The Next Steps for Folding@home

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For anyone interested......

Registration open for a free webinar: The Next Steps for Folding@home
February 18, 2014 by Vijay Pande ·

I’ll be presenting a webinar on Folding@home open to the public on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT.

You can register on this link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/688201986.

The goals are to talk about what we’ve been able to do so far and where we’re going.

Summary. Folding@home is a large-scale volunteer distributed computing project, started in October 1, 2000. For over a decade, new types of hardware (such as GPUs, multi-core CPUs, and PS3) and algorithms have been pioneered in order to make significant advances in our ability to simulate diseases at the molecular scale. Join Professor Vijay Pande from Stanford University for a brief introduction to the goals of Folding@home, followed by the successes so far. Prof. Pande will end with a discussion of what’s being done today, as well as the plans for greatly enhancing what Folding@home can do through new initiatives currently under way.

Please note that this webinar starts at 9:00 AM Pacific, 12:00 PM Eastern, and 5:00 PM BST.

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Date Change

Webinar June 3, 2014: Next Steps for Folding@Home by Vijay Pande
May 23, 2014 by Vijay Pande ·


Please join us on June 3rd for a webinar presented by Vijay Pande, Professor of Chemistry, Structural Biology, and Computer Science at Stanford University and the founder of the Folding@Home project. Professor Pande will give a brief introduction to Folding@home and successes in the project so far. He will also discuss plans to greatly enhance Folding@home capabilities through new initiatives.


This webinar is planned for June 3rd, 2014 at 9.00 AM Pacific Time.


Register at: http://bit.ly/FolHome

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I hope someone can give a good summary of what goes on. I would like to hear the presentation but I'm too busy on the 3rd unfortunately.

He will also discuss plans to greatly enhance Folding@home capabilities through new initiatives.

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Intriguing.

June third is a family member's birthday and I will likely be busy too.

I just missed it by a few hours

So....what was said?

Didn't catch much........Did hear there will be a recording of the webinar posted in a day or two.

Anybody see's it, post it.

Didn't anybody watch this webinar?? Where are the summaries and discussion? Weird.

Here's the recording:

http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/webinar/gtc-express-folding-at-home-webinar.mp4

Zagen30,

Thanks for posting that link.

Unfortunately, with my damaged hearing and the lack of audio quality; I can not understand half of what Dr. Pande said.

Listened to the whole thing:

1. It's interesting to see the history of folding

2. The new direction is towards cellular level simulations only possible because of a 10,000 times increase in folding power available to FAH in last 15 years

3. There was a hope to hit a million GPUs in the future

4. Folding methods are now being used in other areas such as Google cloud computing

5. There was no indications of new points schemes or restructuring of FAH at all

6. Folding participation has been amazing and we beat the fastest world computers. Very grateful to donors who donate a lot to FAH.

That's it, no new info of interest to practical folders.

orion456,

Thank you for the summary.

That is what I wanted to know about.

Thanks for the summary Orion

Zagen30

I listened to the entire webinar. Dr. Pande's target audience seemed to me to be academics and professionals in the science, medical, mathematics, and computer (engineering, networking, micro-electronics, software development) fields. That is not to say he ignored users; but he only spoke to users directly once, that I could hear. He thanked all users at the end of the presentation.

In addition to what orion456 posted above, here is the takeaway for end users that I noted:
* for the near term, GPU computing appears to be the future growth engine
* OpenMM will be the primary driver for boosting GPU performance
* O Cores research, the streaming aspect of it, may lead to efficiencies, which could allow mobile devices to contribute (but it should be noted, this was only to point out that Pande Group was not dismissing Folding on devices other than traditional computers)
* Dr. Pande acknowledged that many end user donors have spent substantial sums of money in supporting FAH
* Dr. Pande acknowledged he is poorly skilled at "marketing;" a corollary, that he did not know how FAH might reach the one million GPU folding hope
* the primary means of fostering the growth of Folding@Home users is to make the FAH client as easy as possible to install and run

What really fascinated me was Dr. Pande's discussion of scale, specifically, how incredibly computationally intensive it is to model just one nanosecond of a protein molecule's folding. One nanosecond's worth requires essentially a full day of processing by a typical computer CPU. (I did not note whether he meant a full processor or one CPU core.)

If you have about an hour to listen, I would recommend playing the presentation. It's a compact history of FAH, its scope, the challenges, and Dr. Pande's vision for the program going forward. Webinar participants' questions are at about the 45:00 minute marker. Unfortunately the sound quality is pretty bad. You will need to turn up the volume and listen carefully. With that said, you should not take my summary of the presentation as fully accurate, as I had difficulty understanding Dr. Pande for much of the run time.