Folding@home

Past the 10 Petaflop scale

Folding@home has historically been an extremely powerful computing resource, hitting many major computing milestones.  For example, we were awarded a Guinness World Record for being the first to reach a petaflop (10^15 floating point operations per second).

We keep track of the power of Folding@home on our osstats page.  Recently, we found an issue with our reporting.  In particular, we were investigating a major under-reporting (OSX stats reported that there were no OSX machines at all). A few months ago, Christian Schwantes (FAH Team member) rewrote our main stats scripts and he fixed a very old bug in the stats reporting. That bug had a workaround in the osstats2 page, so now the workaround was failing and that led to finally getting osstats2 working. 

After checking the db with the raw files from the work servers (it's an important check that we can know what the right answer is from this more laborious manual process of going through the WS logs), this result is now correct, fixing the previous under-reporting. We also now are keeping better track of the Fermi (and later) class of NV GPUs. We were under-reporting their FLOP count and that alone was what make a huge difference in the FLOPs reported.

The upshot of all of this is that we now are no longer under-reporting our stats and the reported FLOPs has gone up significantly, to about 12 PFLOPs.  This puts Folding@home past the 10 PetaFLOP scale, which is itself a very significant amount of computer power.

For more information, please see our FLOPS FAQ, whichis useful in discussing this topic, which is surprisingly complicated.

New FAH client, web site, and video

We've rolled out the latest version 7.3 client to the main web site.  This new client should be much easier to install and comes with a new web interface which is simpler and easier to use.  

But in addition, we've been trying to communicate our goals and mission more clearly.  Our first steps there are a new web site and a new video.  The video in particular is something that we're all very excited about, since it explains to a broad audience what FAH is all about.

 

New methods development

Guest post from Dr. Greg Bowman, University of California, Berkeley

 

Markov state models (MSMs) are a powerful approach for investigating the dynamics of proteins and other biomolecules. The Folding@home team has helped to pioneer the development of these methods and continues to make important contributions to their further development.  For example, the Huang lab at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has created an exciting new method for coarse-graining Markov models (the paper is available here).

One of the major challenges in this area is that the high-resolution Markov models capable of making quantitative predictions of experiments often have tens of thousands of parts.  As you can imagine, it is hard to look at each of these parts and the interactions between them to understand the model.  Therefore, it is valuable to create a new model with, say, a dozen states that still captures much of the behavior of the more complex model. 

The new method from the Huang lab makes use of a mathematical principle called a Nystrom expansion to build more accurate coarse-grained models.  The key advantage of this approach is that one can quickly identify the most important pieces of a model and prove that the remaining pieces can safely be ignored (or merged into the more important parts).  As a proof of principle, the Huang lab has shown they can build much better models for a few small proteins than is possible with previous methods.

 

 

Known stats issue under investigation

We're having an issue with the interaction between our web main server and stats db.  We are looking into this.  It looks like the obvious fixes haven't worked, so we are escalating.  

The stats are being input fine, it's just with the reporting on the main web page.  If this continues, we may take the main web page stats pages down, but 3rd party stats should still work and be regularly updated.

As always, we'll update you on our progress with this issue.