The Future of Folding@Home
From FaHWiki
Currently the future looks bright for the continuation of Folding@home. With a published history of 40 peer-reviewed papers (June 2006) from the Pandegroup at Stanford, and 30 more prior to that, it seems scientific worth is not a problem.
The science behind Folding@home is continually evolving, and more people want to do research in this field. The PI list for the Folding@home project changes from year to year as students complete their study and new recruits take over.
The Folding@home project is always looking to push the boundaries of technology too, provided that resulting increase in computing power is worth the initial investment.
- Clients/cores designed to take advantage of the processing power of GPUs are already being worked upon, as is integrating SMP into the Gromacs core.
- The existing processing cores are updated on a regular basis in order to incorporate the latest features of their respective simulation methods.
Vijay himself has already said that the research he and his group are doing is still limited by the raw CPU power available to them:
We have specific plans ready to put into action once we reach certain CPU levels, up to 1M[illion] CPUs. Once we start to get close to 1M active CPUs, we will sit down and make plans for going beyond that. Our research is very compute limited.
_____________ Professor Vijay S. Pande, PhD
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