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Folding@Home News


9/12/2007 New blog spot, please go here
I've set up a new blog for news. It's better than what Stanford offers (RSS feeds, etc), so I'll plan to make that the main page. The site is http://folding.typepad.com/. See you there. (if it works well, we'll change the News links on the site to point to it).



9/12/2007 Unplanned network outage
There was a network outage today. Everything in FAH is up and running, except for the web site. We are working to get that back up and expect to have it back up on Thursday morning PST. We have been keep a close eye on the stats and all looks fine there. For those who are curious, here's what happened:

At 11:45 a.m. today, a contractor cut a cable to Forsythe Hall resulting in a disruption of university computer service. There was no disruption to 911 service at either the university or Stanford Hospital. Interim recovery procedures were in effect at 1:45 p.m., according to the Forsythe emergency operations center. Faculty and staff using the network may experiences periodic network problems throughout the day as the university works to repair the damage.

8/24/2007 Are you having problems with the accessing the forum? Here's a fix:
Some people are apparently still having problems accessing forum.folding-community.org, which is run and hosted by community volunteers. Below is the workaround that the forum administrators have posted regarding the problem. Basically, if you delete one cookie, you should be able to see the site again.

It appears that the database driving the forum software is having a few problems with its tracking of sessions. If you do try and login you will most likely be presented by a blank page, and any subsequent visits to pages on this forum will cause the same thing to happen. If this happens to you, you need to delete the session_id cookie for forum.folding-community.org, the name of the cookie is phpbb2fah_sid, then restart your browser to make sure.


8/22/2007 New Version for the PS3 now available
With Sony's extensive help, we have released version 1.2 of the Folding@home client for the PS3. Updated features and functionalities that are part of this latest application update (v 1.2) include:

• Support for Remote Play for PSP: Now Folding@home can be remotely operated through PSP utilizing the Remote Play feature of the PS3 system. With this feature, PS3 users are able to view on their PSP the exact same Folding@home information that is viewable on their PS3, complete with the map of the world and the protein that their particular system is simulating.
• More Support for Additional Protein Simulations: Additional computation cores are now supported allowing Folding@home for PS3 to support a wider range of protein-folding simulations which further enhances the science needed to be performed to research diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
• Screensaver Mode: A screensaver mode can now be activated via the Settings menu in the Folding@home application, allowing PS3 users to consume slightly less power and to increase performance of protein-folding simulations.
• Link to Project Description: A link has been added to the Information menu in the Folding@home application allowing users to quickly obtain additional information about the specific research project they are currently contributing to.
• Protein Visualization Enhancements: All visualization modes have been enhanced with improved shading, highlighting and focus effects, including: Tapioca displays the protein as a smooth surface with improved shading and depth; Caviar displays the protein as a smooth surface with defined edges; Licorice displays only the protein's bonds and Backbone which emphasizes specific sections of the protein that are of the most scientific interest to researchers.
• Advanced Participation Mode: Advanced participation mode allows Stanford University to send simulations of varying computational lengths to PS3 users. Because the simulations in this mode can take significantly longer, Advanced Mode is only recommended for contributors who run Folding@home for at least eight hours per day.

All of this is going on late PST Friday night, so it may be a rough weekend, but we're keeping an eye on all of this and will do so until it looks like this is working well. So far, so good.


11/30/2006 GPU and SMP beta client update
We've issued updates to the GPU and SMP beta clients, since many of them expire on December 1, 2006. Also, the new GPU client has greater support for GPU cards (we now support x1600, x1800, and x1900 class ATI cards). The download page has the latest. These new GPU and SMP clients expire on February 1, 2007. Once we go final (i.e. out of a public beta), we will remove the expiration date from the client. The expiration dates are useful to make sure donors upgrade clients, as older beta SMP or GPU clients often have bugs which need to be upgraded.


11/6/2006 SMP client open beta test
We are now starting an open beta test of the SMP client. An open beta test means that everyone is invited to test out the software, although there may still be some rough edges and problems with the software. More information can be found on the SMP FAQ.


11/6/2006 SMP client now beta testing
We are now testing the SMP client with Folding@Home beta testers (beta testers can find more information in the beta testing forum). The SMP client supports OSX/Intel natively (which means a major points boost for OSX donors) as well as 64-bit linux (with 32-bit linux hopefully to come soon). Windows support will come much later, as this is a very different architecture for porting than OSX & Linux.


11/2/2006 Multi-gpu client now beta testing
We have released the multi-gpu client on our download page. More information about how to run multiple gpu clients can be found at this fahinfo page (we will eventually host this on our site).


