Talk:Folding@home/Archive 1

clarification needed

 * Recent developments in the protein folding world by both David Baker's research group at the University of Washington and Rama Ranganathan's research group at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have demonstrated that the folding of proteins, as well as protein-protein interactions and protein engineering can be best solved using principles of cooperative evolutionary conservation. This is not the approach taken by Folding@home, which has rendered it somewhat obsolete.

On the "This is not the approach taken by Folding@home, which has rendered it somewhat obsolete." Does this mean Folding has rendered those paper's conclusions somewhat obsolete, or those papers have rendered the Folding project somewhat obsolete? &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.192.222.26 (talk &bull; contribs).


 * I understood it as the latter, but I am not really sure. There really should be a source to back up this claim, whatever the actual meaning is. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 06:02, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

It is the latter. Both Rosetta@ and Folding@ find the minimum energy of protein structure (i.e. the correct fold). It does so by probing the energy landscape (conformation) and looking for those "moves" that decrease overall energy, therefore mimicking how nature folds the protein. So yes, they do more or less the same thing and Rosetta@ has obtained results that are far more impressive than Folding@. But Mr. Pande would have you think otherwise. I find it disturbing that the original text (above) was completely supressed from the article in favor for the "authority" in the field, the owner of Folding@home, Mr. Pande. I thought Wikipedia was more democratic and less authoritative, but I guess I was wrong. Cornosalpo 22:34, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Cornosalpo, Mr. Pande post is perhaps not perfect (as we'd need and would like a response from Mr. Baker), but he is much more of an authoritative voice on this project than some random unknown person that changes the text without real substantiation. Comments, like yours, belong in the discussion, not on the article.

One way to look at it is: Rosetta works related to prediction of a protein's correct structure (detection and hopefully how to fix or nullify/destroy that protien). Some of the work is to improve its accuracy. F@H works to find out why/how a protein is misfolding (and hopefully how to prevent it to keep happening). These are two different approaches to medical research that do not directly compete against one another (as they seek different answers) - except for volunteers (CPU cycles). Both have made some progress but much work is still required.

Sources & references & qualifications please! Although I'm happy to see that the wiped part of the article by Kiio was reposted in this discussion area, it unfortunately made a contentious statement that had no supporting material or comment about qualifications to make such a statement regardless if it was correct or not. It shouldn't have been wiped out in the first place, rather just the contentious statement should have been moved to this discussion area. --ArkW5 14:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Clarification by Mr. Vijay Pande http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?p=125338#125338 I know Baker and Ranganathan and their work very well and (like the rest of the protein community) find their work very important and impressive. However, Rosetta and Folding@Home are addressing very different problems.

Rosetta only predicts the final folded state, not how do proteins fold (and Rosetta has nothing to do with protein misfolding). Thus, those methods are not useful for the questions we're interested in and the diseases we're tackling (Alzheimer's Disease and other aggregation related diseases). Also, one should note that accurate computational protein structure prediction is still very challenging compared to what one can do experimentally, whereas the information obtained from Folding@home on the nature of folding and misfolding pathways matches experiment (eg with quantitative validation in rates, free energy, etc) and then goes beyond what experiment can tell us in that arena. While Rosetta has gone a long way and is a very impressive project, given the choice between a Rosetta predicted structure and a crystal structure, one would always chose the crystal structure. I bet that will be changing due to their great efforts, but that may still be a ways off for that dream to be realized. So, both are valuable projects IMHO, but addressing very different questions. I think there are some misunderstandings out there, though. Some people think FAH is all about structure prediction (which it is not -- that's Rosetta's strength) and some think Rosetta is about misfolding related disease (which it's not, that's Folding@Home's strength). Hopefully this post helps straighten some of that out.

To Ucarambo, I noticed you edited the above quote on the 26 April 2006 - I reverted it as it was a quote from another source. But so not to delete your comments (you probably didn't realize it was a quote), I've listed the changes you had made to the above quote below: "Rosetta and Folding@Home are not addressing very different problems." "Rosetta only predicts the final folded state, and how do proteins fold (and Rosetta has nothing to do with protein misfolding). Thus, those methods are useful for the questions we're interested in and the diseases we're tackling (Alzheimer's Disease and other aggregation related diseases)." "So, both are valuable projects IMHO, but addressing very similar questions." "and some think Rosetta is about misfolding related disease (which it is)" Thanks for your input. However, if you can provide some sources (e.g. a post from someone working with Baker Laboratory) that will be a big help. --ArkW5 14:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

