Messages from Prof. Vijay Pande

**Leganfuh** · 09-14-2010, 12:59 AM

Folding@home
A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
Folding@home - Main
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

September 13, 2010

A new link between Autism and protein folding

Just a short post: I thought this story would be of interest to the FAH community.

Misfolded neural proteins linked to autism disorders

We're keeping our eye on this system for possible future FAH projects.

**Leganfuh** · 10-01-2010, 09:01 PM

Happy 10th Folding@home

by VijayPande » Fri Oct 01, 2010 6:35 am
It’s with great pleasure that I announce that today is Folding@home’s official tenth anniversary. It’s been an amazing 10 years, especially in terms of what we’ve collectively been able to do, and my team and I are grateful for all the contributions by millions of people that has made this possible. If you’re curious to see what we’ve done so far, please check out our Results section or Diseases FAQ. In particular, we're very excited about recent work on protein folding, which could radically reshape how people think about folding (leading to recent awards).

Behind the scenes, we’ve been planning some 10 year celebration activities, including a new client, better client software feedback of what’s going on, some new client surprises through new collaborations, new backend software, and enhanced science via new cores. We’re also pushing to support more hardware, such as new support for OpenCL on ATI hardware (an ATI OpenMM/OpenCL core16 is in internal testing, although it requires the v7 client).

One key big picture goal for this year is our push to try to make FAH much easier, interesting, and fun to use by donors. With a new server backend soon to be in place, we should be ready to scale to much higher levels and we’re excited about what we can do with the combination of a new client that’s easier to run, much more stable backend, and new science in cores A3, A4, 15, and 16.

Finally, amongst some of the surprises are new initiatives that I hope will change how people think about distributed computing. That’s clearly a lot to hope for, but that’s our goal. Sorry for being so coy about this now, but I wanted to let people know there’s a lot going on behind the scenes and we’ll be talking about this more as we announce these initiatives throughout the year.

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2010/10 ... rsary.html

**Leganfuh** · 10-13-2010, 06:00 PM

Folding@home
A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
Folding@home - Main
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

October 13, 2010

Recent talk of results from Folding@home

Donors are often curious to hear about recent results. While one can read our papers, listed on our web site, those are fairly technical and intended for a biological or biophysical audience. The talk I gave at GTC 2010 ("Folding@home: Petaflops on the cheap today, exaflops soon?") was intended for a computational audience, so it may be more approachable than the papers, especially for those more familiar with the computational side of FAH, rather than the biological. You can see it here.

I talk a bit about how FAH works and some recent results in protein folding (pushing past the millisecond timescale), protein misfolding disease (Alzheimer's) and viral infection. If you're curious about how FAH works or what we've done recently, this might be of interest to you.

http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/gtc2...23-b-2007.html

***Scott*** · 10-14-2010, 02:20 PM

Good reading. Thanks for the info.

**Leganfuh** · 11-09-2010, 12:27 AM

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

November 08, 2010

Update in FAH stats by Operating System

We have been tracking down a bug in our stats by operating system page and it looks like we have now found it. Basically, we were counting SMP clients as giving 1 CPU. This grossly undercounted the total number of CPUs, especially for Linux and OSX. Please note that we have only updated this particular page (stats by operating system) and are looking into updating other ones with the additional information of the number of CPUs per client.
For those who are curious, here's the latest as of 5 min ago:

Client statistics by OS

OS Type Native TFLOPS* x86 TFLOPS* Active CPUs Total CPUs
Windows 303 303 291382 3508526
Mac OS X/PowerPC 4 4 4505 141460
Mac OS X/Intel 101 101 24526 134420
Linux 295 295 109289 539508
ATI GPU 896 945 6307 139443
NVIDIA GPU 329 694 2068 215909
PLAYSTATION®3 800 1688 28360 1034788 Total 2728 4030 449343 5714054

Total number of non-Anonymous donators = 1478538 Last updated at Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:27:38 DB date 2010-11-08 16:38:48 Active CPUS are defined as those which have returned WUs within 50 days. Active GPUs are defined as those which have returned WUs within 10 days (due to the shorter deadlines on GPU WUs). Active PS3's are defined as those which have returned WUs within 15 days. *TFLOPS is the actual teraflops from the software cores, not the peak values from CPU/GPU/PS3 specs. Please see our main FAQ, FLOPS FAQ, PS3 FAQ,NVIDIA GPU FAQ, or ATI GPU FAQ for more details on specific platforms.