10/27/2006 Multi-gpu support coming soon
We are testing a new client/core (core v0.09) which allows one to use multiple GPUs in one box. We hope to release this next week.


10/15/2006 GPU client not reporting progress
It's looking like the GPU client might not be reporting progress. We are actively looking into this issue today.
Beta testers having problems: please report your cases here and let us know:
http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?t=16477&highlight=


10/13/2006 Forum back up and working
WW has gotten the Folding Community Forum working again -- thanks for all his efforts. It looks like the alternate GPU forum is no longer needed.


10/12/2006 Alternate forum for GPU help
The Folding Community Forum has been having trouble with their login system. We have set up a temporary help forum to handle GPU issues only (please go to http://groups-beta.google.com/group/foldingathome ).


10/10/2006 GPU Core Update
We have been examining the GPU Core and how it runs on donor machines. After some initial core problems, it appears that the code is working well for the most part (with just some cosmetic issues, which we are working on). Donors have had success with both the 6.5 and 6.10 ATI drivers and so we suggest that if one is giving problems, to switch to the other.

The primary issue now appears to be the CPU use of the GPU core. Due to how graphics drivers work in Windows, the CPU must poll to see if the GPU has completed. This polling is very CPU intensive (as the GPU does complete its work fairly quickly). We are working on a fix to this, but it is also likely that future GPU cores may use CPU power for scientific calculations which cannot be run on the GPU.

Thus, we are asking donors who run the GPU core to leave some CPU power (~1 core) available for GPU's to use. We need to compensate donors for this additional use of resources, so the points have been increased. The very idea of a GPU core and GPU software is new, so we are still working out what's the best way to handle these issues, but in general, we will of course award points based on the hardware used -- more hardware used, more points. As we develop the GPU core, the points may need to be changed (possibly up, especially if more CPU is used, possibly down if essentially no CPU is needed).

We'd also like to thank all the beta testers who have given us great feedback. It's still very early for our GPU core, but the future is already looking very bright.


10/10/2006 Forum blank screen problem
For those still unable to get to the site, here is a workaround. Go here, and on that page input name & password info and hit login. To maintain its impartiality, the forum is run by a third party and they are looking into this issue. This will not work for guest accounts, or New Member accounts. You must have already been a member of the forum.


10/2/2006 GPU Client released
As many of you have seen, we released our beta version of our GPU client today. You can find out all the details in our GPU FAQ. Beta testing has already turned up an important problem with the Catalyst 6.10 drivers (thanks to everyone for their help here); 6.10 is causing EUE's (possibly amongst other causes too) and ATI is looking into this.

For now, we recommend 6.5 *only* (not 6.10, until it can be fixed). This is very much a beta test, so we expect to find problems like this. But we are working to quickly fix them as we find them.

9/29/2006 GPU client to debut on Monday, October 2, 2006. We will release an open beta of our client for GPU's on Monday Oct 2 in the early afternoon (Stanford time). We will also release a more detailed FAQ at that time to answer many questions that are not answered in our current FAQs (ATI FAQ, FPI FAQ).


8/23/2006 PS3 client announced today. Today in Germany, Sony demoed their Folding@Home client for the PS3. For more details, check out our PS3 FAQ. Using the Cell processor of the PS3, we should be able to do more folding than what one could do on a PC. Also, since the PS3 has a powerful GPU, the PS3 client will offer real time visualization for the first time. Check out the PS3 FAQ for some early movies of that.

The PS3 client and GPU client are together part of our new broader goals to push Folding@Home to the next stage, reaching calculations on the petaflop to 10 petaflop scale. We have some preliminary details on our Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative (FPI). We will release more details on all of this as the new software rolls out. We are beta testing the ATI GPU client software internally at the moment and will likely announce an open beta in four to five weeks (end of September).


8/20/2006 Network outtage Sunday. There will be a mostly brief (10-30 minute) network outtage today at ~10am pacific time.


7/19/2006 Great intro to biology: Inside the cell. The NIH has put out a great book which gives an introduction to cell biology, aptly called Inside the Cell. It also features Folding@Home on p. 24. Also see their html version of the document and you can also get a hardcopy from the NIH.


7/18/2006 Network switch over today at 11am Pacific Time. We will be switching over networks on some machines today at 11am PST, so you may notice some FAH servers down briefly. Notably the main AS and web server will need to be switched, so stats may be delayed for a while.


7/17/2006 Link between Alzheimer's Disease and Diabetes. There was a very interesting result recently announced at a conference strengthening the possible link between diabetes and Alzheimer's Disease. This has enormous ramifications as there is now a very large and growing group of people with diabetes (especially among young people); the scary implication is that the huge rise in diabetes in the youth of today will lead to a huge rise in Alzheimer's in the future. Check out this Google News link for more details.