In addition the above thread (that includes the above post from Dr. Pande), I also suggest looking at the the thread The Link between papers published and applications --ArkW5 14:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Folding@Home and Cancer
First results from Folding@Home cancer project published. Posted by Dr. Pande (Jan, 2005): "We have been studying the p53 tumor surpressor and our first results have recently been published. To our knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed results from a distributed computing project related to cancer. Thanks to the continued support of FAH donors, this is will be just the first of many cancer related works that will come from FAH. The nature of our results can best be described in our paper. However, here's a brief summary of our results. Roughly half of all known cancers result from mutations in p53. Our first work in the cancer area examines the tetramerization domain of p53. We predict how p53 folds and in doing so, we can predict which amino acid mutations would be relevant. When compared with experiments, our predictions have appeared to agree with experiment and give a new interpretation to existing data." "I should stress that cancer is a tough problem and no single paper will cure it (especially since there are so many different forms of cancer, and the term "cancer" is an umbrella term for them). However, I am very excited about the future direction of this work, especially as we start to couple it with the new drug design methods we have been developing." Paper is the 20th listed on Papers --ArkW5 14:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

More clarification
"So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range"
 * Someone please define this to the uninitiated.

I was hoping to find a section on results. I know there is a number of links on the Folding@home project page, but like the above comment, I don't really understand them. Could someone write or link to something written for an inteligent audience that is not already familar with the subject? TIA, Mike


 * I believe what they mean is, when a protein is folding, it takes a certain amount of time to do so in real life. This isn't referring to how long it takes to simulate on computers. Rather, it is an impressive figure because of the extent a protein can be accurately simulated today. I would think it's more a testament to the good programming than the processing power, however, you can't have one with out the other. CryptoQuick 09:38, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

F@H on Wikimedia servers
I removed the following from the article:


 *  On December 6, 2005, F@H was installed on some of Wikimedia's servers.

It just seems very unencyclopedic (kind of fits in with Avoid self-references) and also there are most likely quite a few companies that have F@H installed on various workstations or servers so it just seems unnotable. Furthermore, the section it was in doesn't really fit in either. I wanted it listed on the talk page though because it is interesting. PS2pcGAMER 00:38, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Commercial / non-commercial project?
The article doesn't really state whether this project is commercial or non-commercial. In other words, if some earth-shaking proteing thingie that can cure AIDS is found, will some commercial instance just shut down this project, say thanks and then make billions of money? Or will the cure for cancer be posted to public and then medical companies can compete, who can create the cheapest cure? --ZeroOne 01:24, 24 August 2006 (UTC)


 * F@H and the Pande Group has published all their results and makes them available to anyone vis the "papers" link on their homepage. They are a non-profit research organization.  Link: http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html Billy the Impaler 18:59, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

citation needed
"Folding@home is now the second largest distributed computing project after SETI@home."

It is not possible to compare different DC projects by size. Every project will use different methods to describe its size. Is it (active) CPU count? Is it GFLOPS count? etc. It is a mess.

The FAH DC system "size": http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

BOINC DC system "size": http://www.boincstats.com/ http://www.boincsynergy.com/stats/index.php

no connection to the FAH
Moved this from the Folding@home page as this has nothing to do with the FAH.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.204.35.117 (talk • contribs) 11 October 2006

I confirmed those with Prof. Vijay Pande and those are indeed not about Folding@home.

Changing quotes
I do not think it is a proper thing to do to change quotes. On 21:49, 2 November 2006 Bucetass changed Prof. Vijay Pande quote: "Some people think FAH is all about structure prediction (which it is not -- that's Rosetta's strength) and some think Rosetta is about misfolding related disease (which it's not, that's Folding@Home's strength). Hopefully this post helps straighten some of that out." to this: "Some people think FAH is all about structure prediction (which it is not -- that's Rosetta's strength) and some think Rosetta is about misfolding related disease (which it is). Hopefully this post helps straighten some of that out."

Why was this needed? It just negates the meaning of the Prof. Vijay Pande statement and he is only person who can do it, not someone else.

"Progress" section
The "Progress" section relates only progress in building the computing community, the virtual supercomputer, not progress in achieving the scientific ends to which the technology is being applied. It would be useful for someone to add information on progress toward scientific ends. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 05:02, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Link to human gene
I added the dab notice at the beginning. I don't appreciate the tone of your edit note, but that's just an indication of your style. The red-link was valid, but I won't contest its removal. 'FAH' is the official symbol for the gene mentioned; I've added a request for article for the gene, as it is involved in human disease. Biologists who search 'FAH' will be frustrated by not finding the x-reference. Be that as it may, addition was a violation of the 'do not predict the future with edits' dictum. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 02:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of 'see also' section
User:Records deleted the 'see also' section with the edit summary "Removed See Also as links in article direct to See Also articles, besides FA articles don't have see also (todays one)." It is patently incorrect that FA articles do not have See Also sections. Clicking through random articles at Featured articles will illustrate this. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 02:37, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Needed
This article could use some info on how they get people to install it without their knowledge. It happened to me and I did a little google0ing, and apparently getting this program on your computer without your knowledge is not unheard of. 66.231.130.14 23:41, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

