Folding@home

ATI GPU server going off line for maintenance today, may be some WU shortages

We will likely be taking an ATI GPU server (vspg2v2) down today for maintenance.  We are working to get more jobs on its sister server (vspg3v2) to avoid WU shortages, but we're giving a heads up for donors just in case this doesn't time out well.

New award for Folding@home team

Folding@home researcher Greg Bowman was awarded the 2010 Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) for his talk on two paradigm shifts resulting from Folding@home: 1) the new methods that Folding@home uses to simulate protein folding, misfolding, etc, and 2) the results themselves, which suggest a significant change in protein folding theory.

Update on server status & WU shortage

There have been some questions about the server status for Folding@home.  The problem from the donor perspective is that the lack of WUs looks very similar to the servers being down -- the client reports it can't connect to the server.  The servers have been up and in good shape since about Feb 25 (see the blog post on that day -- and that was just for the limited case of NVIDIA GPU servers, not FAH-wide).  However, we have had a WU shortage now and again over the last week or so, which donors have mistaken as server reliability issues.

To fix this, we have been working to greatly increase the number of WUs, both for classic and SMP clients.  There are a very large number of classic WUs that are coming out in new cores: the Protomol B4 core and the new Gromacs A4 core.  B4 has rolled out and A4 is coming out in a week or so (maybe sooner).  We also have new A3 SMP WUs in the pipeline.  There have been some science issues that we have been working out on them.

Right now we are a bit too close, which leads to shortages for certain types of clients.  My goal is to have way more WUs than we need so there are never any donor delays in getting WUs and we are pretty close to that, once the last few issues get worked out.