7/13/2006 Major new result . We have a significant new result which just came out today in Science magazine. See the papers page for more details (it's also significant as this marks the fortieth paper for FAH!).


6/30/2006 Stats server maintenance. We are working on updating the stats server for v6. We will need to take the web interface to the stats down for several days. We will therefore not do this all at once, but starting Monday, we will have the stats update down a bit so our update can catch up. The actual stats will be updating, just the web interface for people to check their stats will be down.


6/29/2006 Folding@Home Principle Investigator Vijay Pande wins the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society. From their web site: "The Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories, recognizes a significant contribution to the study of proteins by a scientist who is in the early stages of an independent career and, generally, not more than 40 years of age at the time of the award. The 2006 awardee is Dr. Vijay Pande (Stanford University) for his unique approach to employing advances in algorithms that make optimal use of distributed computing, which places his efforts at the cutting edge of simulations. The results have stimulated a re-examination of the meaning of both ensemble and single-molecule measurements, making Dr. Pande’s efforts pioneering contributions to simulation methodology." Prof. Pande will accept the award at the Protein Society meeting in August and present the most recent results from Folding@Home in his award lecture.


6/18/2006 Stats temporarily down
The stats are down for a few hours. We expect to have it up by Monday afternoon pacific time, if not sooner (maybe Sunday night pacific time).


6/6/2006 Update
We've had a busy few months preparing for some new roll outs. In particular, there has been a lot of progress on the GPU front and on some new results. Due to some NDAs (either from collaborating companies or journals, who don't want us to talk about work before it's published), it's a bit too early to go into details, but we've updated the high performance FAQ and the diseases FAQ.

4/2/2006 New project description page
FAH has had many projects studied and lots more to come. However, the allprojects page has gotten very big, so we've made a page to get information for specific projects. Hopefully, this will help avoid long downloads. Also, the internal links to project pages in the stats have been updated to use the new project pages.


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.


11/6/2005 Planned Network Outage: 4AM-6AM PST December 15, 2005
In order to upgrade our provided network core, there will be a network outage on Thursday, December 15th from 4AM to 6AM Pacific time. This will affect roughly half of the FAH servers during this brief outage.

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.


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


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.


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.

8/21/2005 Stats crediting. We have developed 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 not to double credit), this process is very slow and may take 1-3 days to complete.


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.


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.


7/26/2005 Planned network outage, Thursday July 28, 2pm-5pm PDT We will have a planned network outage 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 outage 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.

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 significant 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!

3/1/2005 New FAH core to be released: QMD
We are releasing a new core for Quantum Molecular Dynamics. This core has similarities to previous cores, but also differences. In particular, it has very large memory needs. We have prepared a FAQ to describe QMD WUs in more detail.

1/15/2005 First results from Folding@Home cancer project published. We have been studying the p53 tumor suppressor and our first results on p53 have recently been published. You can find a summary and link to the paper on our papers page.

To our knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed results from a distributed computing project related to cancer. Thanks to the continued support of FAH donors, this is will be just the first of many cancer related works that will come from FAH.

The nature of our results can best be described in our paper. However, here's a brief summary of our results. Roughly half of all known cancers result from mutations in p53. Our first work in the cancer area examines the tetramerization domain of p53. We predict how p53 folds and in doing so, we can predict which amino acid mutations would be relevant. When compared with experiments, our predictions have appeared to agree with experiment and give a new interpretation to existing data.


1/14/2005 Folding@Home breaks 170,000 active CPUs. Folding@Home continues to attract more donors. Thanks to all for their contributions! The great outpouring of support has really paid off, allowing us to perform calculations which would otherwise be impossible (even with exclusive use of high end supercomputers like IBM Blue Gene). For example, we'll be making an announcement of some recent results related to cancer soon.


12/15/2004 New Folding@Home exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium
Folding@Home has been partially funded by and has continued scientific and teaching collaborations with CPIMA. One of the fruits of this collaboration has been the education pages.

More recently, high school teachers Gary Benz (American High School, Fremont, CA) and Claudia Winkler (Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA) have developed exhibits for San Francisco's Exploratorium.

There's a kiosk version as well as web pages detailing their efforts (including a high school level program and exhibits for the museum floor).

11/12/2004 Rough week for FAH: unplanned power outage and network problems
It's been a rough week for FAH. There was an unplanned power outage in the building housing our secondary server room. This outage had an impact campus wide, including in our primary server room. This appears to have lead to a problem with the cooling in our primary server room and that's being dealt with. Also, we continue to have some issues with the network due to the switchover to the new network (Medical school vs Campus). Both of these issues are being actively worked on, but may take some time to finally resolve. FAH is up and working quite well all things considered and hopefully we'll get the last bits up later next week.