This shouldn't be put into the article because it is against the folding@home license agreement. When you install FAH you are supposed to have permission to install it on the computer so installing it without permission/knowledge is not something appropriate for this article. SirGrant 01:10, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

A mention that there are instances of illicit installation without people's knowledge happening on the internet ... if verifiable and documented ... is not out of the question in the article. It's tantamount to adding an 'FAH as malware' section. However, it must have good documentation; otherwise, it comes across as just a snarky scare note intended to make the public wary of this but not other distributed computing efforts. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 01:16, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

F@H EULA Violation Removal Tools: http://ra.vendomar.ee/~ivo/ufold/

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.204.35.117 (talk • contribs) 28 December 2006

More information which can be added to article
How does the Folding@home technique work:

Find at the project website, or in the project forums. Judging by the titles of published material which can be downloaded from the site, you may find answers amongst them: "Mathematical Foundations of ensemble dynamics.", "Atomistic protein folding simulations on the submillisecond timescale using worldwide distributed computing.", and "How well can simulation predict protein folding kinetics and thermodynamics?" are but some. --Foundby 11:44, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

correct direction?
"the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range—a time scale thousands of times longer than was previously thought possible" I am guessing they meant to say thousands of times SHORTER here, as they are outlining its successes. If you know that's what they meant to say, please change. Jwigton 05:27, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Longer is correct. These simulations took months/years/decades of processor time in order to simulate a few microseconds of the real-life folding of a small protein. Previously, if we take the contents of that quotation to be accurate, only nanosecond simulations had been done. Thus, we can see 1000x more of the folding pathway than we could have before. --Antelan 05:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

FAH NPOV dispute
Is there a FAH NPOV dispute? 194.204.35.117 10:19, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Article improvements needed.
I'm probably going to offend some people who obviously worked very hard on this article. So let me apologize in advance. Please take these comments in the spirit in which they are offered which is for the betterment of wikipedia and F@H. In no particular order...

- If I didn't already know most of this information this article would be very difficult to parse and understand.

- There is virtually no flow between the sections. One section should lead naturally into another. I know this is difficult in technical writing but it can be and should be done.

-There is insufficient description of terms and acronyms for somebody who is reading about F@H for the first time.

-The sections are out of order in terms of importance. The most important information should be first and so on.

-The advertisement tag is absolutely correct. This is probably always going to be somewhat of an issue because anybody who has the knowledge and interest to write about F@H is going to be somewhat biased. However, I think we can put F@H's best foot forward without overtly advertising.

-Citations and sources needed. There have been a ton of articles written about F@H. This is supposed to be the modern encyclopedia entry for F@H so cite those articles. I know the temptation for someone who has been involved in folding for awhile is just to say, "I know all of this stuff so why should I find a source or citation?" However for the article to be professional it needs to cite sources. This is the Wikipedia standard and it is there for a reason.

-Better description of the science that has been published so far. This works well as a subsection. Should include a chronological list of all results that Pande group has published with a short abstract of the article.

-Description of the team and points elements of F@H in a more thorough and unbiased fashion.

-Better linkage to F@H sites and resources with better description of the links.

-The two diagrams about relative computing power of various operating systems are great. However there should be some descriptive text attached to them to make them a little easier to grok for newcomers who are hitting these concepts for the first time.

I'm sure I'll think of more on 2nd, 3rd, and .... read throughs. However, I think this is enough to chew on for now. I'm willing to tackle some of this but I think there are more gifted and knowledgeable writers in the F@H community who could do much better than I. Rogsmart 08:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Computational power image, please update
Now that PlayStation 3 is involved (and accounting for almost 5 times of Windows TFLOPs, and almost three-fourths of the operation) with this project, it needs to be added for the TFLOP image. Windows:          152 Mac OS X/Power PC: 7 Mac OS X/Intel:   8 Linux:            43 GPU:              41 Playstation 3:    435

If you are updating the image, and the above figures are obsolete, please use current figures.

Socby19 17:52, 23 March 2007 (UTC)SocBy19

Given the huge differences between "late" March 23rd and "early" March 24th (PS3 total is now up to 577) I think it might be a good idea to wait until the numbers level off before further changes to the main page. Maybe it should be tagged as news, to note that the numbers are changing rapidly? Shadowstar 16:37, 24 March 2007 (UTC)


 * From the source, P3's contributions are now at 732 TFLOPs. The total TFLOPs for the project are now 988. That's getting damn close to 1 PFLOP. Ante  lan  talk  18:42, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
 * And from the same source, the PS3s contributions have now dropped to 576 TFLOPs, with CPUs timing out. It was at 990 for a while. The sustained level should probably be left lower than the peak level later in the article. --Shadowstar 20:15, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Good call, whoever put the 'current event' tag on top of this page. It will probably take some time to see "normal" patterns emerging (since at this moment we can't tell what normal levels will be). Ante  lan  talk  23:19, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

28 Sep 2007: Someone ought to fix the "Average computations per client" image and explanation. Currently it erroneously states that the figures are in megaFLOP per day. Actually when you divide ca 160 TeraFLOPS by 170,000 computers you get 0.0009 TeraFLOPS which is 0.9 GigaFLOPS. FLOPS means FLoating point Operations Per Second so the "per day" part adds to the confusion. Currently some might get the impression that individual PC clients manage 900,000 operations per day, that is 10.4 FLOPS, a low figure indeed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.131.0.181 (talk) 18:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Playstation 3 section
67.160.51.232, please add a reference to your disputation of the numbers provided by Folding@Home's website. Shadowstar 01:07, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

This is POV of the author and has no place in the article without a proper reference and argumentation.

