Ask HN: Anybody here active on folding at home ?
Users are donating copious amount of CPU time (and power) to the Stanford University project in order to help with the study of diseases, I figure at this moment that value of that donation is roughly 250K cpus each consuming about 100 watts, at 10cts per KWh about $2500 every hour, or about $22 million annually (the 250K cpus is a 2008 figure).
At this moment the list of diseases studied is:
- Alzheimers
- Huntingtons
- Cancer
- Parkinsons
- general antibiotics
- Osteogensis imperfecta
Folding@home promises that the results and datasets will be made public:
"Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles that analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site. "
Currently there are 69 papers listed that use f@h results, according to http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers , quite a few of those are not accessible to the general public, of a small sample out of the 69 papers listed 7 were accessible and 10 were not.
There is only one dataset available for download:
https://simtk.org/home/foldvillin
So far it seems that Stanford is not living up to its promise to share the results of the folding at home project.
What are your thoughts on this?