11/7/2004 New awards for Folding@Home
Folding@Home lead developer and research scientist Guha Jayachandran has won the top award at BCATS2004. Prof. Vijay Pande has been named a 2004 Technovator. See the Awards Page for more details.


11/4/2004 New web pages for team creation/modification
We've done some significant re-working of the team creation and changing web pages to avoid the db problems many people have been having. We now understand why the page was failing and we believe our fix should handle it. Sorry for the problems in the first place!


10/24/2004 AMBER core FAQ
We've set up an AMBER core FAQ to address questions relating to this new core.


10/12/2004 New core: AMBER core 82
We are releasing a new core, based on the AMBER MD code (see the FAQ for more details). The AMBER core will give us functionality not present in either the Tinker or Gromacs cores.

AMBER uses double precision only. AMBER does not currently have SSE2 specific assembly code and so it will likely run closer to Tinker than Gromacs in general performance. We are planning on adding SSE2 support in future revs, but to keep the core as stable as possible in the initial rollout, we've left it out. Keep in mind that since AMBER uses double precision, SSE2 won't help *that* much.

Since this is a new core, there may be unexpected problems. However, this core has been extensively tested in house and has done extremely well in beta testing. Also, since it doesn't use SSE2 as heavily as Gromacs or other issues which push the limits on CPUs, it will likely be less troublesome to release than the Gromacs core was.

We are very excited about the new scientific possibilities that are possible with the new core. More news on these results as they come in!

10/4/2004 Dutch translation
Thanks to Tom Huls (Tochjo), we now have a Dutch translation. See http://folding.stanford.edu/dutch/


9/9/2004 FAH breaks the 1,000,000 CPU and 100 TFLOP barrier
We've passed the 1,000,000 total CPU mark. See the OS stats. We also have included new stats on the number of TeraFlops (Trillion FLoating point Per Second) done by FAH. At the moment, FAH is one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) supercomputer in the world (most supercomputers are at the single TFLOP level and FAH can do ~200 TFLOPS). How can we reach this level? Lots of CPUs (over 150,000) and very highly optimized code using CPUs to their fullest (eg SSE).


9/6/2004 New servers on line
We've been steadily adding new servers on line. These are very high powered machines (dual Opteron, lots of RAM, and 5TB storage each). These new servers will play a very important role in several new, important projects we're rolling out. Also, they'll help with server reliability, server response, and uptime.

Finally, with the new servers, FAH breaks 40TB in online server storage!


8/20/2004 New projects: P130x
We have some new exciting projects just being released. They are unlike any project we've done before and "break" some of the normal FAH rules:  

1. They're a lot bigger than the normal FAH WUs in terms of the RAM they take (hundreds of MB) and the net transfer (~5MB). To keep them only in the hands of those who have the resources for them, they require the "big WU" switch in the v5 client, enough RAM, and enough net bandwidth.
   
2. Since they take more resources, there is are bonus points associated with them (right now, a 100% bonus over the standard benchmark value). This value may increase or change if needed.
   


3. One other way that these WUs are different is that they are more likely to EARLY_END. Don't be surprised if this happens and don't worry: they are still scientifically important and clients get partial credit for the fraction completed.

5/28/2004 Project stats are back
The project stats are back. Due to a revamping of how they work in our database internally, they're grouped by project ranges in the 1000's, but you can still find info on each individual project.


5/16/2004 Folding@Home breaks 160,000 active CPUs
We have broken the 160,000 active CPU mark and are close to breaking the 1,000,000 CPU mark in total devices ever registered.

OS Type	Active	Total
Windows	137006	635553
Mac OS X	10550	39922
Linux	12845	61473
Other	0	0
Total	160401	736948
Total devices (including Folding@Home 1)	160401	904327

On the stats main page, we've placed a graph of the number of active based on previous milestones announced.

5/13/2004 Donator breaking the 5 million point mark

Top individual donator OC-AMD has broken the 5 million point mark. He has also been an active beta tester and helped a great deal with several troublesome WUs.

Congratulations and thanks for all of his contributions!

5/8/2004 Timeless Gromacs now online
We are now also giving out Gromacs WUs w/o deadlines to clients with the GAH config. They are on the .100 server.


5/2/2004 Prof. Pande's talk at PARC now online
Check out Prof. Pande's talk at PARC at this link online. For those who are interested in how FAH works and some of the recently published works, this talk discusses these issues and is meant for a general scientific audience.


