aimed at encouraging and rewarding FAH donor participation. Couldn't a donation like this be written off as a charitable deduction since the money is going toward encouraging medical research? What about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Bill and his wife Melinda are interested in supporting research to fight diseases - and FAH certainly qualifies on that front. Could a grant application of some sort specifically intended to encourage FAH donor participation be applied for? (I'm sure Bill and Melinda have heard of FAH.)

There are challenges, but nothing is impossible. If Vijay and all the scientists around the world who are working to conquer these diseases thought the challenges were too great - that understanding protein folding is "impossible" and will never be accomplished - they wouldn't be busting their butts (and dedicating their lives) to solving these problems. I want to see these diseases conquered before I kick the can. If some form of an annual "FAH Awards Competition" can help to bring in more donors, then we need to figure out how to make it happen!

Will an annual cash prize pool attract several hundred thousand (or even a million) new donors? Gosh, I don't know, but I do know this: Millions of people buy lottery tickets - and they only have a 1-in-175 million chance of winning - but they still buy the tickets. If we can somehow work out all the details, (and find a benefactor/philanthropist), I have a feeling Dr. Pande will suddenly have one of those "good problems" that he likes to work on. (And they should be able to go after simulation of that Alpha synuclein protein that is suspected as a factor in my sister's Parkinson's disease.)

Here's another thought that just occurred to me. Those of us who are going to have "FAH Business Cards" printed up would be able to casually "drop a hint" [to a potential new donor] about an annual "FAH Awards Competition" when the inevitable question arises: "Well, this is interesting, but is there anything you can win or anything you can earn?" (I have had this very question come up more than once when I have been talking with potential new folders.) Right now all we can tell them is: "Well, there's no money, but you can earn points." Tell somebody, with legitimacy, that there's a real chance they could win a million dollars and you've probably got a new folder. (You'll certainly have their attention - at a minimum.)

An interesting idea, but $10 Million per year would also buy a lot of high-end systems to fold with.

Let's say that $7.5 Million per year went to buy high-end systems, and $2.5 Million per year went to pay for power and upkeep.

$7.5 Million would buy 3000 systems at $2500 each, which in that sort of bulk buy you should be able to get these sort of specs:
- high-end 8-core CPU
- 32GB memory
- GTX690 GPU (= dual GTX680 on one board)
- Win 7 or 8
This sort of system should get from 100,000 to 200,000 PPD. That's 300 Million to 600 Million PPD total for the 3000 systems.

Or, some of the systems could be 'bigadv' Linux systems with from 32 to 144(?) cores. These can get even higher PPD scores.

Or maybe a combination of the two ideas, with some money for prizes and some money for buying and operating new systems.

Definitely crazy and exciting ideas, my mouth is watering at the thought of all those powerful systems!

And the money too!

Like the thinking,most of the top teams already do similar things on a smaller scale, the trouble will be the top teams will mobilise behind as many categories as they think they can win but i can guess some early winners thus:-

[H] would pretty much win the multi proc category due to the insane amount of muli cpu setup we have
EVGA would win the most WU category due the their reliance on gpu folding and the ability of a single gpu to crank out 8 WU a day
The most persistant folder is automatically won by lots of people, a lot of people round here keep machines running 24/7/365, i can rattle off a dozen names without thinking

There is nothing to stop a multi Cpu person swamping the uni proc category - example - i have 4 dual cpu machines each with a minimum of 12 real cores and 12 more HT cores - thats at least 48 WU being worked on at a time and more if i push the HT threads as well.

The idea is good but it would need a lot of thought to make it fair to those in each category

Good ideas here - but the number of WUs processed is hardly controllable by the individuals at all without unfair manipulation against the Stanford rules of engagement.

Once you set up a folding slot - whether it be a GPU, SMP or Uniprocessor - you are at the mercy of whatever work units the assignment servers throw at you, reflecting the scientific priorities of the moment.

