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Charity is not about Helping · Gwern.net

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Simple cost-benefit: distributed computing considered harmful as scientific lemon projects run at high resource cost. W hen considering “helping out”, also consider the costs of your helping out and what alternatives there are (such as AlphaFold⁠). Folding@home⁠ (FAH for short) boasts of being the largest/most powerful distributed computing project in the world with >5 petaflops⁠ of capacity, focused on the ⁠NP-hard⁠ problem of protein folding⁠. It is powered by volunteers running its client on their computers, or more specifically, their GPUs⁠ and PS3s⁠. (Their architectures are more specialized than normal CPUs and, if a problem happens to match their architecture, can run an order of magnitude or two faster & more power-efficiently than a CPU would.) The researchers solve their problems, the volunteers know their idle computing capacity is going to good use—everyone wins. Right? But where is this free lunch coming from? Why are the researchers relying on volunteers? What does it cos

--- title: Charity is not about Helping description: "Simple cost-benefit: distributed computing considered harmful as scientific lemon projects run at high resource cost." created: 2011-09-15 modified: 2015-09-12 status: in progress confidence: possible importance: 8 css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs ... When considering "helping out", also consider the costs of your helping out and what alternatives there are (such as [AlphaFold](!W)). # Charitable supercomputing [Folding@home](!W "Folding@home") (FAH for short) boasts of being the largest/most powerful distributed computing project in the world

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