"Criticism of the accuracy of this number has been raised. Cell processor floating point operations, which are 7 of the 8 processors in a PS3, are single precision operations instead of double precision FLOPs that PCs use. Double precision operations are more accurate and take longer to calculate. Critics argue that the "comparable" computing power being added to the Folding@home project by PS3's is about 1/10th of what is reported on the Stanford website(citation needed). Stanford's client statistics page claims to take a conservative approach to FLOP calculation, which may also contribute to this criticism. It is unknown whether or not Stanford is taking the precision of operations into account when calculating the FLOPs from the software cores."

194.204.35.117 08:14, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually, that was my attempt at changing it to NPOV (I guess it didn't work). Someone else might want to try fixing it. Here's the original:

"As wonderful as these numbers are they should not be used to directly compare Folding@home with any supercomputer, nor should they be used to compare the contribution of PS3's to the Folding@home project with the contribution of regular PC's. The reason for this is simple, the PS3 Floating Point Operations are single precision operations instead of the double precision FLOPS that all PC's use. Double precision operations are much more accurate and take much longer to calculate, and so the PS3 is only estimated to perform double precision FLOPS at about 1/10th it's measured TFLOP speed. Therefore the actual "comparable" computing power being added to the Folding@home project by PS3's is about 1/10th of that indicated by the PS3's TFLOPS measurement. Factual reality is also that even if 42,000 PS3's were connected together to form a single supercomputer they might not even be allowed on the top 500 supercomputer list because of this issue, and if they were it would be as having 100 TFLOPS, not 1 PetaFLOP."

(Seriously, I can't imagine why people would imply Stanford is lying for 72 TFLOPS.) Shadowstar 15:03, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Majority of FAH projects are running off the GROMACS core and thus the majority of FAH calculations are single precision. http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Cores 194.204.35.117 15:59, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

"Performance weighting"
"A Peak output of the project at 990 teraFLOPS was achieved on Sunday March 25, 2007 at which time a new weighting system for PS3 results was implemented that reduced the speed rating of those machines by 50%. This had the effect of bumping down the overall project speed to the mid 700 range and increasing the number of active PS3's required to achieve a petaFLOP level to around 60,000. Lately, the console accounts for nearly 2/3 of all teraflops."

This wasn't the case. There was no performance measurement adjustments made. As the active PS3/CPU/GPU/... counting is defined by "return of a WU within last X days" then a single WU within this time window will increase active PS3 count. Even if the active PS3 count is still going up then large portion of those finish only few/one WUs during the "active" period. As long as there are relatively small number of dedicated PS3 running the FAH client then we'll continue to see the TFLOPS rating fluctuations.

http://forum.folding-community.org/fpost174824.html#174824

194.204.35.117 13:21, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Criticism?
Following section in it present form has no place on the FAH pages:

"Folding@home has recieved some criticism, notably for its power consumption. "

If this is a criticism about anything then it is not about the FAH.

194.204.35.117 19:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Additionally, the article that is linked to is very biased and the author does not seem to have the credentials to back up his claim. Dihard 22:01, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

A modified version of that "criticism": "Folding@home has recieved some criticism, notably for its power consumption. While many users are aware that they are donating CPU Cycles, fewer are aware of the costs associated with the additional energy draw or the environmental impact associated with running a processor at 100%, or preventing their computer from going in to a reduced power (sleep, hybernation, or idle) mode."

If the power consumption is considered to be an issue with distributed computing then this should be posted under some larger topics, but not under individual project. There is no reason why one DC system is good power user and another one is mis-using it. Maybe here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing ?

194.204.35.117 07:53, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Retired?
BOINC topics at the bottom of this article lists Folding@home among "Retired projects". What does it mean?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 15:03, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

It does mean that the FAH has stopped the FAH BOINC client development and it may or may not ever materialize. 194.204.35.117 07:57, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

verification of the 990 TFLOPS figure from March 25, 2007
It was reported that Folding@Home first reached 990 TFLOPS on March 25, 2007. However, Folding@Home's client stats page shows only the current stats; it does not reveal the highest throughput that has ever been achieved. It would be nice if Folding@Home documented its milestones like GIMPS does, but it doesn't. The Internet Archive will not work because it is blocked by the site's robots.txt file. Should we include another source other than the client stats page?

