Clips: Dr. Marks Explains Folding at Home Posted by XanTium | 24-3-2007 13:33 EST

From kotaku.com: [QUOTE] Stanford University's Folding@Home program has gotten a lot of play this week, and so it should. The program harnesses the power of idling PC's and PS3's to calculate data that will eventually help find cures for Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's, various types of Cancer and other diseases. This is all well and good and I'm sure we all want to do something to help the cause, but how does this program really work? What exactly is protein folding and what will be the eventual outcome? GameVideos producer Kathleen Sanders finds out in this sit down interview with Sony's r&d manager, Dr. Richard Marks. [/QUOTE] If you use Folding@Home on your PS3, feel free to join our group 'ps3scene' with ID# 56516. Full Story: kotaku.com

I'm a little confused. I thought people were getting a games console to, well.... er... play games?

I know it's a really 'way out' thought, so don't shoot me down for being too radical.

Aren't people more worried about the power consumption of the PS3. In one hand, you're helping compute data, but on the other hand you're killing the planet with your carbon footprint .

You're saving peoples lives. Good times.

There'll be nowhere to live. Bad times.

"but if you don't download this, you are kind of automatically an asshole..."

too funny!

@MartinChris23: Consuming almost the same amount of energy to play Oblivion on a PC or Gears of War on an XBox360 is better ?
Energy is wasted everyday, that's only a better way to use it.
If you are worried about the environment use only energy savings bulbs, buy an electric car and some solar panel... or stop playing videogames.
Research is surely more important that enlighten marketplaces, but nobody will shut down some lamp for the sake of a better world.

I think you'll find the PS3 power consumption is way above that of a 360.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainm...-360-211005.php

If you want to argue about waste of energy, swap your Ps3 for a 360 and you'll be effectively halving your energy consumption whilst playing a better lineup of games.

I do use energy saving bulbs - I live in the UK so buying a solar panel would be as useful as a chocolate teapot.

I suppose this is a good thing, with Folding@home needing help 'n all. It's not like you're going to be using the PS3 for much else right now.

> I think you'll find the PS3 power consumption is way above that of a 360.

Yes, and either is usefulness for F@H is way above that of a 360, and his power consumption is way lower than most Core 2 Duo out there (when performing F@H), while its performances (on that field) are way higher.

> If you want to argue about waste of energy, swap your Ps3 for a 360 and you'll be effectively halving your energy consumption whilst playing a better lineup of games.

Not something really useful if I'm going to use F@H (since there isn't a F@H client for XBox360); killing monsters with Gears of war is amusing but, in the end, not something that could save lives; since I pay the energy I spend I'm glad I'm spending some more to help save a life.

> I do use energy saving bulbs - I live in the UK so buying a solar panel would be as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Go for an electric car.

> I suppose this is a good thing, with Folding@home needing help 'n all. It's not like you're going to be using the PS3 for much else right now.

Actually it's the opposite, I'm enjoying linux a lot, and it's surely useful as a game console (well, Resistance is way better than Project Dark Zero, and both are launch titles).
You don't imagine how useful is putting in a 250Gb disk (€100), format and just use it... no bullshit involved.

Thats right, compare the ps3's high point to the 360s low point....real fair.

If I remember correctly Project Dark Zero was the highest and better title available when the XBox360 came out (I know, I whas there).
There was a lot of people talking about how magnificient PDZ was, how realistic, how awesome it appeared...
It was a launch title, if I should make some comparison I think that a launch title has to be compared with a launch title, because it shows what's the console potential (on a equal base: 0 previous knowledge).
I know GoW is "better", but it came after a year of developement, I'll use in a comparison in eight months or so...

I think if you spend 700 on a system and only have one game, then F@H is good. Might as well use it to good use since you'll never be gaming much on it. Help someone else since you got fuck'd.

And I would like to see some studies on what folding has really accomplished thus far. This has been around forever and I have never once heard anything come about from it (scientific community).

Does anyone have any proof this is even useful in science? Any links??

That's a rather bold claim to make.