**Leganfuh** · 11-23-2010, 05:15 AM

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

November 22, 2010

2 new results from FAH

Two new papers from FAH have just come out, both from the lab of FAH affiliate Eric Sorin. For more information, check out papers #76 and #77 on our results page.

**zachig** · 03-30-2011, 10:03 PM

Rob...let us know when you try it. I might give v7 beta a try as well

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

**ET3D** · 03-31-2011, 12:16 AM

Just installed the beta client, running with my (underclocked) 5850, and WU time estimate is around 10 hours, which isn't much different than before (a little slower, but it's just an estimate, and dropping faster than real time). Of course, the WU itself may be different. I'll let you know when there are some real results.

I do see a difference in that when I run AMD System Monitor I see that the GPU is at 98-99% utilisation, and before that it was lower (don't remember exactly, but I think in the 70-80%).

**Leganfuh** · 03-31-2011, 02:16 AM

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande March 30, 2011

Server updates completed, back on line

fah-web.stanford.edu and the stats updates are back on line.

**James86** · 03-31-2011, 04:37 AM

Originally Posted by ET3D

Just installed the beta client, running with my (underclocked) 5850, and WU time estimate is around 10 hours, which isn't much different than before (a little slower, but it's just an estimate, and dropping faster than real time). Of course, the WU itself may be different. I'll let you know when there are some real results.

I do see a difference in that when I run AMD System Monitor I see that the GPU is at 98-99% utilisation, and before that it was lower (don't remember exactly, but I think in the 70-80%).

that's good to know now lets see if your ppd increases

**Rob** · 03-31-2011, 04:25 PM

Originally Posted by zachig

Rob...let us know when you try it. I might give v7 beta a try as well

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

I still haven't had a chance to do any Folding. I got home very late last night and spent only 10 minutes on my PC. Then I brushed my teeth and hit they hay. We'll see about tonight.

**thebluebumblebee** · 03-31-2011, 05:03 PM

If you Fold on ATI, please read this post. This will apply until fahcore_16 comes out for ATI. That post is from August, 09, but I see posts going back to March of 09 about them.

**Leganfuh** · 03-31-2011, 11:08 PM

Folding@home

A blog all about Folding@home, from its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande
http://folding.stanford.edu
(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

March 31, 2011

Core 16 for ATI released; also note on NVIDIA GPU support for older boards

In a previous post, I mentioned our plans for supporting ATI GPUs. I'm happy to announce that with the release of v7 into open beta, we have now released ATI core 16 GPU3 WUs into advanced methods for Folding@home. Please see Dr. Lin's forum post for details.
We are doing a gradual rollout of these WUs, for a couple of reasons. First, while this has gone through beta testing, it is still pretty new, so we want to be cautious with its rollout. Second, I would like to add some more servers to help the load. These servers are being delivered today and will likley be on line in a week or two. Depending on the load on the ATI core 16 Work server, we may wait for a full release until the new hardware is on line.
Just a reminder from the previous post that there are some limitations in our ability to support ATI boards. In particular, we're limited to those which support OpenCL 1.1 in order to get any sort of reasonable performance out of the hardware. This means that only 5xxx ATI GPU boards or later will work with the new core 16 (the series 3xxx are not supported and the series 4xxx does not have sufficient OpenCL support). However, we will keep core 11 support going hopefully at least until Sept 1, 2011 in order to support the older hardware.
Also, we are looking at support of older NVIDIA GPUs as well. In particular, there have been reported issues with some 8xxx series boards. We may have to limit their support as well due to analogous hardware compatibility issues.
We're excited to be able to release OpenCL support for ATI GPUs. However, I want to stress that it is still pretty early days for this code, but we're excited about where this is going.

**ET3D** · 04-01-2011, 01:24 PM

I reconfigured the GPU slot with 'client-type' = 'advanced' and got a core 16 WU. That was a couple of minutes ago. I'll let you know how it goes.

Edit: Forgot to install an up to date Catalyst. I have 10.9. I do have the latest OpenCL SDK installed though. So far F@H seems to work fine, but I'll update to a new driver anyway.