Since Folding@Home has officially crossed the petaFLOP barrier, this issue is probably redundant now. --Ixfd64 21:09, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Question about newer ATI cards
Supported graphics cards are based upon 500 series GPU chips. For example the X1950 is based upon the R580. I've noticed that newer cards from ATI are now part of the HD2000 series and employ the R600 series GPU. Has anyone tried to use the folding@home GPU client with these newer products. Can the 600 series chips fall-back to 500 mode? --Neilrieck 11:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The R600 series is not supported, yet. 194.204.35.117 20:22, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Super Computer missunderstanding..?
please note, that the fastest SC is indeed the RoadRunner but the figures are not correct as the 1.46 PFLOP/s account for it Rpeak which is the theoretical fastest performance where as the 1.105 Rmax, is the actual achieved ability through their LINPACK test, the figures at the TOP500 relay on the Rmax (possibly max range) as the actual performance gauge.Ismahill (talk) 21:39, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Can we use one name throughout the article.
Folding@home, Folding@Home, and FAH are all used in this article. Can we just use one? To make it even more complicated, Stanford's own websites uses both capitalizations... BebopBob 02:17, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, I think we shouled use Folding@home for the first time it is mentioned in each section and than F@H for each subsiquent reference. That way it would be constitant. The reason I think we should use Folding@home for the capitilization is because that is how it appears in tht title image on the website homepage. SirGrant 22:05, 22 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I have gone through this article and changed the first instance of F@H in every paragraph to Folding@home and all subsequent instances in that paragraph to F@H. Hope this helps with consistency. BebopBob 00:06, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

The correct usage is Folding@home, with lower case h. This is dispite the commonly used abbreviations F@H and FAH. These are the common use because once caps or caps lock is pushed, most people type the whole abbreviation that way because it's easier to do it that way, and F@h doesn't quite look right. Folding@home and FAH are what's used on the project web site (although a few H will sneak in once in a while). Thanks. ;) 7im (talk) 18:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Folding@Home teams sounds like an ad?
I was reading through this - the section "Folding@Home teams" sounds like an advertisement, or at the very least, not like an encyclopedia... should probably be fixed, or tagged with some template (i'm not sure which would be appropriate here). Fiskars007 18:16, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I removed some stuff that can't be verified, but the paragraph still puts a somewhat positive spin on the benefits of being on a team.--Planetary 00:34, 15 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I added a NPOV template.--Donald Goldberg 01:59, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Fine, but what is the NPOV dispute here?

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.204.35.117 (talk • contribs) 13 February 2007

I don't think there's an NPOV dispute here, certainly not with the whole article, so I removed the NPOV template and added the advertisement template to the "Folding@home teams" section. 151.204.22.18 20:31, 25 February 2007 (UTC) (User:Daekharel, not logged in)


 * Agreed I don't think it is a problem with the article in general just that section that needs to be reworked SirGrant 21:46, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I rewrote it. I think it sounds better now. BebopBob 23:43, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I removed the link to the Imortality Institute, which claims to offer cash prizes. I consider it SPAM, self promoting, and offering bribes to come fold for their team. And they have their own WIKI entry, so they don't need to advertise in the FAH wiki entry! 7im (talk) 20:08, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with your removal of that original link, but please do not remove the link to the news story that is available via Google News. (first link) Thanks. Cardsplayer4life (talk) 19:36, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Move to Folding@Home?
As far as I can tell, this article has always been at this title, with a redirect at Folding@Home. However, the proper name, as displayed on the project's website, is with a capitalized H. Should we move this article over redirect to the other one? Tuvok[T@lk/Improve me] 00:34, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Since there were no objections, I've made the move. --Ixfd64 18:30, 23 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I do not understand. This project is really "Folding@home" at their website - with a small "h". See http://folding.stanford.edu/ . This sould really be moved to Folding@home. ---Majestic- (talk) 23:08, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I suspect the official website must have decided to change the capitalisation (assuming the above comments were correct). Therefore, I have altered the article now, and I suggest someone requests the article be renamed back (assuming the official website aren't going to change their mind again!). --Rebroad (talk) 10:07, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Project summary page - Tinker core
I removed the remark about Tinker core being inactive: 16:17, 1 January 2008 194.204.35.117 (Tinker core is live and kicking - http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html)

This was rejected by: 15:19, 3 January 2008 86.130.96.190 (→How it works - the psummary page is out of date; it needs cleaning up. This has been pointed out to but not acted upon by the Pande Group.)

But the Project Summary page "definition" (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Stats): Project summary (directly from the servers, updated hourly)

It is hard to believe that their hourly update will somehow misdetect or confuse the absence of Tinker projects and "magically" insert these back to the project list.

I've never heard as Tinker being dropped. Does anyone have data to back this claim?

