Quote Originally Posted by Particle View Post
I like folding and stuff, but I always have to wonder:

- Am I actually doing anything with the effort? They never seem to talk much about anything that comes out of this project. I'm not saying there isn't anything--just that without feedback I don't feel like I'm doing anything helpful. I don't want to be anyone's fool, you know?

- Where is processor time best spent? WCG is CPU-only. Does it do more medical good to crunch with CPU or GPU on another project? I don't want to waste potential by doing the wrong thing. I suppose that ultimately, the only wrong choice is to waste the cycles (provided it actually helps).
I can totally understand that question.
Now I'm pretty comitted to this project but if I found out that I'd been scammed for the last 3 years I'd thow a nutty like you wouldn't beleive.
I have seen some updates but here's my take on it and I will give credit to riptide for wording it so well;
(paraphrasing from memory so rip don't blast me!..
What is happening is like a home being built.
What you see are the people excavating the foundation and like driving by a new home every day it seems to take forever to get built.
They are doing the same with these projects, laying in the foundation of knowledge they will need to crack these diseases. Mountains of data needed to accomplish this.
Immense man hours to just set up these WU and then the time to sift thru them and this is just the foundation.
This may take the next 3-5 years to accumulate what is needed for that vast database to find the causes and then the combinations that will cure them.
I see it as a scale that moves very slowly at first, then gathers momentum as the database is grown and shaped.
In my heart I see a day, maybe 2 or 10 years off when some researcher in a lab sits up, smiles and says "We got it!"
Our work now will make that day come sooner.
We here have some of the best privately owned machines on the planet and combined are more than any supercomputer in existance.
With each generation of PC advance that mountain of data gets eaten at faster and faster.
Some of you have heard me pissing and moaning that I can't OC the gainestown rig. It isn't for ego or for that 5 minutes of glory showing huge benchmarks, it's for the additional amount of work I see it able to do that it can't when locked up as it is.
Computational power is the answer to the problem and the more we can throw at it the sooner this will be accomplished.
Thanks for reading..