Folding At Home News

[glennk721]

I will be posting Folding At Home News on this thread to keep our Folding Team up to date ---source::

http://folding.stanford.edu/news.html


Folding@Home News

7/25/2005 Client v5.04 public beta release
Client v.5.04 is in public beta for Linux and Windows (console). It allows configuration of the amount of memory reported and the setting of advmethods through the Configuration so that it persists. This is a maintenance release, with more signficant improvements coming in v.6. See http://folding.stanford.edu/beta for more details.


7/25/2005 New Assignment Server (AS) fallback scheme. We've implemented a new AS fallback scheme for how WUs are assigned. We will talk more about about how this works once we see if it works well. It's now being tested on both ASes.

7/25/2005 QMD re-release complete
QMD's are now going to machines reporting 504MB or more and with the appropriate flags (BigWU + advmethods). We're now back to the previous value.


7/23/2005 QMD re-release update
QMD's are now going to machines reporting 600MB or more and with the appropriate flags (BigWU + advmethods). We're almost done with the rollout and should be back to the previous value (504MB) on Tuesday.

7/21/2005 QMD re-release update
QMD's are now going to machines reporting 750MB or more and with the appropriate flags (BigWU + advmethods).

7/19/2005 QMD re-release update
QMD's are now going to machines reporting 900MB or more and with the appropriate flags (BigWU + advmethods).

7/18/2005 Proxy bug fixed
Adam has fixed a proxy bug recently reported and we are now testing this fix gradually. First the port 80 AS and certain work servers, then the main AS. So far, everything seems ok on our end, but it will take more of a complete roll out for donors to see a difference.

7/18/2005 QMD re-relase commenced
We have re-released the QMD's, but with a higher memory restriction. Your machines will have to have 1GB of RAM in order to receive these WUs. We will lower this RAM requirement in the new future, but we want to start conservatively.

7/17/2005 Plan for QMD rollout and new client mod
Our plan is to re-release QMD WUs starting on Monday around noon PST. Hopefully enough people will have heard about the various issues. We will release them gradually, starting with a high memory limit. The previous memory limit was set to 500MB. We'll start conservatively with a limit of 1000MB and then gradually work down from there. Note that in the current client, the memory reported to the AS is the total memory of the box. For SMP boxes, all clients will report the same amount of RAM, which is bad since they are in fact all sharing that RAM. Thus, we will re-release these with a large RAM request to try to help this issue.

In addition to this re-release plan, we are working to release a new v5 client rev which allows the donor to set the amount of RAM reported to the AS. Thus, if your dual has 1GB and you are running 2 clients, you can choose to report to the AS that each client should only use 500MB. One can also use this to simply request smaller WUs on machines. This is a "soft limit" as there is no code to ensure that the core sticks to this, but this soft request will still go a long way to allocating WUs correctly to machines. We are also considering the possibility of a hard limit, which would stop cores from using more memory than allocated. It is unclear whether this is a good idea (and how to do this right) and we will do more testing on this before we release this feature in v6.


7/15/2005 A cautionary note about Advanced methods, QMD, and big WUs. There have been some questions about the use of flags and FAH's stability and I wanted to make an announcement to try to clear things up.

There are two flags in particular which are to be used with caution. The big WU flag gets big WUs, but these big WUs may be poorly suited for older machines. The bigWU flag combined with advanced methods brings big WUs that are more advanced (QMD"s right now).

Gromacs was originally released as an advanced only WU until we could work things out to make it more stable. By having a flag, one would have to opt in and the default (Tinker in that case) would be stable.

We've kept that philosophy throughout FAH. Right now, Gromacs is stable, but QMD is much less so. QMD is also a big WU, so one has to choose both QMD and advanced methods to get it. BigWU + adv gets highly experimental QMD WUs and they may not work well for all. We suggest that one only use both flags if you're absolutely sure this is what you want (if you're not sure what you want, I would suggest that you don't want QMD's).

We should have been more clear about this, but hopefully this post will help. Due to this confusion, I'm going to suspend QMD's until we can be sure that a significant number of people have gotten the word on this.

So, as a summary, advanced methods is just that -- something which may bring more points, but also more trouble. Please consider this tradeoff when you choose settings.
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6/8/2005 Several new papers published . We've been busy getting several new results published. Some of them are on the papers page, but several others have not completed peer review. FAH now has 24 papers directly resulting from distributed computing work -- the most of any distributed computing project. Thanks to all who have contributed to this success!