194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Check the psummary page: All Tinker projects are no longer listed. Johnnaylor (talk) 10:45, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Estimated energy consumption (was Environmental impact)
This section of the article is much too "PS3-centric." I would like to see an estimate of the additional energy consumed by all clients (PCs, Macs, and game consoles) as a result of running F@H.199.46.245.230 (talk) 23:56, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40Home#Environmental_impact

A Playstation 3 has a maximum power rating of 380 Watts. As Folding@Home is a CPU intensive application, it causes 100% utilisation. Therefore the total power consumption required to produce the processing power required by the project can be estimated based upon the average FLOPS per Watt. As of 2007, according to the Green500 list, the most efficient computer runs at 357.23 MFLOPS/watt[3]. One petaFLOP equals 1,000,000,000 MFLOPS. Therefore, the current Folding@Home project, even if using the most efficient CPUs that exist, would be requiring 2.8 MegaWatts of power per petaFLOP of total processing power.

If this estimate is correct then what will it mean? Is it good or bad or what?

Is this useless data snippet or does it contain some info as well?

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1316

194.204.35.117 (talk) 18:56, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I have reverted your deletion, as you do not make it clear why it is "utterly pointless". If you could please explain your deletion. I think there are a sufficient number of people who would consider the energy usage of Folding@Home to be important/newsworthy, in the public interest, relevant, noteworthy, etc. As it is all of these, it is within Wikipedia guidelines for inclusion in the article. Cheers, --Rebroad (talk) 12:06, 26 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I removed that remark as being "utterly pointless" because it does reveal no relevant information about the project. It only mangles with big numbers. I wonder why I do not see any other DC project or any other computing project article having this "environment" section? --194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:11, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
 * If this section is there to stay then who ever insisting of having it should at least read Wikipedia article on that subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact As much I read out from it, there should be clearly provided positive/negative impact to the nature/environment and not only stating some numbers.194.204.35.117 (talk) 16:28, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I am merely stating the facts. Any inference of positivity or negativity is down to the reader. --Rebroad (talk) 22:47, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * OK. I hope to see these types of facts posted to other DC articles as well. 194.204.35.117 (talk) 00:54, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I would add that I would agree that the section as it stands is not the most well written and doesn't flow as as it could. I would consider it perfectly acceptable for someone to re-word it if it can make it read better, but a complete deletion is nothing short of censorship, and considering that this seems to be one of the only articles you (194.204.35.117) edit on Wikipedia, it does seem that this topic may be one quite close to your heart, so apologies if we're not yet in agreement on the content matter. --Rebroad (talk) 12:11, 26 February 2008 (UTC)


 * How would you like that section to be modified? Who should do it? 194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:11, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
 * From time to time I'll try to add relevant information to this topic, but who am I to fight the mob... 194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:23, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I am assuming you are "KillerBeagle" who posts from the same IP address on various forums about Folding@Home topics and hosts related utilities to the project. Perhaps you would like to create a wikipedia user-id so that you can sign your contributions to the article rather than anonymously as you have done so far? --Rebroad (talk) 12:18, 26 February 2008 (UTC)


 * No, I am not "KillerBeagle". Are you sure it is the same IP address you are seeing?194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:11, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Does it make any difference if I identify myself by an imagined name? 194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:19, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

15:46, 27 February 2008 Rebroad (Talk | contribs) (22,721 bytes) (valid points, but the discussion of the article belongs in the talk page, not the article itself.) (undo) I do not understand the reason why my addition to that topic was removed: But all those MegaWatt numbers are quite meaningless - you can not make any computational molecular dynamic research without using electric power. It is highly debatable if the electric power running all those FAH clients can be spent some better way or not. Is it a waste of resources or not is up to the individual Folding@home donator to decide. What is wrong with those couple of sentences? What Wikipedia rule it does break? If it is being insisted that we should talk about it here then what does the current environmental impact section is supposed to state? I still think that it has no relevance to the FAH project. Can anyone prove me wrong? 194.204.35.117 (talk) 15:59, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I assumed you meant to discuss the article rather than add your comments to the article. I've never seen a wikipedia article addressing the reader with questions before. Also, what do you mean by "meaningless"? --Rebroad (talk) 22:51, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * What part there is my comment? Where do you see a single question of mine?
 * I call it meaningless because in it current form there is no context to place these numbers to. Reader is being hinted as FAH being a bad thing - look how many Watts it is wasting! Why is FAH any more worse than any other computer based research project? 194.204.35.117 (talk) 00:54, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

The opening sentence is at best misleading, and at worst inflammatory towards the project. As stated above, no other DC entry has this section.