For instance, I've pulled the weekly stats from my EOC page for my three Fermi/Kepler GPU, two SMP8, and two Uniprocessor folding slots on four computers - and both the points and the number of WUs follow whatever work units are served to me. In the 12.09.12 week, for example, I had a ton of work units with relatively few points. Two weeks later, the Stanford assignment servers gave me far fewer work units, but more points (the 762X Fermi/Kepler GPU projects are prime examples).

Maybe we could find some way to normalize every day the individual donor's stats to reflect the Stanford intense projects du jour. After all, the object is to encourage donors to put as many assets at they can tuned appropriately for stability and performance into the folding pool - and not to incentivize any kind of manipulation to artificially produce more WUs or more points.

I think there's a major issue with a handful of top prizes, namely that the vast majority of folders are not in the running for any of them. Telling a potential contributor that they could win a million dollars is nice, but if the follow-up is "but you'd have to have started eight months ago to have any shot of winning them," you've probably lost them. Even among the dedicated current user base, there's a select few in the running for biggest contributor. I know I'd be out of the race from the start. Plus, I don't particularly like the idea of a handful of people profiting immensely from a charitable endeavor, and it seems like things could get nasty if such vast sums of money were on the line. The inter-team and inter-user competition is friendly right now because there's nothing of value that's technically at stake (I know some teams have their own rewards, but a quick check looked like they were either random giveaways or for ~$10), but things could go sour quickly if they're fighting over a million dollars.

I think offering people a much lower but steadier and widespread amount of money would work better. There have been many inquiries over the years as to whether one could write off the electricity usage as a charitable contribution, and while the answer's always been "it's too difficult to separate folding usage and personal/business usage for the IRS' satisfaction," if an outside party were to pick up the tab on many people's power, I think that'd pretty much fulfill people's wish of not having to deal with high electricity bills. EVGA's gotten good mileage out of offering people $5 or $10 on their products a month for turning in 150k or 350k points that month, and I'd think that a somewhat larger offer of straight cash would be even more appealing to the general public. All of my college friends who were folding stopped after graduation because they didn't want to pay for the extra power usage themselves. Some of them would probably have continued if it weren't for that.

If there were a team competition with prize amounts that weren't worth committing multiple felonies to win, I think they'd have to be spread over multiple places. If there's just one big prize, and you can sign up for any team, that's not going to encourage a bunch of new teams to form. Everyone's going to go for one of the current top teams so as to better their odds of being with the top one, and if one team ever attains a basically insurmountable lead over the others, what's the incentive to join another team or start a new one? On the other hand, if having the 10th best team meant you'd still get a decent amount of money, I think there'd be an incentive to still have smaller ones, especially since if everyone joins the top one they're going to get a tiny sliver of the pie. It would also encourage recruiting of powerful machines; getting a bigger share of a smaller total amount could still work out to be more money overall if you can nab a few high-end rigs.

I just built my desktop here is the specs and rough total price... AMD FX 8350 8 core price about $200 ram is 16GB at about $100... GPU is nvidia gtx 650 Ti 2GB about $80... motherboard MSI 970A-G46 was about $75... the liquid cooling was about $100... and the power 750watts was about $80... used my hard drives and case... all was bought from Fry's Electronics which is frys.com but I went to local store... even got a tablet and dvd burner and some disk and afew other things with the grand total of just under $1150 so if ya add about $75 for a good case and about another $75 for hard drive a desktop can be built fairly good for around $800 and then add monitor. Sounds like a great idea but at this time with all that is going on people don't want/have money to spend just a side note I built this just before x-mas so prices may have changed.