5/1/2004 Server .108 off line in stats system
Server .108 is offline in the stats system. We'll get it hooked back in on Monday. Right now, it looks to be getting WUs, so the stats will go way up when its hooked back in.


4/24/2004 F@H breaks 150,000 active CPUs!

OS Type	Active	Total
Windows	129666	611288
Mac OS X	9816	38464
Linux	11564	58164
Total	151046	707916
Total devices (including Folding@Home 1)	151046	875295

Thanks to all who have contributed!


4/23/2004 Important new FAH results
We've just published some neat new results -- the first published results from the Gromacs core. You can see a press release from Stanford University as well as the paper itself in the papers section.


4/18/2004 New reference machine for FAH points determination (UPDATED 5pm Pacific Time)
We have rolled out our new points determination system. The advantages are:

1. There will be much more standardization for points and deadlines.


2. The points and deadlines will be determined on a more modern machine (2.8GHz P4), although they will be scaled to match current Gromacs projects.

Thanks to all who have contributed!


4/2/2004 Team certificates now on line
We have added certificates for team achievements as well as individual stats. You will see certificate links on the FAH team web page stats.


3/30/2004 Extended 'Education@Home' pages
Tug has updated his education pages and we've (finally) put them up. There is updated info on G@H, lay explanations of some of our important papers, and more! Actually, lots of neat stuff to explore. Don't miss the trivia game!


3/29/2004 Stats back up and on new server
The stats are back up and now go off of the new server. The stats should be faster now. More importantly, it's on more reliable hardware and we've got the infrastructure down for future improvements. The stats files on vsp27.stanford.edu will no longer be supported, so please update your links to the corresponding pages on http://fah-web.stanford.edu.


3/29/2004 Stats down for planned maintenance
We're switching over to the new hardware and hope to be done later today.


3/27/2004 New stats scripts
The new stats scripts are now up. One key part has not been completed: the data for which WUs (and the corresponding projects) contributed. We are revamping how that db works to give much more info, but for now, that part is off-line. This is not using the new hardware (so there won't be any speed improvement, yet). Once this is looking good, we'll switch to the new backend server for the db and then we should see a stats speed increase. We hope to have this done on Tuesday.

3/24/2004 Longer retry deadlines
We have been trying a new algorithm for projects 858 and 859. This algorithm requires shorter deadlines to run efficiently. Of course, these short deadlines must be balanced with what donators can return. We have gotten feedback that the retry deadline was too short for many CPUs and so we have temporarily increased it to 24 days, while we analyze to see how well the new methods worked.

3/22/2004 Folding Fact of the Day
We have added a new "Fact of the day" to the stats. These were gathered by Tug Sezen, our resident high school teacher, in order to try to "spice things up" a bit. As the name implies, these facts change every day.


3/18/2004 FAH Upgrading Hardware
The main AS (assign.stanford.edu) has now also been transferred over. More to come!


3/17/2004 FAH Upgrading Hardware
We have started our migration to new hardware. We are first migrating the assignment servers. Assign2.stanford.edu has been moved and we expect the DNS propagation will take 2-3 days. Both (old and new) machines are up and accepting requests, but once the DNS is completed, we'll stop the old servers. We're upgrading from 500MHz Celerons (here since Oct 2000 -- if it isn't broke, don't fix it) to Dell 1750s (dual 2.8GHz Xeons). Thanks to Dell for their donation of some hardware!

3/16/2004 Biologists think bigger
EMBO Reports has a nice article about distributed computing and its impact on biology. Check it out here.

3/10/2004 The end of Genome@Home
Our sister project, Genome@Home, will be shutting down. We want to make FAH more friendly to Genomers. Our plan is to set up a server for FAH WUs, but without any deadlines. The gah preference in the client will, after March 12, send clients to that server.

2/18/2004F@H breaks 130,000 active CPUs!

Thanks to all who have contributed!


2/13/2004 Stats back up
The stats db has been restored and is back up. Thanks for your continued contributions to Folding@Home!

2/12/2004 Stats update
The db is being restored from a backup and the old stats (since the backup) are being re-entered from logs. So far, things look good. We hope to be back on line Friday noon PST. Thanks for your patience.

2/11/2004 Stats down
The stats are down due to a corrupted database. We'll bring it back from a backup and re-enter the recent entries. This should take a day or so. Sorry for the delay.

2/4/2004 FAH results considered one of the "hot papers" of 2003. The Nature paper by Chris Snow et al from Folding@Home was considered to be one of the "hot papers" from 2003. Check out the ISI web site http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2004/january-04-VijayPande.html for more details.