Any time you mix "Environmental Impact" and "380 watts" everyone is going to assume that's how much power is really used by the PS3 while folding, and that is as I said, misleading. Depending on which PS3 model and options you have, the range of ACTUAL power used when folding is from 140 to 200 watts (as measured by a Kill-a-Watt at the wall outlet). http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1265641

And while this new section was carefully written not to be too inflammatory towards F@h, most people will assume the worst and conclude the 2.8 MW were generated by a super polluting coal power plant and the tons of CO2 it would add. In reality, the conscientious individuals who donate to such a project are also more environmentally responsible. As such, it would be more responsible of this paragraph to note this. One CAN NOT assume all of this power comes from nuclear or coal plants, as in the next sentence in this section (see below)... And in fact, F@h is an international project, and many countries outside the US are much more environmentally friendly with their power production.

Take this statement for example: No additional nuclear/coal/... power plants are being built specifically because of the Folding@home DC system.

It mentions what most people consider to be the two worst types of power plants. I may be biased towards the project, but that is certainly biased against the project. Please change it to something less inflammatory... "No additional power plants" or "No additional nuclear/coal/wind/solar... power plants"  See, balance.

So rebalance this sentence as well: "Therefore, the current Folding@Home project, even if using the most efficient CPUs that exist, would be requiring 2.8 MegaWatts of power per petaFLOP of total processing power."

It would be less inciting to say "Therefore, the current Folding@home project, using the most efficient CPUs, would require 2.8 MegaWatts of power per petaFLOP." Short, on topic, not misleading, not emotional, just straightforward facts with no hyperbole.

One last thought. Because we have absolutely no way to determine the production sources of that 2.8 MegaWatts, there is no way to determine the real environmental impact. We have no idea as to the mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, hydro, solar, thermal, or tidal generation sources that power the thousands of F@h users. As such, IMO, this Environmental Impact section is pointless and misleading unless more concrete numbers are supplied. Step up to complete the section or remove the section completely. The power used by the project can easily be stated in several of the other sections without drawing false conclusions, so IMO it should be removed. 7im (talk) 19:38, 28 February 2008 (UTC)


 * 7im, thanks. I agree with pretty much 99% of what you say. I think it would also help if the 2.8 MegaWatts was described in real-world terms, as for most people the number may not mean much. For example, 2.8 MegaWatts is equivalent to the power required by some passenger trains (according to the MegaWatts article), or equivalent to twenty-eight thousand 100 Watts light bulbs running concurrently, or equivalent to 2800 electric fan heaters (the 1 kW type).
 * I get the feeling the above comments are to me rather than a discussion on how the article can be improved. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, so if you think adding some context such as those I mention above would help, then you should add it to the article. The main aims of wikipedia is that we should present the facts in an unbiased way, avoiding any personal opinion. As long as that is being done, everyone should (in theory!) be happy. Cheers, --Rebroad (talk) 20:08, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Rebroad. I am not new to editing wikis in general, nor to reading wikipedia. However, I am a new registrant here, so I didn't want to step on any toes my first time in. I would prefer to discuss a change prior to making it.

I do appreciate the very conservative numbers used in the original post. However, a friend of mine pointed out another fact to consider. If the computers running F@h at 100% power usage were not running F@h, most would still be sitting around still running at some unknown idle power usage. So we should consider the incrimental power used by F@h, not the total power used.

Again, I just don't see an easy way to accurately determine environmental impact. And a good estimate would take more time than I am able to give. I suppose one could start quoting the average idle power vs. 100% power of a typical PC, and the average mix of power production sources around the world weighted against the distribution of F@h users from each country, etc. Then estimate the CO2 produced by those various sources. And on, and on.

So I'll just throw this out as the proposed change. Environmental Impact is unknown. Here's a vague estimate of power used, but the mix of sources used to produce that power is also unknown. Either that, or delete it and point people back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact.

