Folding In the News

[RMouse]

Samsung phones are now doing some kind of folding @ home style research and in the article explaining this, Folding @ home gets a mention!

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/ ... 23783.html

[bruce]

I commend them for using an alarm clock as a front-end. Nobody who downloads that app is going to expect anything like FAHViewer. They probably don't even encourage completion by awarding points. (A front-end like that would greatly simplify the function of this forum if the only complaints we ever got were that the alarm wasn't loud enough to wake you up. )

Seriously, though, I doubt the claimed similarity makes mathematical sense. Digesting and sorting great quantities of data is (most likely) a lot simpler than actually generating new data based on an every atom simulation. See comments here about floating point vs. integer calculations as well as about coffee makers and calculators.

Nevertheless, the trend of the typical @home person replacing their home computer with a phone/tablet will continue and if all a person ever does with their home computer is to connect to the internet/send email/run mapquest/etc. there's little doubt in my mind that that person doesn't need a home computer at all. Eventually they'll replace the one they might have now with a tablet or phone. How, when, and if FAH ever downsizes to match that trend, it's going to be interesting.

Tonight's business news mentioned HP. Sales to businesses INCREASED. Sales of home computers DECREASED.

[PantherX]

...How, when, and if FAH ever downsizes to match that trend, it's going to be interesting...

I always envisioned that F@H would expand its scope to include such devices while still supporting the computationally intensive aspect. AFAIK, there will always be gamers who demand the best visual experience and thus, high-end GPUs will exist for quite sometime (http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/more_t ... games.html). It may evolve into other devices but the concept of it being a high-end GPU that can perform computationally intensive tasks will remain for quite a while.

Maybe the future can be something like this for F@H:
1) F@H - Light Mode aims at data sorting/digesting.
For devices that are portable in nature. There could be billions of these devices that work for short time periods across the globe.

2) F@H - Heavy Mode aims at data generation.
For devices that aren't portable in nature. There could be thousands/millions of these devices that work for extended period across the globe.

BTW, not sure about this Android App but I do know that SIMAP (which this App uses) does award points (http://boincsimap.org/boincsimap/top_users.php).