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Folding@Home Reports Success
msheppard writes "This Article describes how the folding@home distributed computing project is reporting that they used the data processed on client machines to "predict the folding rate and trajectory of the average molecule." Too bad Seti@Home hasn't had a hit yet."
Try the Distributed folding project I like them because they have cooler client for linux
SETI@home has much nicer graphics, albeit, a much dumber purpose. I'll stick with folding@home, but I wish they would pretty the damn thing up a little--at least on the Mac OS X platform.
blarg.
Amen. If you are going to use your spare cpu cycles for something, apply them to a good cause. Besides if you study much on the SETI project, they look at a very limited range of data of the odds of finding anything interesting are exponentially worse than you'd even think. At least the various folding projects and the think project from intel and other medically related go towards good causes where every bit of data helps the cause.
SETI is a nice concept, and I don't wish for it to go away, but it is a waste of your spare CPU cycles.
And who, exactly, are you to say what other people should be doing with their own spare CPU cycles on their own machines? Who died and made you dictator? Do you have any idea how many people paid the ultimate sacrifice so that free people in a free society can choose to do whatever they want with their selves and their own private property, without any constraints or impositions from governmental authority?
Say NO to SETI and YES to Folding/Genome@Home.
Uh huh. Sieg bloody heil, laddie.
if we only focused our minds and money on problems that are immediate to us, we would be making a grave mistake. if we DID find evidence of another civilization, the philosophical ramifications would be enormous.
smd4985
Hehe. Because of your comment, I'm going to take two of my machines that are currently running GIMPS clients (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) and run SETI@Home instead. I've got a desktop machine running Folding@Home, but if I see many more comments like this, I'm going to kill that one as well. (Hint: People can use their own spare CPU cycles on whatever they like.)
I think what drives people to use these clients is simple. I have heard several "technically adept" (read: geek) friends state that they simply hate to see their computer sit idle.
They have paid for the hardware, paid for the bandwidth, paid for the electricity. It should be doing SOMETHING. Even if it is just displaying flying toasters.
By the time Folding@Home or Genome@Home actually produce data useful enough to lead to medical cures, your wristwatch will be powerful enough to fold proteins in seconds. Don't confuse a nifty theoretical exercise with experimental science. Neither the technology nor the methods are sophisticated enough for this to be of any help to people with cancer etc. I wish someone would come up with a project that actually produced useful biological data with distributed computing. BLAST@Home, maybe. Doesn't sound nearly as sexy as protein folding, I guess.
(You're still right about SETI, though. What a freakin' waste.)
You see... folding at home is going for a tangible goal... seti is... searching for ALIENS! ;)
I still prefer Seti@home, it looks cooler
--JonnyBlog
And what about all the tens or hundreds of millions that aren't running anything?
Hint: People can use their own spare CPU cycles on whatever they like
Sure they can. That's not in question. But the theory behind the distributed clients is to avoid wasting CPU cycles and to do something useful.
The point of the OP was that SETI@Home (and, frankly, RC5 crack searches) are osteniably no better than having the CPU cycles spinning anyway. Projects like Folding@Home, Genome@Home, and UD Cancer Research can provide a real, proveable benefit in both the short and long term. Mathematical projects like GIMPS and prime number searches do so as well, although my personal opinion is that they're not as valuable.
Use your CPU cycles however you like. Hell, don't run a distributed project at all if you don't want to. All that's being asked is to consider how to actually use the spare cycles effectively if you're going to join a distributed project.
From the article:
"Specifically, the computers predicted that one experimental protein would fold in 6 microseconds, while laboratory observations revealed an actual folding time of 7.5 microseconds."
They missed the prediction by 1.5 microseconds. While that may not sound like much, that's 20 percent of the actual result.
Are these considered good results? I'm no protein folding expert...but 20 percent seems like alot.
-ted
With a universe the size of ours it is almost inconcievable that life doesn't exist elsewhere. On the other hand how special and unique does it make humanity if we are the ONLY life in the universe? God is truly wise, we are not.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I've read the Folding@Home FAQ looking for information about what they plan to do (from an IP standpoint) with the information they get. The "answers" they provide are pretty vague on the details.
Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a non-profit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Ok, they won't make any money off it, but who might? Who owns any patents? What actually is done with the data? And the non-profit bit tells me nothing. The Vanguard Group is a non-profit too, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in money. (Vanguard is owned by the investors, hence non-profit, but not really) Just because it is a non-profit institution doesn't tell me much. Universities are non-profit but they make a ton of money off of IP. They can do whatever they want but before I commit my processor cycles to helping I'd like to know specifically what I'm helping.
