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There is certainly a chance that 10-100x more flops will appear on the fah network, but as I said I just don't believe it will happen.

> nor why they aren’t scheduling compute time on Summit, right?

They are. The researchers who get to use the FAH network certainly do have access to traditional supercomputing resources too. Some types of problems require strong scaling (and reliable resources) which requires HPC iron.

> > Also AFAIK garbage flops also count.

> That’s always true in these peak performance measurements, both for distributed projects and for supercomputers too. Also true for CPU & GPU peak flops specs.

I think you're misunderstanding me: I literally meant that the data files returned by the FAH contributors may often be garbage due to data corruption (OC'd cards, no ECC, overheating hardware, poor storage etc.). Not sure to what extent is this still the case today.

> I just don’t see any reason why Folding@Home would or should refrain from distributed crowd computing just because supercomputers exist. They can both happen. We don’t need to try to come up with efficiency numbers or compare utility/flop in order to see that Folding@Home is producing some useful research results, right?

In principle you're right. There are some questions around it, though. Briefly: access is a privilege of few; oversight?; inefficient use of hardware (low Flops/W), just to name a few.

> Maybe it’s worth pointing out that compute time on TOP500 supercomputers is not free,

No, it is not, but access is granted by grant agencies with at least some transparency and oversight as well as scientific review; also, those machine are far more efficient (flops/w).

> and Folding@Home is not a job you can run for 1 day or 1 week and be done.

No, Folding@Home is not the "job"; a "job" at least in HPC sense is a molecular dynamics simulation (or many); a set of such jobs is what is typically required for a project to be completed result of which would end up in a publication. The computational work corresponding to such a project/paper, depending on the size of the machine, can in fact be run in 1 week, and on a large machine even in 1 day.

I will say that there's nothing wrong with continuing the folding research that's being done. We have a ways to go before purely predicted protein structures (as opposed to structures from crystallography or EM) become trustworthy enough to make research decisions based off of. But we can't get there if we don't continue the basic research! In that sense I'm all for these studies. A lab I always appreciate (purely from perceived merit of the papers I see continuously from) is that of David Baker. They seem to make meaningful strides towards making synthetic protein folding more powerful as a tool among other projects.

However what I see as problems are two things in this field:

1. Definitely have seen papers where they'll try to do some molecular Dynamics simulations on some protein related to a disease but it's not clear if it's meaningful to anyone - people actually working on the disease therapy probably weren't even asking for these insights if there were even any; these low-hanging-fruit studies also don't aid the progress of folding and Dynamics research either, because they were just applying standard techniques to a problem domain. Often times these are just cash grabs by researchers who have specialized in the mol.dyn fields and end up writing grants to disease research agencies allegedly in aid of curing the disease but practically not. I know this because my lab did this blatantly. When anthrax was a real threat we got funds for anthrax related research, then we shifted to MS, now cancer. I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly write grants for corona virus related research! This goes on in all these fields.

2. I argue that folding@home keep advertising misleadingly that they're gonna help cure aids or corona or whatever. I don't think they are, not directly. In a very vague way this feels more like war profiteering to me - these experts are exploiting the current fears to canvas their projects (even design them around this) and giving what is closer to false hope than anything that people are contributing towards end goals of curing disease. I feel like they should be honest about it - this is more basic research than anything else, so they should just say they want computational power for basic science. If people still choose to give their resources, great. Otherwise at least you live and die with dignity.

Anyways this is of course a rant from a PhD who got sick of the system and left, and someone with only an associative knowledge of this particular field. Hence these thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt!

Fair point. I think this is something you should bring up with the authors of Folding@Home. I do not work on that project.

My personal view on this is that there is always a cost/benefit balance that one has to strike which is often tricky especially given the considerably constrained resources as it is typically the case in academic computational/simulation tool development.

It is however, as you point out, a great responsibility of the researchers and developers of codes to make sure that choices made and action taken (or not) do not lead to disproportionate waste of resources donated by volunteers or awarded through a grant by research funding agencies.

I do not know the detailed reasons why F@H chose to not update CPU "core" since FahCore_a7 (AFAIK based one GROMACS code from 2014), but it is likely related to the aforementioned cost/benefit analysis done in their team. One of the motivations could have been (just hypothesizing) that the software engineering efforts estimated to be required to update FahCore for CPUs (which generate a very small fraction of the "points") would have taken away resources from the GPU FahCore.

In that respect, the responsibility of whether to ask for and how to make good use of donations lies solely on the teams that receive the donation. Without oversight it would however be foolish of them to be overly critical on their own shortcomings as there is a great benefit to having these cheap FLOPS (and good PR) that F@H brings.

I was about to suggest that it would be great to set up a merit-based funding scheme somewhat akin to the governamental funding agencies, but one run independently by the "council of the people". I'm however uncertain how effective could such an organization be at awarding the funding in a responsible and effective manner.