Here are some of the notable topics of interest from the last few months in the F@H Project, News, Client Developments (version 6, GPU, ClearSpeed), etc...

1/29/2006 QMD temporarily off line
We are in the process of building new QMD projects. In order to do so, we need to complete our analysis of the existing QMD data, so we have stopped assigning new QMD's as we analyze the existing data set. We expect the analysis to take at least a few weeks (and potentially longer, depending on what we find). The upshot will be that we will be moving to second stage QMD WU's, which is very exciting to us. Thanks to all who have contributed on QMD projects and we'll make an announcement on new QMD projects once we're further along.

2/27/2006 QMD update
Our first round of analysis is still underway, so it looks like QMD's will be out for at least one more month, but likely longer. Unfortunately, these sorts of estimates are hard to make and if something new (and often interesting science-wise!) comes up, this could easily take much longer still.

4/2/2006 New project description page
FAH has had many projects studied and lots more to come. However, the allprojects page has gotten very big, so we've made a page to get information for specific projects. Hopefully, this will help avoid long downloads. Also, the internal links to project pages in the stats have been updated to use the new project pages.

February 2006 We are trying out a new type of code to run on GPUs to see if we can get an even greater speed increase. Depending on how this looks, we may go with the new version or stick with the previous one to release on FAH.

March 2006 We have been investigating using ATI boards. The newest ones (with the R520 or R580 GPU -- eg the 1800XT or 1900XT boards) support 32 bit floating point operations, so they now work for folding calculations.

April 2006 We and our collaborators have submitted our first folding on GPU papers to the Supercomputing 2006 meeting. The results will be publically available at a later date. We are now working to refine the algorithms as well as make the code suitable for running on FAH. One of the big challenges for FAH deployment will be the differences in drivers on donors machines. However, we now have a plan for this and so we are starting to make plans for porting to FAH. We note that the port may take a while to debug (and we will want to do a great deal of internal testing before releasing such a different type of port).

We do not have updates on the code which we can publicly discuss at the moment. The CS hardware appears set to roll out in the Spring of 2006.

April 2006 We have updated much of the code, but are now in the midst of dealing with staff turnover in the BOINC part of the development team, which has slowed development.

We have been talking with the Gromacs developers about a threads-based solution as well, which would have many benefits over an MPI solution for multi-core CPUs/SMP.

And from the discussions in the Folding-Community.org forums, Standford is working on a version 6 of the F@h client with better CPU Identification to better match work units to your hardware, and take advantage of all the new processor hardware hitting the streets this summer.  Core, MacIntels, AMD.

And Pande Group has published three new papers so far this year.  Fold On!