1/6/2004 Stats server abuse
Certain servers are trying to download everyone's stats from the cgi pages. This is causing the stats to come to a crawl for everyone else and is an act in violation of our robots.txt file. We are denying access to these IPs and may forward the details for this attack to Stanford security if needed.

Please just download the pages

http://vsp27.stanford.edu/daily_user_summary.txt
http://vsp27.stanford.edu/daily_team_summary.txt

They don't put a huge hit on our servers and is the "right" way to do this. Thanks!

12/30/2003 Mad Cow hits the US
It's definitely not a great topic for the holidays, but Mad Cow disease has hit the US. I was thinking of making a running commentary on it, but perhaps that's better done in other ways. In particular, Google News is a good source for news from a variety of places. Click here for the latest Mad Cow reports. We're taking this news pretty seriously, as it really highlights how close to home (for us, at least) these issues are.

12/19/2003 Client version 4.0 released
We've released the next major revision of the client. There are lots of changes and improvements, including better handling of WUs for GAH. Please see the release notes for all the details. The cores have not changed significantly and so none of these changes will affect performance.

12/18/2003 Happy holidays from FAH and GAH
We've added certificates to thank the FAH and GAH donators for their contributions. You will see links to the certificates on the stats pages. While this is really only a small token of our gratitude, we are very grateful for everyone's contributions to our projects. Thanks to JWhy for making the original scripts that we used!

Happy holidays!

PS GAH certificates will appear at the next stats update.

11/26/2003 Change to the stats system
The stats system is getting hit hard right now with stats queries, which is causing problems with entering new stats into the db. We've put a cap on the number of people who can access the stats at any given time in order to relieve this issue. This does not affect the fast team pages, which are always the best way to access stats if possible.

11/23/2003 New papers
In the last few weeks, we've now had several papers which have been published based on Folding@Home computation. They are summarized on our papers page. That makes 14 papers from FAH computation!

I'll just summarize two of the most recent below. The paper in Nature Structural Biology is a surprising result on the fundamental nature of protein structure and the paper in Physical Review Letters sets the stage for a new way to perform computational drug design which we are both further developing and applying.

11/9/2003 New disease under study
In collaboration with other groups at Stanford (esp Klein's group), we have started looking at Collagen folding and misfolding. Collagen is the most common protein in the body and mutations in collagen leads to a very nasty disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (or OI for short). In many cases, OI is lethal and leads to miscarriage. However, 1 in 10,000 people have some sort of mutational in collagen. For many, where the mutation is not very serious, it lies unknown and misdiagnosed and leads to brittle bones and other more subtle problems. In others, however, mutations lead to more serious morphological disorders (see below).

We are starting to model collagen folding and misfolding in the 1000 series projects. For more info, see http://vsp27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/allprojects#1001.

11/5/2003 Network problems at the University
There have been some network problems reported at the University and they appear to be affecting Folding@Home. The symptom is that network connections are taking a while and hanging. Stanford IT is working on this and we'll give an update when there is more to say. For now, F@H is up and working, although donators may have trouble contacting Stanford.

11/3/2003 New improved Gromacs OS X core
Due to some hard work by Guha and Erik, the OSX Gromacs OSX core is now 2-3x faster on G3's and G4's and fixes the incompatibility problem for G5's. The result: screaming fast folding on the Mac. Let's hope that the word gets out and we can bring some more Mac donators to the "fold"!

10/10/2003 F@H breaks 120,000 active CPUs!

Thanks to all who have contributed!

10/1/2003 Happy Birthday, Folding@Home!
Folding@Home is now officially 3 years old. Coding for FAH 1.x started in early 2000, beta testing started in August, and we went live & public on October 1. Congrats to all who have made FAH a success.

9/16/2003 Revamped backend
Eric and Vijay have revamped the main backend codes and scripts to better handle down servers. This includes the serverstats.html web page, the Assignment server, and the stats scripts. Our new fix is pretty simple, but effective -- all operations timeout so if a server is only partially down (which happens a lot), there's no complex logic to parse. This should help our stats system uptime a great deal as well as AS logic for down servers.

9/12/2003 Active CPU time extended to 1 month
Now that FAH deadlines are getting pretty long, we needed to extend the time in which we use to calculate what is an active CPU. We now say a CPU is active if it's given a WU back in the last month (defined as 31 days). With this new definition, we're counting machines we missed before (the ones which gave WUs back after 2 weeks, but before 1 month) and the total number of active CPUs is now over 100,000 CPUs.

8/21/2003 Stats down for planned maintenance
The stats system is currently down for internal maintenance. Things should be back to normal in a few hours.