Also later on this year when I move I plan on building atleast 2 more desktops roughly same specs maybe a bit better and will then bring them on line to fold.

zagen30, Grey Whiskers, Nathan_P, Art, ford316 et al:

Thanks for your comments and thoughtful observations. There is obviously more to this than I realized - especially in the area of "technical problems" and ensuring a fair competition that doesn't rip the FAH community apart. Since figuring out a way to avoid all the practical problems zagen mentioned is over my head, (I'm not that technically astute), maybe the best way to approach this might be a lottery type prize pool where [up to] 10,000 "active folders" - where "active" means having completed and returned at least one WU in the past 50 days - get rewarded with a prize ranging anywhere from $1,000.00 to $10,000.00. (If a decision were made to go with the lower number, then you have 10,000 "lucky winners" - some of whom might have folded as few as ten WUs.) A competition based on a simple lottery type concept also avoids many of the "team problems" zagen mentioned, although it probably wouldn't do much to encourage team competition ...

I've been spending quite a bit of time casually talking with people (one on one) in various social gatherings - such as at the local book store or even in restaurants. Most of the people I talk with own a "consumer grade" home computer ... they don't necessarily own a liquid cooled rocket ship (Ferrari) that can churn out 50,000 PPD. If you think in terms of all the computers on this planet, the vast majority of them are "consumer grade" type boxes. My five-year-old uniprocessor desktop box probably fits in this catagory. When I bought it, it was top of the line and cost over $3,500.00, but now it's a "slow poke" compared to the current generation of i7 class machines that can be had for $800 to $1,000.00 at your local Wal Mart. Still, despite its "old age," my desktop box is averaging 8-9 WUs/day and right in the neighborhood of 4,000 points/day. Compared to the rocket ship boxes you guys are running, my numbers are peanuts, but that's not the point. Attracting 10,000 or 100,000 (or a million!) new donors who own "consumer grade" boxes - and only churn out 4,000 points/day - would add (what?) ... another 4-5 petaFLOPs of computing power to FAH? Adding another 4-5 petaFLOPs would nearly double the current sustained rate of WU production.

I could be wrong about this, (it wouldn't be the first time), but I don't think we're going to get another 4-5 petaFLOPs by going after new folders who own desktop rockets. (Having a hot rod machine that can churn out 50,000 points/day is great, but most of those folks are probably already folding.) I have the sense that the "untapped market" we need to be going after are the (literally) millions of consumer grade PCs out there that spend half of their time doing nothing. Get enough of those in the mix and Vijay will have enough power to go after Alpha synuclein and the other large proteins that are currently relegated to the "experimental project" catagory.

ford316 wrote:I just built my desktop here is the specs and rough total price... AMD FX 8350 8 core price about $200 ram is 16GB at about $100... GPU is nvidia gtx 650 Ti 2GB about $80... motherboard MSI 970A-G46 was about $75... the liquid cooling was about $100... and the power 750watts was about $80... used my hard drives and case... all was bought from Fry's Electronics which is frys.com but I went to local store... even got a tablet and dvd burner and some disk and afew other things with the grand total of just under $1150 so if ya add about $75 for a good case and about another $75 for hard drive a desktop can be built fairly good for around $800 and then add monitor. Sounds like a great idea but at this time with all that is going on people don't want/have money to spend just a side note I built this just before x-mas so prices may have changed.

Also later on this year when I move I plan on building atleast 2 more desktops roughly same specs maybe a bit better and will then bring them on line to fold.

I agree that it is not cheap building a decent machine these days - although it is a lot cheaper than is used to be. Using your cost as a guide i just spent 5 minutes putting together a machine on the egg and a well know auction site that will do ~55k PPD and use about 220w from the wall.

As others have pointed out though its not the cost of the hardware that puts people off - bear in mind that good parts will last several years so $1200 becomes $300-$400 per year, running costs are the bigger deterrent,many people have given up, not because they don't believe in the project or cannot afford the hardware - its the big increase in electricity bills that kills them.

@Alan

Consumer grade boxes are great and if we can get them on board great but caution - many OEM's skimp on mobo and PSU quality, folding pushes hardware and is very unforgiving of cheap PSU's and Mobo's as many old timers on here and elsewhere will testify.