I could respond that you spend 500 on a system and only have one game, and no F@H either.

As for F@H it haven't produced nothing right now, but it's knowledge, having a "map" about how each protein folds is something that is useful anyway, and something that the scientific community can address anywhere, anytime... no matter if it seems useless now, it's something that can be useful in the future.

Well, that is exactly the main argument AGAINST the F@H project.
The group behind the project is the Pande Group.
That is a bunch of people surrounding a Professor named
Pande. This group keeps the whole frames that are calculated
by the participants as closed as the source code of the
binaries that the participants are executing. So nobody
knows what his CPU power is actually used for and
nobody can use the code to start a similar project.

But that is not all that is to critisize in the F@H project:

Prof. Pande keeps the right to decide by himself which data he
is going to disclose. He goes even further by keeping the
right to disclose the whole calculations only in his scientific
publications so that no other scientist might be faster on
discovering something interesiting out of these caclulations.

In fact Prof. Pande begs CPU power for free but
he does not give anything more back to the community
comparing the situation in which he would be if he would
rent a render farm for his calculations.

My advice for Prof. Pande whould be the following:
Whats about remembering the roman legal principle:
"do ut des" -> "I give so that you do give"

Unless Prof. Pande opens full access to the whole
calculated frames as well as releasing the complete
source code of the executed binaries NOBODY should
participate in the F@H project.

Actually there's a lenghty interview to the developer of GROMACS core about how he feels about the "closed version" of his code used by F@H project.
He say he's happy.
The whole gromacs core (and few others, last of them supplied by Sony) are just folding engines, the only thing that "forces" that code to be closed is that results are collected and "signed" by a custom proprietary hash to prevent people from submitting bogus data (and pharma companies are likely to do this to keep something "secret" while they are working on it).

Oh, and about the gromacs core and similar projects, you can go here ( http://www.gromacs.org/ ), download the core, compile and use it for free (as a beer).

As for the source code of the executed binaries, they where surely checked by Sony (that physically made the PS3 version) to be "bullshit proof".
Others that had checked mr.Pande's code "in deep" are the fellow programmers from ATi, when they made the (still experimental) GPU engine.

Oh wait... I see the "big cospiration for world domination" coming, it's headed by the flying spaghetti monster.

Relax... F@H is an university project, even if their data is actually "not public" it will be released someday... Pande cannot just flee with the data.

Surgeons who game are better at surgery. So a surgeon should own an Xbox360 then?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/

You probably won't find a F@H client for the 360 either - we're far too busy playing games to just have the console switched on and doing something for someone else. Still, if you can afford the PS3 you've probably got too much money anyway. You'd be better to donate some of that money to a worthy cause rather than participate in something which 'might' save lives. For the difference in cost between the 360 and PS3 (£146), I'm pretty sure you could pay for some serious treatment in third-world countries. That combined with actually owning a games console with lower power consumption, it's a no-brainer.



As above, we're not all made of money. If that's you offering to buy me one, please let me know.



Cool - you spent all that cash for linux. I can build a PC for a quarter of the cost and run linux on it.

I like the way you call it a game console and not a games console. RfoM is one game. You're quite right - it's a game console. a very expensive game though, if you ask me. I disagree with the PDZ praise - I always thought it was 'clunky' - PGR3 and CoD 2 were two excellent launch titles of which I still play today.

Exactly what would I do with a 250GB HDD on the 360? I won't even be getting the 120GB when it's released. Anyone in storage management will tell you for every byte of data you have, you need 1 byte contingency. Where are you going to backup your 250GB of data to? If my 20GB goes down the pan, I've lost themes, demos, trailers and gamesaves. No biggie.

I can't imagine the pain of losing 250GB worth of data.

Martin

You're basically saying it's better to not save anything so you can avoid the pain of losing it

Anyway, that really wasn't his point. He was just commenting on how easy it is to swap out HDDs on the PS3. With the 360 you have to wait for an official upgrade, on the PS3 you can basically just swap in any SATA laptop drive you want.