8/11/2003 Donators breaking the million point mark
Now, individual 3 donators have broken the million point mark. Top individual donator DGROMS.com (see picture on the left) was the first to break the barrier a few weeks ago. Since then, two more (plext and OC-AMD) have broken the million-point barrier as well.

Congrats to all!


8/4/2003 HHMI article
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (which funds Folding@Home via funding for Chris Snow and Bojan Zagrovic) wrote an article about FAH http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/pdf/june2003/Behind.pdf

7/30/2003 Planned outage today
Just a reminder. We are having a planned outage today at 8am PDT. Some systems will likely be down before this in anticipation of the power outage.

7/25/2003 Please upgrade old clients -- support for 2.xx clients will soon be ending
Please upgrade 2.xx clients. We will soon stop supporting the 2.xx series of clients. In the end, 3.xx also has lots of features and fixes and has remained stable for a while, so there is no reason not to upgrade!

7/24/2003 Planned shutdown, Wed July 30, 8AM PDT
The power to our server room will be temporarily shutdown this coming Wednesday. We plan to keep FAH up as much as possible (assuming the generator is working), but we will likely take this time to do some server maintenance. It is scheduled to last 3-4 hours.

7/10/2003 Unplanned power outage
The power went out on the Stanford campus this evening and we're still dealing with the fall out. Most of FAH is up due to UPSes, but a couple of servers are down. We'll turn off stats updates until we can fix everything tomorrow.

Also note that there will be a planned outage Friday morning 8am PST to noon PST.

7/1/2003 Pande lab is moving
The good news: soon, we'll be moving to a pretty neat new building at Stanford -- the James Clark Center for Interdisciplinary Biology at Stanford University Medical School. This is part of the BioX project at Stanford.

The only negative part of this is that it's lead to the screwy DNS issues as we've moved. This (hopefully) should be completely resolved now.

6/17/2003 Time to upgrade those old clients
We've found a compatibility problem with old clients (pre 3.x). If you've got a 2.x client, please upgrade.

5/19/2003 Folding@Home: Reloaded with Gromacs
We've formally rolled out Gromacs. To celebrate, we have some web pages announcing the result and thanking all who helped out in its development. Please check out: Shorty's "Folding@Home: Reloaded" video and our summary of what's new. Special thanks to Shorty for all of his hard work on the video!

5/15/2003 Are you ready?
Check this out.

5/11/2003 Vijay Pande awarded a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award
More info in the awards section.

3/27/2003 New WU types Today
Several new WU types are being released today on a new type of F@H server. We hope that this new configuration will eliminate some of the hard disk problems we have been having recently. The new work includes two very different systems NTL9 (a protein with both beta and alpha structure) and 1PRB (a three helix bundle). In addition we are increasing the scope of our trpzip investigation to include a fourth variant trpzip4.

3/17/2003 PLANNED SHUTDOWN, FRIDAY MARCH 21
The power in our building is being rerouted and we are being forced to have a planned shutdown. We will likely take all of the F@H servers off line Friday, March 21 around 5pm PST and then bring them up around 1pm Saturday, March 22. The exact times may change slightly. We had a previous planned shutdown like this which went relatively smoothly and we hope that this will go smoothly as well.

3/14/2003 Back from Asia
I just got back from the Asia part of the tour (see below). People seemed very excited about the work and we've established some new collaborations.

2/10/2003 Folding@Home tour
I'll be giving a series of talks in the coming weeks, including University of Pennsylvania (2/20), Princeton University (2/21), the International Symposium on Simulation Science (Japan, 3/8), Public Sessions of the conference (3/9), Seoul National University (3/12), the Hopkins Protein Folding meeting, and University of Maryland.

1/10/2003 F@H breaks 90,000 active CPUs!

Thanks to all who have contributed!

1/1/2003 Happy new year!

12/31/2002 New OS X versions on the way
Adam and Guha got new OS X versions posted -- 3.24 final. Happy new year!

12/30/2002 New stats code
Siraj has dramatically sped up the stats system. After some testing, we've put it in as the default version.

12/11/2002 Gromacs update
We're prepping new Gromacs WUs, but don't expect any for probably another week at least. We've been doing a lot of local debugging and testing and have some problems/issues with Gromacs.Our plan is to roll out Gromacs in small test batches first. That will continue for a while. If you're interested in getting Gromacs WUs, we'll release them first on adv methods (once we feel that there are no bugs, etc). Once we trust it, we'll do a larger rollout (which is likely several weeks away).

12/10/2002 New server stats log
On the serverstats page, you can now click on the IP address to get a log of the server status over time. There are also .log files in the same directory http://vsp27.stanford.edu/logs directory which have a text version for those that are curious.

