About future of Folding...

[Melhisedek]

Hi mates,
I'we been thinking about this one for a long time now. I really don't know how many proteins there are and in how many different ways they can fold so I would like to know:
If we continue Folding ( all teams and anonymes ) in the current speed how much time would it take to finish everything ?
Rough estimate...

I know that time is on our side meaning that CPUs are only getting faster and faster but for now... How much more ?

Thank you for your time!

[David]

Im not too sure, but I think that the research that is completed now will allow them to develop new projects that will be run in the future. Now that Pandegroup have a nice big usergroup going then they will probably keep Folding@Home going as long as they can, and make use of the available CPU power as much as possible.

[KaHNZa]

I'll put it to you this way, we have barely touched the tip of the iceberg. The F@H project will likely run out of funding long before all of the protein simulations have been run. Right now I know we are running small portions of small proteins. There are much larger and complex proteins to be simulated yet. ;)

[Melhisedek]

:(
To be honest I hoped for answer in style... 60 years or something...

So we won't be able to see fruits of our rigs work, right ?

[MrMarbles]

well, more and more (and faster) CPUs are added to the project on a dayly basis
Id like to see some statistics on this but my guess is that our [folding community's] turnout doubles every few months. If thats the case, I doubt we would have to wait that long :)

[Arkaine23]

I would guess at several decaades, even with growth of the community and increase of speed in CPU's. Even that would nearly scratch at the whole picture of protrein folding.

[KaHNZa]

Originally posted by Melhisedek
:(
To be honest I hoped for answer in style... 60 years or something...

So we won't be able to see fruits of our rigs work, right ?

Okay I'll put it too you in this way. Unless there are some major breakthroughs, simulating protein folding will not see an end in your lifetime. ;)

[MrMarbles]

I just realized that as vague an answer you are going to get, its still more precise than an answer to, "How long will SETI take?" hehe

[Afmo]

I already know the answer

I was at Roswell :D

[Melhisedek]

Originally posted by KaHNZa


Okay I'll put it too you in this way. Unless there are some major breakthroughs, simulating protein folding will not see an end in your lifetime. ;)

Thank you for beeing sincere! :D Suddenly I'm afraid that F@H won't live for long ( all that with founding and "not see and end in your lifetime" )

Good luck to F@H!

[JetMech]

I see it this way. When a guy with power like plext jumps into the game (or another example Google last year) and more proteins continue to appear, we've got a long long way to go.

[BBigJ]

There was a similar thread on this recently (http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=227129) If you scroll down to my post, I give some perspective on what we have accomplished and what still needs to be done. I think the project will be going very well if we can accurately predict the folding of an average sized globular protein 5-10 years from now. At that point the project will move on to
1) build a catalog of folded proteins
2) study protein binding and complexes
3) (related to #2) predict binding to small molecules for drug design
4) study more complicated proteins such as membrane proteins, "amorphous" proteins (such as Tau, which is very important in alzheimer's), and very large proteins.

I'm sure there are other things to work on that I can't think of now.

[sautegod]

we need to get more people folding.
I'ts really not that hard to do, just turn on your computer and step back.
I encourage every one I know to start folding and to join team 32