As for the points argument - they are nice but getting 350k PPD and only doing 2 wu *MIGHT* not be the same as doing 10wu but only earning 10k PPD, ultimately its not how they are folding thats important - the important thing is that they are folding

Let's not turn this into a hardware topic.

Nathan_P wrote:As others have pointed out though its not the cost of the hardware that puts people off - bear in mind that good parts will last several years so $1200 becomes $300-$400 per year, running costs are the bigger deterrent,many people have given up, not because they don't believe in the project or cannot afford the hardware - its the big increase in electricity bills that kills them.

@Alan

Consumer grade boxes are great and if we can get them on board great but caution - many OEM's skimp on mobo and PSU quality, folding pushes hardware and is very unforgiving of cheap PSU's and Mobo's as many old timers on here and elsewhere will testify.

As for the points argument - they are nice but getting 350k PPD and only doing 2 wu *MIGHT* not be the same as doing 10wu but only earning 10k PPD, ultimately its not how they are folding thats important - the important thing is that they are folding

That is part of the reason I said what I said first about building 1 because you are right go to any store and buy a computer that would be great for almost everything but folding since they use cheaper and less quality parts. Alot would need either/or both power upgrade and heat sink fans upgrade. Also the cost of running any computer is not really cheap any more. I hope and wish that more would get involved but the cost "not just buying/building a computer" but to run it is not cheap BUT alot of power could be saved by simply turning off the monitor but alot of people don't know this ... As far as the points go right now I have found no use of them, can't eat them, spend them paying the light bill or anything else. So I fully agree with you Alan to grow fah something needs to be done to get more people involved but without hurting their pockets $$$

Doing something like the lottery with like visa gift cards to help with power bills would be a great idea. Remember what we all "around the world" is going through with less jobs and paying more taxes. That means people have less money to spend on something that is a great work "fah research" ... The old saying comes to mind "Where there is a will there will be a way" Alan you have the will now just wait until the way opens up but don't stop trying keep pushing and thinking... remember rome was not built in a day

ford316 wrote:Also the cost of running any computer is not really cheap any more. I hope and wish that more would get involved but the cost "not just buying/building a computer" but to run it is not cheap

In colder climates and seasons, the heating value of the FAH computers can offset much of the cost of the power used. Of course, the opposite is true in hotter climates and seasons. As Napoleon said in the topic 'The (net) cost of power' here:

Napoleon wrote:I figured it worthwhile to link to http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 43#p147029 here as well. As the example clearly shows, in colder climes/times there are further considerations as to the cost of power than just the price of electricity spent on folding.

art_l_j_PlanetAMD64 wrote:So, my monthly power bill for these 19 computers, which is $205.94 CAD (= 3.2kW x 24h/d x 31d/m x 0.0865$/kW-h), is almost entirely paid for by my savings on my Natural Gas bill!

art_l_j_PlanetAMD64 wrote:

ford316 wrote:Also the cost of running any computer is not really cheap any more. I hope and wish that more would get involved but the cost "not just buying/building a computer" but to run it is not cheap

In colder climates and seasons, the heating value of the FAH computers can offset much of the cost of the power used. Of course, the opposite is true in hotter climates and seasons. As Napoleon said in the topic 'The (net) cost of power' here:

Napoleon wrote:I figured it worthwhile to link to http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 43#p147029 here as well. As the example clearly shows, in colder climes/times there are further considerations as to the cost of power than just the price of electricity spent on folding.

art_l_j_PlanetAMD64 wrote:So, my monthly power bill for these 19 computers, which is $205.94 CAD (= 3.2kW x 24h/d x 31d/m x 0.0865$/kW-h), is almost entirely paid for by my savings on my Natural Gas bill!