[glennk721]

Folding@Home News

7/26/2005 Planned n etwork outtage, Thursday July 28, 2pm-5pm PDT We will have a planned network outtage on some of the FAH servers. It hopefully will not be too long. The stats update and stats cgi pages will also likely be down during this time. We may not get to all we need, so this outtage may be postponed to a later date, but we wanted to give a heads up. The data servers should not be affected, but one of the ASes will.

[glennk721]

8/3/2005 Folding@home researcher Chris Snow receives award at international conference for the second year in a row. Recent scientific results stemming from the Folding@home project garnered an award for "Best Poster" at the 19th Symposium of the Protein Society in Boston. This year's work from FAH centered around recent work on the ribosome, which is relevant both for fundamental biology (how proteins are synthesized, also known as "translation") as well as a better understanding of how many antibiotics work (roughly 50% of all antibiotics target the ribosome). This is the second Protein Society award for Snow and the third for FAH in general, which has won the award in three of the last 4 meetings.

[glennk721]

Folding@Home News

8/15/2005 Stanford network issues. The Stanford net is having major issues right now and is slow. Stanford IT knows about the issue and is on it. Hopefully there won't be much impact on FAH, although clients may need to retry more often until this is fixed.


8/11/2005 Updated stats system db We've updated the stats system to handle large number of points much better.

[glennk721]

8/21/2005 Stats crediting. We have develop a way to efficiently test to see whether a WU has been credited and are running a stats update with this tool. WUs which haven't been credited in the past for some issue will likely be credited in this upcoming pass. We have a long list of WUs from the past which were potentially not credited due to one issue or another. Since many checks must be made during this process (in order to do our best not to double credit), this process is very slow and may take 1-3 days to complete.

[glennk721]

Folding@Home News

8/23/2005 We have been beefing up the FAQs, which can be found on our main FAQ page. What's especially new are FAQs on specific issues of interest to donors: configuration (esp for bonus point WUs), how the point system works, QMD, Gromacs, and others.

[glennk721]

:STAR: :STAR: 10/1/2005 Happy Fifth Birthday FAH!
FAH just pased its fifth anniversary. Thanks to all who have made the project such a a success. :STAR: :STAR:



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9/20/2005 FAH passes the 200,000 active CPU count
FAH's power continues to grow, now pushing beyond the 200,000 active CPU count.

[glennk721]

Sorry for not posting news to bring it current, now that things are setteling back to normal after hurricane season I will have more time for our home :wub: :wub:

Ok for the news,,,

11/24/2005 Thanksgiving
It's Thanksgiving holiday in the US and we at FAH would like to give our thanks out to all that have contributed to FAH and wish all a happy holiday.


11/05/2005 Update in Diseases Studied FAQ
We've updated the diseases studied FAQ to include recent progress on several fronts. Thanks to all the donors who have made these results possible!


10/30/2005 Rolling out Gromacs to more OSX clients.
We have been investigating the previous issues of certain types of Gromacs calculations on OSX and we believe that the the issues are now resolved. We will test this by gradually phasing in Gromacs to OSX.


10/19/2005 Web server name switch
We are switching some of our web services to a new address. All pages which start with vspx27.stanford.edu will switch to fah-web.stanford.edu. For now, both addresses are available, although the vspx27 will go away. For example, the serverstat page can now be found at http://fah-web.stanford.edu/serverstat.html.

[glennk721]

2/27/2006 QMD update
Our first round of analysis is still underway, so it looks like QMD's will be out for at least one more month, but likely longer. Unfortunately, these sorts of estimates are hard to make and if something new (and often interesting science-wise!) comes up, this could easily take much longer still.


1/29/2006 QMD temporarily off line
We are in the process of building new QMD projects. In order to do so, we need to complete our analysis of the existing QMD data, so we have stopped assigning new QMD's as we analyze the existing data set. We expect the analysis to take at least a few weeks (and potentially longer, depending on what we find). The upshot will be that we will be moving to second stage QMD WU's, which is very exciting to us. Thanks to all who have contributed on QMD projects and we'll make an announcement on new QMD projects once we're further along.


1/6/2006 Another planned Network Outage: 4AM-6AM PST January 19, 2006
In order to upgrade our network core for the Medical School, there will be a network outage on Thursday, January 19th from 4AM to 6AM Pacific time. This will affect roughly half of the FAH servers during this brief outage.