Why Im Quitting Folding@Home

My Past

I got involved with Folding@Home (FAH) in October 2010 when I read it in Custom PC magazine. I saw that people were using it on their PCs when not being used to support medical research by Stanford University (among others). Whilst initially conceived as something your typical user would install as a screensaver it quickly became a benchmarking tool and just like most benchmarking tools, there becomes a race to see who is the best.

For me FAH served a multitude of purposes, firstly, it fed my inner geek. For me there was a personal reason to it too - FAH was attempting research into deadly diseases such as cancer - I've already lost two members of my family to it, a third is diagnosed with it too, so it's been a massive motivator for me.

Setting up Windows XP and running an installer is easy and you then start to reap the rewards of your efforts when you see your hard work . But then you realise that there are several steps you can do to get more points out of your PC. Using Linux is probably the biggest boost, followed by over-clocking. So I quickly started to learn about Ubuntu and networking the computers together more efficiently. During this process I would consult the forums of the Custom PC magazine for help and guidance.

The Bit-Tech and Custom PC folding team is a very friendly group, all competitiveness is very light-hearted and the community is very supportive. At my peak when I had my own farm of computers (a total of 13 I believe) I was putting out 140,000 points per month. 

To do that I had built my own farm of folding PCs and even ended up buying a monstrous 7' server cabinet! In the picture below you can see a vertical panorama of the server cabinet - it's a little warped, but from top to bottom you can see: computer monitor, 8-way KVM switch, 8-port Ethernet switch, PDU bar, a workstation PC with dual Xeon processors, the two grey PCs are core2quad based PCs, the black PC is also a core2quad based PC, a 2U Dual Processor AMD Opteron workstation (also serves as a game server dual to the RAID-ed 10,000 RPM drives), finally the PC on the floor with the screwdriver on is a 1U Core2Duo PC.

Vertical panorama

To help grasp the size of the cabinet better here it is again

The thing is - there were still 5 PCs outside the rack as well!

Then things changed ...

By the middle of 2012 my employer transferred me from the site in the south of England to the one in Scotland. This meant a massive lifestyle change and moving out of shared accommodation and taking my own first step onto the property ladder. Despite having massive support from my employer, that first step is still challenging - especially since I was doing alone and at just 24 I was the youngest of all my friends to do it.

Upon moving in and getting settled into a new lifestyle with both bigger and more bills meant that running a folding farm was now prohibitively expensive because the total power draw of the system was approaching 4 kW, this became a hobby I could no longer justify.

Then Stanford changed things ... again ...

Stanford are regularly adjusting the Work Units (WUs) based on the research that they need. The processing power required for WUs generally increases over time. My hardware is still based on Core2Duo and Core2Quad era hardware which makes it very slow relative to the powerful i7s we have now. Earlier in 2015 Stanford withdrew WUs for GTX 2-series cards (GTX260s was what all of the PCs had, so losing the ability to fold on them hurt badly).

You can see in the image above that the WUs have a deadline of about 5-6 days, but its going to take about 4 days for my PC to process the data. Given that the PC is only on for about 4-5 hours a day it makes achieving these deadlines impossible and there's no point trying because the data will be wasted. The WU would be better spent being processed by someone who can chew it through in time.

It's been a tough decision to make because I have enjoyed learning about Linux and the perpetual PC maintenance is great fun, but money is the overriding factor, the current hardware is expensive to run and it's struggling to meet deadlines even if I could afford to run them 24/7.

I bid my fellow and future Folders all the luck in their folding career :)