Let's let people chew on this for a bit. Give them a chance to respond, and then I'll happily make some changes if no serious objections appear. Regards, 7im (talk) 20:31, 28 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, we can easily state the minimum power requirement for the FLOPS being generated. To speculate about what people would otherwise be doing with their PCs (if not running F@H) is tricky and therefore likely to lead to a lot of debate and original research, I suspect. Probably best avoided unless we can refer to some widely recognised numbers. --Rebroad (talk) 14:01, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm new to Wikipedia contributing, but this has been an interesting thought experiment for me lately: In a house, that is being heated, doesn't the CPU power usage, which is dissipated as heat, just heat the space? Therefore, a house with someone living there, in the winter, would save on heating bills whatever they spent on Folding. Therefore, the Folding@home is infinitely more efficient in people's houses in the winter than some data center somewhere. Of course, an air conditioned house is a terribly inefficient place for Folding, so does this cancel out? Or is it nice that the Folding keeps some otherwise cold people warm? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.179.113.67 (talk) 22:11, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Article main picture
I am puzzled by Rebroad's assertion that the main picture needs to be made smaller so as not to take up too much horizontal screen space, particularly on computers using SVGA resolutions. The user uses the example of the Nokia N800 - while these devices are made for the point of accessing the internet, surely it is pointless to make the page smaller for the tiny number of users who view this particular wikipedia page on mobile devices, when this is a site designed for viewing on full-blown desktop and laptop computers. While the detrimental effect to the picture itself may be small, the program information box which contains the picture becomes squashed and all of the text underneath looks ridiculously cramped when the picture is made smaller. I have seen no other article subject to this strange idea, and would like to see it reverted. Does anybody else feel that this change is necessary, as well as Rebroad? Johnnaylor (talk) 16:57, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * It is likely largely issue of different browsers. I can read the text just fine with my Firefox running Linux, but the image description is oddly placed - partially next to the image and partially under it. I recall as larger picture did not have this issue. Maybe there is a Wikipedia policy about it? Hopefully the Rebroad will point that out. 194.204.35.117 (talk) 17:08, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I have the same text placement issue On IE7/Windows XP. Johnnaylor (talk) 17:10, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I should probably point out, that I do not have any trouble actually reading the text, but it just looks odd, especially compared to what it looked like when the each client type fitted on its own single line. Johnnaylor (talk) 17:14, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Johnnaylor. Where is it stated that this site is "designed for viewing on full-blown desktop and laptop computers" please? Do you mean to the exclusion of everything else? Also, what do you mean by "full-blown"? This website is in fact designed to be read by as many computers as possible, including PDAs, and various low-resolution displays. The engine provides the ability to identify the resolution of the display it is being rendered on, so it should not be necessary to hard-code sizes of images at all. It's a configurable preference per user also. More details available at Extended image syntax --Rebroad (talk) 22:54, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Firstly, very well put. Consider all of my points answered, except for one; why do most other pages on wikipedia use large images, and yet the article on F@H cannot? i.e. why change the one for F@H and not those on other pages. Surely a bot could be built to resize pictures if the need is so great? Johnnaylor (talk) 15:41, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Most other pages on Wikipedia use large images because not enough people are familiar with how MediaWiki works, and have not read the applicable Wikipedia Guidelines and Policies. A bot is a very good idea indeed! I hope someone writes one soon! --Rebroad (talk) 20:11, 28 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm reverting this. Until a rather undiscussed change to the MoS ten days ago, there was a longstanding policy of allowing the lead image of articles to be larger than the default thumbnail size. I've argued that this exception should go back in; until that point, it's still unusual to use thumbnail attribute on infobox images, and if a smaller size is to be used then it should be manually specified at 180px rather than a thumbnail misused. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:40, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Requested move
The project is known with a small "h" nowadays: Folding@home. See their official website: ---Majestic- (talk) 22:17, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, it should be moved. Lower case "h" is now used. Cardsplayer4life (talk) 22:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Nvidia GPUs account for 42% of all folding.
Source. Should be in the article somewhere, I'd say. · AndonicO  Engage. 02:31, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

New userbox
Hey there, I took the liberty of creating a standardised userbox for the F@H project. You can see it, and add it to your userpage if you like it, through here. There's an accompanying list of Wikipedians currently using it, also. Cheers. KaySL (talk) 15:43, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Current Processing Power
Folding@Home is NOT operating at over 5 Petaflops at all times and the line to that effect should be removed or changed to be more accurate. The have been several days since its achieving 5 petaflop power that it has fallen under that mark, the day i'm writing this for one, two days after the milestone for another.134.243.210.14 (talk) 16:27, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Milestones
If I'm not mistaken, the on the list of milestones, 1 petaflop through 5 petaflops correspond to a different standard than the 8 petaflop marker. I think that including them in the same list is comparing apples and oranges because on the dates given the processing power of the first 5 markers would be double what is listed if measured in the same way that the April 9th milestone was. If I'm completely mistaken please explain.134.243.210.14 (talk) 19:12, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I made a few edits to try to cut down on the confusion level. F@H is indeed reporting in 2 different formats now. ("native" FLOPS, which is similar to how they were reporting before, and the new "x86" FLOPS) The change was made to try and more accurately represent the work that GPUs were performing, but it does lead to confusion. See this and this for slightly more information. Cardsplayer4life (talk) 05:59, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Migrate PS3 section of article to PS3 article
You read it. Bahahs 01:31, 25 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bahahs (talk • contribs)

edits by 15.238.95.37
The recent edits by 15.238.95.37 seem to be POV as well as having lots of mis-spelled words (easily fixed) and are also speculative in nature without being labeled. I reverted them, but they have been reverted back again by the same anonymous IP, so I was just starting this discussion thread in case anyone has any comments on it. Thanks! Cardsplayer4life (talk) 04:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Given that this "hardware performance database" isn't Stanford's project, doesn't contribute to actual folding, reads like an ad, and the fact there are other stat databases (the long established http://www.fahinfo.org comes to mind), I think it should just be removed. Evaders99 (talk) 05:49, 6 August 2009 (UTC)