What I was saying is that if folding cost you 30$ a year in electricity and instead of folding multiples hours and encurring the 30$ electricity bill you simply give 30$ to the research institute. The research institute will still have to cover the electricity and will be left out of your multiple hours of folding. What you suggest is a loose/loose situation. While your PS3 or computer run, sure you pay for electricity, but your also lending a system that worth 300$ to them and some room. If everyone that use their service were going to give them 30 $ they wouldnt be able to purchase enough system and cover fees to get the same result that they are getting today. So yeah I was completely understanding the point suggesting they would be able to make better use of the money people spent running foldingathome.

(Computing power is only one tool, not a solution to a problem.) They also receive money donation for other types of research.

Wow, you totally lost me.

Simply put, they can collect more data with peoples folding at home then if the same persons would give them 30$ to collect the data by themselves. Sure they need both of them (they also have other types of research), but you shouldnt replace the person foldingathome with small amount of money such as 30$. Hope you understand, I have difficulty explaining things in english.

Well, this thread now has actual complainers about how Folding@Home is inferior to people directly donating money to the research labs.

The major benefit F@H has for the researchers at Stanford is that it cuts both energy costs and computer costs at their end while still having an insanely powerful network of computers compiling data.

So instead of donating $30 to them, your actually donating lot more folding at your own home.

Now for the argument about PS3 being "best" way to donate. Squillium pretty much nailed the fact GPU folding speeds destroys the PS3 at folding.

Let me say this. IF you have a crappy, not so great PC, that you probably bought at walmart or went cheap on your PC from Best Buy or where ever, it really doesnt have the computing power. No one will argue that any PC folding doesnt help, because it does, its just not as fast as the PS3 or GPU folding.

IF you own a crappy PC but do own a PS3, fold using the PS3 or both the PS3 and your PC. Either way you will contribute greatly to Stanford's research. Now if you own a gaming PC or have a decent GPU in your PC, fold using Stanford's GPU client, and of course if you own a PS3, use that too.

GPUs fold work units 100% faster then the PS3 can and easily 1000% faster then a basic CPU can.

Anyways anyone here who uses F@H please join the official VGC team. Team #109453

And yes, I'm the third biggest contributor in the group.

GPU don't fold the same work units as CPU work units. GPU gets more work units done faster but CPU handles more complex work. I still fold with my PS3 occasionally, 430 work units and counting but I do more work units with my Geforce 285.

Why would Folding@Home use the GPU? I believe Folding@Home uses the Cell for number crunching and sends the results back to the researchers. The graphics are used to distract the owner of the PS3.

Squilliam said: Icyedge said: Squilliam said: Of course. It could be argued that thousands of people died because the people who folded on the PS3 could have bought the discovery faster with GPU folding. You joking right? The PS3 is 10 X faster than an average computer at folding.   http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3#ntoc6 Thats an average computer. There are fewer than half the number of active Nvidia GPUs but they deliver four times the performance that the PS3 gives. http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

From the same website (see paragraph 2)...

How are the FLOPS calculated?

People often use the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) as a metric for the speed of a computer. One question that arises is how to compare machines with radically different architectures. In particular, what requires only a few operations (or even just a single operation) on one machine could require many operations on another. Classic examples are evaluations of functions like the exp(x) or sin(x). On GPU and Cell hardware, functions like this can often be calculated very quickly, say in one cycle, while this is often counted as 10-20 operations for other machines.

We take a conservative approach to FLOP calculation, rendering quantities such as exp(x) or sqrt(x) as a single FLOP, if the hardware supports it. This can significantly underestimate the FLOP count (as others would count an exp(x) as 10 or 20 FLOPS, for example). Others take a much less conservative approach and we are considering giving two counts, adding a more traditional (less conservative) count as well.

The ideal comparison would be to run Folding@home on the supercomputer itself to test its speed. In this sort of comparison, FAH would likely do very well, and we are investigating the best way to perform this benchmark, as we expect people would be very interested.

How should the FLOPS per client be interpreted?

We stress that one should not divide "current TFLOPS" by "active clients" to estimate the performance of that hardware running without interruption. Note that if donors suspend the FAH client (e.g. to play a game, watch a movie, etc) they enlarge the time between getting the WU and delivering the result. This in turn reduces the FLOPS value, as more time was needed to deliver the result.

It seems that the PS3 is more than 10X as powerful as an average PC. Why doesn't it get 10X the credit as well?

We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WUs. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPUs (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WUs). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).

Ok, that is understandable. However I don't agree.

Im glad people are using the Folding@Home option. I however would not put my old 40gb under that sort of strain.