Yes art I knew and know this but alot of people don't guess that is the other thing we need to teach people not only of fah but ways to save money while helping. Sadly at this time I can only run 1 desktop with out hurting the power here where I am but once I get to move I will make sure the place I get will be able to run 10 or more and will most likely buy some at an auction that a school or business upgraded and selling off and that will help with my heating in winter with where I am going to be moving to. Just so ya know there is nothing I can do about my power problem except live with it until I get to move later this year.

I wanted to add that a giveaway of this magnitude would likely run into some significant legal and regulatory obstacles. My guess is that the giveaway portion would be classified as a sweepstakes*, and sweeps laws are not very unified. I enter a lot of sweeps, and few are open to any non-US resident; at best, it'll be open to Canadian residents as well. Considering the level of non-US participation, this could be a major hold-up. I wouldn't think that it could be classified as gambling since no one's paying either the Pande Group or this theoretical wealthy benefactor anything (you're certainly paying for the electricity, but that money goes to the utility company), but for all I know scientific knowledge could somehow be considered a form of material value.

I'm less certain how a fixed return system would be classified, but I have to think trying to reimburse people in many countries can't be done without going through legal channels, and again you run into the issue of dealing with many countries' laws. My idea for this would be payment to a verified PayPal account, but I have no idea what sort of tax laws even something like that might deal with.

And I really wouldn't want any of these options to be limited to US or Canadian residents. That's sure to turn off a lot of non-North American contributors, and no one wants that.

*For those who don't know, in the US a sweepstakes is a giveaway that must have a free method of entry so as to avoid being classified as a form of gambling. I believe this only covers not having to pay the sweepstakes sponsor, as for many of them the free method of entry is sending in a hand-written index card with your information on it, and that would necessitate buying postage for it.

Zagen30 wrote:I wanted to add that a giveaway of this magnitude would likely run into some significant legal and regulatory obstacles. My guess is that the giveaway portion would be classified as a sweepstakes*, and sweeps laws are not very unified. I enter a lot of sweeps, and few are open to any non-US resident; at best, it'll be open to Canadian residents as well. Considering the level of non-US participation, this could be a major hold-up. I wouldn't think that it could be classified as gambling since no one's paying either the Pande Group or this theoretical wealthy benefactor anything (you're certainly paying for the electricity, but that money goes to the utility company), but for all I know scientific knowledge could somehow be considered a form of material value.

I'm less certain how a fixed return system would be classified, but I have to think trying to reimburse people in many countries can't be done without going through legal channels, and again you run into the issue of dealing with many countries' laws. My idea for this would be payment to a verified PayPal account, but I have no idea what sort of tax laws even something like that might deal with.

And I really wouldn't want any of these options to be limited to US or Canadian residents. That's sure to turn off a lot of non-North American contributors, and no one wants that.

*For those who don't know, in the US a sweepstakes is a giveaway that must have a free method of entry so as to avoid being classified as a form of gambling. I believe this only covers not having to pay the sweepstakes sponsor, as for many of them the free method of entry is sending in a hand-written index card with your information on it, and that would necessitate buying postage for it.

You are right the "taxman" would want "his share" only problem with paypal they now want your bank info pic SS# and other things... thus the reason I thought of gift card like visa since it is accepted almost every where and no we would not want to run off non americans "living in america" that would hurt the program fah research.. I know this about paypal because I have setup an account and am verified because of the bank account but they still want more info... here is what it says... going to use code so it's not a mile long... Bank account should be enough but now it's not...
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Zagen30 wrote:I wanted to add that a giveaway of this magnitude would likely run into some significant legal and regulatory obstacles.

This is an excellent point. Perhaps if such a wealthy benefactor was ever found, the easiest and best way to benefit the FAH project might be to fund the addition and running/maintenance costs of high-end FAH machines as I said here. This can be done entirely within the US, and a clever tax specialist (which I'm sure the benefactor would have) might even be able to make most or all of it into a tax-deductible charitable donation, like donating money to cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's research (to which FAH is truly contributing).