Messages from Prof. Vijay Pande

[Leganfuh]

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]

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]

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]

Good reading. Thanks for the info.

[Leganfuh]

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]

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.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

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

(c) 2007 Vijay Pande

December 08, 2010

server room maintenance: December 16, 2010

One of our main server rooms will be undergoing maintenance on December 16, 2010. This will mean some of the FAH servers will be off line on that day. It looks like most of the key FAH infrastructure will be up, but there will likely be WU shortages on that day since a large fraction of machines will be down.
We are working to optimize what we can by distributing jobs to servers in other server rooms, but we wanted to give donors a heads up in advance so they know this is coming.

[Blacksmith1]

thanks for the notice. hopefuly everyone will read this, and not freak out that day. Me? I'm gonna plan a marathon game session if I don't get any WU's.

[Leganfuh]

Stanford network upgrades – Dec 18 through Jan 2

Folding@home

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


December 10, 2010


During Stanford's Winter Closure (December 18 through January 2), IT Services plans to schedule a network backbone maintenance window every morning from 4:00 a.m.- 8:00 a.m. to implement improvements in the network, as we did last year. In most cases, the changes should not affect the connectivity of departmental or home networks. In cases where they might, any interruption in service should be under 5 minutes.

While Folding@home will be up for this period, there may be brief (~5 min) network interruptions for network traffic from/to off-campus during the daily maintenance windows of 4:00 to 8:00 am pacific time. The upshot is that the campus should get improved network performance after the upgrades.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

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



December 15, 2010

reminder & update: server room maintenance: December 16, 2010

We've been working to try to minimize the effect of the server room maintenance coming up tomorrow. Since this is our main room, FAH will be stretched pretty thin during the outage and we expect there will be WU shortages. Also, clients will not be able to send WUs back to servers that will be unavailable during the outage.
However, some good news is that we have been able to get power to a few key machines so the stats and web page should be up as well as most of the key servers. If you have trouble getting or returning WUs tomorrow, please just wait it out until we get a chance to get everything back on line.

[Scott]

Yeah lots of problems today getting work units for GPU3 and sending them in already. Really kind of bumming since just setting up the the 570 and 580 in one box. My main rig alone should get almost 30K points a day with the 2 GPU's.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

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

December 15, 2010

update 2: server room maintenance: December 16, 2010

It looks like we will have to take a few machines down early in anticipation of the server room outage tomorrow. Right now, it looks to be just vspg11 and vspg12 (and their related VM's). We're working to keep as much up as we can though during the outage

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

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

December 16, 2010

update 3: server room maintenance: now (December 16, 2010)

We've started dealing with all of the outage. It looks like we should have the basics online (stats, fah-web, main AS, most of the key servers), but most of the redundant systems will be down, so there could be outages even with all we've done to try to have the basics up. Hopefully this will be straightened out by the end of the day pacific time.

[Leganfuh]

Folding@home

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

December 16, 2010

update 4: server room maintenance: December 16, 2010

Looks like the server room updates have been completed and our team is starting to bring the servers back up. It will likely take a few hours for some, since this is an opportunistic time for some routine server maintenance (since they machines had to go down anyway). Some of the down servers are already back up and serving, more on the way in the next few hours.

[Scott]

Good, nice to start getting work units again.