12/9/2002 New stats db speedups
Siraj has made some significant speedup in the stats db. He/we're still testing, but that plus the new static pages should take care of things for a while and make the stats more snappy.

12/8/2002 New Faster team pages
Check out the new static html fast team pages. They're generated once an hour. For example, for team1, go to http://vsp27.stanford.edu/teamstats/team1.html

11/14/2002 New team stats page format
Due to the unique nature of donators which use the Google toolbar, we have rearranged the stats page. Other than this rearranging into two groups, nothing else has changed.

11/11/2002 F@H tested by Tech Report
The well-known web publication Tech Report has done an extensive study on F@H, showing that it doesn't affect the performance of other programs and runs quietly and unnoticed in the background.

"In Quake III Arena, Folding@Home again has a miniscule impact on performance. At lower resolutions, the Folding@Home systems are only a few frames per second slower than systems running without the client enabled."

"The results of our testing couldn't be clearer, at least for the systems we've tested today. Quite simply, the impact of running Folding@Home in the background is negligible. Even the most discerning users won't notice it."

"With the results we've seen here, one more excuse for not donating excess CPU time to the Folding@Home project is gone. Whether you're playing games, encoding media files, surfing the web, slaving away in a cubicle at work, or mumbling to your computer, running the Folding@Home client won't slow you down. "

 

11/7/2002 New Gromacs WU coming next week
We're done with our most recent Gro project (Gro is so much faster than Tinker that for the same scale projects, they'll finish faster) and are working to get the next batch on. We found one issue and there is some new functionality we need to put in for the new Gro WUs, so no new WUs until this is finished. We hope to have them out early next week.

11/6/2002 Folding@Home breaks the 70,000 Active CPU point
In large part due to Google compute and to the press from our recent articles, we've broken the 70,000 active CPU barrier. We are actively working to shore up the server side infrastructure to handle the load and so far, things are looking pretty good. With lots of users, we'll be running many more projects (on many more servers) and thus an interesting side effect will be more WU variety project-wide. Thanks to all for contributing!

10/28/2002 Folding@Home breaks the 60,000 Active CPU point
Thanks to all for contributing!

10/26/2002 Bojan Zagrovic wins BCATS top price
Bojan Zagrovic, F@H team member, won the best talk prize at BCATS, Stanford's symposium for Biomedical Computation. For more, see the awards page.

10/23/2002 More articles
You can check out a quick summary at Google here.

Stanford gives distributed computing an A
Globetechnology.com, Canada - 29 minutes ago
... over the job of calculating the rate of folding in the molecule to some 200000
PCs connected through a distributed computing project known as Folding@home ...

Computer screensavers solve protein puzzle
Independent Online, South Africa - 1 hour ago
... Pande's project, dubbed Folding@home, assembled 200 000 volunteers, who each downloaded a programme which swung into action after their computer had been idle ...

Stanford gives distributed computing an A
BusinessWeek - 2 hours ago
... over the job of calculating the rate of folding in the molecule to some 200000 PCs connected through a distributed computing project known as Folding@home ...

Distributed computing gets top marks
ZDNet, UK - 2 hours ago
... over the job of calculating the rate of folding in the molecule to some 200000 PCs connected through a distributed computing project known as Folding@home ...

Stanford gives "A" to distributed computing
ZDNet - 3 hours ago
... over the job of calculating the rate of folding in the molecule to some 200000 PCs connected through a distributed computing project known as Folding@home ...

Stanford gives distributed computing an A

CNET News.com - 4 hours ago
... over the job of calculating the rate of folding in the molecule to some 200000 PCs connected through a distributed computing project known as Folding@home ...

10/22/2002 Large surge in users
There is a large surge in new users which is slowing down the stats significantly. We are looking into ways to fix this ASAP.

10/20/2002-10/22/2002 Nature publication and press coverage update
There seems to be some problem with the link below. You can go to Nature's AOP here. You can check out a quick summary at Google here. Some others are summarized below:

Folding@home Scientists Report First Distributed Computing ...
Science Daily 
... Two years ago, Pande launched Folding@home - a distributed computing project that so far has enlisted the aid of more than 200000 PC owners, whose ...

Folding@Home Reports Success
Slashdot 
msheppard writes "This Article describes how the folding@home distributed computing project is reporting that they used the data processed on client machines ...

Spare computer capacity pays dividends
BBC, UK 
... extraterrestrial life. The success has been achieved by the Folding@home project, run by scientists at Stanford University in the US. It ...

Scientists claim distributed computing success
Ananova, UK