The FAQ goes on to say:
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
So the data is going to be available. How? What "levels"? To whom? For how much? Just saying it will be published in journals tells me little. What else will be done with it? Who stands to benefit from the data? (aside from the obvious)
Basically I want to know and am not impressed with their answers. I'd like some candor when it comes to something this important. With SETI@home, who really cares? That won't affect my life. Folding@home might.
Other civilizations will also go through evolution. So the earliest signals emitted will be the simple ones, and those will reach us first. If aliens detect signals from us at this moment, it will probably be radio or television emisions from decades ago. Marconi transmitted the first radio signal in 1901, but signals from those days are probably too weak to detect, even with technologies more advanced than ours. But earth's strongest transmitters like military radars are sending out signals since about 30 years.
Also see this item in the Seti@Home FAQ.
Perhaps the kinetic "experimental" 1.5 usec lag time is what is referred to in this PNAS article by Alan Fersht.
I think you're missing the point. This is not about structure prediction, it's about understanding HOW proteins fold -- info which will never come from Xray or NMR. In terms of practical applications, we're now running simulations of Alzheimer AB peptides to understand their misfolding properties.
Who says we will be listening at this intersection of time and space? Current theory is that civilizations/intelligent life advance stupendously fast. Remember all the current progress has been made in 100 years...out of BILLIONS. It seems almost inevitable that in another hundred years this era will end (the era of humans) and simple radio signals unless used in a deliberate communication attempt are unlikely. So the odds that we would be able to pick up extremely weak signals from a developing civilization at a given time period of listening are so small to be negligable. The SETI project is being done for religious reasons. (not organized religion...just a general feeling that if we discovered intelligent life we would feel we had a purpose)
... and even art
I'm really suprised that none of the special-effects CG companies are using this. This kind of grid computing is great for rendering. I could see Pixar doing a really slick screen-saver & maybe letting you see the frames you rendered as a "reward" (maybe not all of them - don't want to give away too much of the movie to a geek with a super powerful computer). It would get their rendering done for free and would be a great promo for the movie. Who wouldn't go to see a movie they helped produce? More than once - " Here comes the frame I rendered... There! Did you see it? Just when Nemo swims up to that shark?... I did that!"
No.
Here's why:If all the "yahoos" stopped crunching SETI, it WOULD go away. So you DO wish for it to go away. Let the MAC freaks do the annoying evangelizing, they are better at it.
... no one had sufficiently brute forced the process that the existing methods shouldn't work. They use a bunch of 'cheating' techniques to make this managable during the screen saver timescale....
The essence of engineering when the math can't be done to completion. When I went to college (84-88, Mechanical Engineering) we had VAXen (11/785) and PCs. The 8MHz AT was just coming out. The 386 wasn't widespread until later.
Here's the scene: You need to design an airplane wing. You have an equation to solve for harmonic vibration. You bring it to the math guys. They tell you it's an unsolveable differential equation. It's in this group of unsolveable ODEs. So, you can solve this. Meanwhile, you still have to design the wing and you have to make sure it doesn't vibrate off the plane from harmonic vibration like the Galloping Gurtie bridge did.
So, you cheat. You might make the wing heavier and stiffer then it needs to be. In the 80's you reduced the calculus to those boxes to figure out the area under the curve. You make the boxes smaller & smaller until the answer is "close enough".
Engineering doesn't solve everything to all decimal places. You round off. The moon shot only used 4 decimal places; much of it was done with slide rules.
The trick with engineering is know when you "cheat" and aproximate and when you can't
A lot of focus is made on SETI and listening for signals. We have in fact in the past sent signals to outer space with a specific message. In 1974, Frank Drake used the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico to beam an elaborate coded message in the direction of globular star cluster M13. The message, coded in the binary notation of ones and zeros, contained 1679 bits of information. 1679 is the product of two prime numbers 23 and 73, which should suggest to an alien to break the message up into some combination of those two numbers. When the message is arranged in 23 columns of 73 bits each, and the zeros and ones are replaced by white squares and black squares. Coded into this pattern are from top to bottom: binary representations of the numbers 1- 10, atomic numbers of the five elements essential to terrestrial life, the chemical formula of the DNA molecule, numbers for the average human height and the world's human population, images of the human form, the solar system (with Earth displaced to indicate it is the planet from which the signal originated), and the transmitting radio telescope, with its diameter indicated.
If, (and that's a strong if) there are aliens out there, chances are that we'd receive a simple radio signal rather than intercept B'lorg's phone call to Vk'lar.