Df News!

[High_Jumbllama]

Let's see.

Home
Athlon 600 W2K UseExtraRam (Always on)

Work
1.2 ghz W2k (Always on)
(2) Compaq 1.0ghz W2k (40+ hours a week)
(6) Gateway 1.2ghz W2k (40+ hours a week)
Emachine 1.3ghz W2k (40+ hours a week)
Emachine 1.8ghz W2k (40+ hours a week)
Dell 2.0ghz XPProf UseExtraRam (Always on)
(3) Dell 2.0ghz XPProf UseExtraRam (40+ hours a week)

THird Location
900mhz W2K (Always on)
1.8ghz XPProf (40+ hours a week)




Are you sure 4 months is enough?

[Guru]

06/13/2003

- Our new hardware is successfully in place and so we have scheduled the update to Phase II to occur on Tuesday June 17. If this should change for any reason we'll post a follow up message here. The servers will be down for several hours during this period. Also for techincal reasons, you will NOT be e-mailed when the update becomes available, if you usually are. However once up again, auto-update should function as normal. If folding offline, please remember NO credit will be given for old proteins after this switch, so upload any buffered data between now and Monday to be safe

[Guru]

Distributed Folding Project
Server temporarily down for several hours while we switch to phase II. Thanks for your patience.

[Guru]

06/17/2003

- We have now switched to Phase II of the Distributed Folding Project. This phase will use a new smarter algortihm - see FAQ (to appear shortly) for more details. All user statistics have been reset, but we are keeping all the Phase I information - it will be accessible for viewing in the near future.

[JJc]

06/19/2003

- We are not doing too well with power shutdowns lately. The hospital (where we are located) will be testing their power system and as a result, power will be out from approx. Monday June 23, 10:00 PM to Tuesday June 24, 5:00 AM. Thus all our servers must again be shut off during this period. The folding clients should, however, happily continue folding offline if you just leave them alone, buffering their work, and they will upload once the servers are back on. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience but we are at the mercy of our environment. The good news is this should be the last (planned) power-down for a while.

- We have fixed a crashing problem on Compaq Tru64 machines - if you were receiving a floating point exception error, please re-download the software again (you can overwrite the previous one safely) and it should be fixed.

- A FAQ on the phase II software/algorithm has been started, for those interested.

[Guru]

Pipes are clear

I got out the liquid Drano, gave the server a good flush, and now I believe it should be back to normal again.

Seriously though, I think I identified the problem which was NOT what I expected. It was hanging on a particular database query (a read, not a write!) because a certain column had not been indexed. Who knew? So by indexing it the queries take a fraction of a second instead of half a minute to complete.

Guess this didn't show up as a problem on the beta tests since there was only 50 or so people uploading. Anyways it seems to have cleared the queue and is going fine now

Fixing those other bugs may take a while longer so bear with us...

[JJc]

v3.1 (Jun. 28, 2003)

Added Points tab which gives information about points for current and previous generation, buffered work, a point calculator, and more.
Added Graph Config tab which allows the user to set various configuration options related to the graphs in dfGUI.
Added Time Graph tab which will graph the time it took to complete each generation in minutes.
dfGUI will now auto-save your Energy Graph to a genEnergyGraphXXX.bmp file after it has completed a 250 generation set. XXX starts at 000 and increases every time a new graph is saved so previously saved graphs will not be overwritten. The generation stats and graph will also automatically be reset after the .bmp has been saved (unless otherwise configured).
dfGUI will now auto-save your Time Graph to a genTimeGraphXXX.bmp file after it has completed a 250 generation set. XXX starts at 000 and increases every time a new graph is saved so previously saved graphs will not be overwritten. The generation time stats and graph will also automatically be reset after the .bmp has been saved (unless otherwise configured).
Confirmation dialog boxes were added to "Write Bench", "Save" Energy Graph, and "Save" Time Graph buttons.
Added "Run Client Bench" button to Advanced tab. When users click on this button, the DF client (.\foldtrajlite.exe -bench) benchmark will be run and the DOS box paused so the user has time to see the results. This feature requires the use of a new dfbench.bat file included in the dfGUI distribution.
The graphing code now ignores energy values above 100. If any 10M values were plotted on the graph, the normal energy values looked like a flat line which did not give much info to the user. It will now just skip the 10M values so the user can see the detailed changes. The time graph will ignore minute values above 1000.
Added keyboard shortcuts: F5 = Refresh, F6 = Start Client, F7 = Stop Client, and F8 = Exit GUI

--------------------------------------------------

v3.2 (Coming Soon)
Will have multi-language support.

dfGUI

[Guru]

07/23/2003

- BeOS users have reported an error about 'Threads must be enabled'. This is a problem with the executable itself and a new code base we are using. There is nothing you can do about this. We have posted a new version which does not attempt to use threads, so please manually get this from the Download page of this site. If we figure out how to use POSIX threads on BeOS we will re-enable this functionality. The only disadvantage is that you will not be able to quit (by pressing Q) in between generations and you will not get nice progress bars.

- For users running the text client or screensaver under Windows, please note that due to unforeseen circumstances, the update released yesterday may not work or work well on your system. This has been fixed as of 2PM EST today. If you manually downloaded a new Windows version yesterday or today before 2PM, or if your Windows machine(s) auto-updated during this time period, we suggest you get the fixed copy. For text client users, get it here. Screensaver users can get this update. Note you should only get these updates if your machine updated yesterday or today before 2PM. If your machine has not yet updated to the new version, please do so in the normal way (with auto-update or manually from the Download page of this web site). To install this updates, simply unzip the file in your folding directory, overwriting the files of the same name. For the screensaver, unzip it to C:\windows\system, C:\windows\system32 or c:\winnt\system32 for Win98/ME, WinXP and WinNT/2000 respectively (there should already be a file called foldtraj.scr in this directory, that you should overwrite). We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The version released yesterday has all code optimizations turned off due to a bug that cropped up at the last moment that was related to code optimizations on our new Windows compiler. We have since returned to our previous compiler until this can be resolved, and all currently posted versions should be fully functional. Because the 'bad' client may have been outputting corrupted data files however, we recommend you also delete the 'filelist.txt' file before restarting the patched client. If you do not do this you may receive further error messages about corrupt or missing files at some point.

07/18/2003

- We will be releasing a software update on Tuesday, July 22, 2:00 PM EST. This fixes some of the bugs that have been reported.

[Guru]

Been gone for over a week but here goes!

08/05/2003

-We will be releasing a new version of the software AND a new protein on Wednesday, August 13, 2003 at 11:00 AM EST. This software update should fix a large portion of the existing bugs.

[Guru]

Old News!

08/16/2003

- As you are probably aware, we were hit by the massive power outage Thursday afternoon, however all systems are back up and appear to be functioning normally again. Thankfully no data was lost on the server either, so we can continue folding from right where we left off.

- Due to the increased speed of this smaller protein, we will be changing the 'goal' amount to 5 billion from the current 1 billion. The thermometer will be changed to reflect this shortly.

08/13/2003

- Our new protein is underway, we are now studying the folding of Protein G, soon to be followed by Protein L. These are small, well-characterized proteins that have been studied by other methods, and this will allow us to compare our 'folding movies' to other, more tried and tested studies of protein folding.

- Please note if you manually downloaded (not autoupdate) the new client (NOT screensaver) before 11PM EST today, it seems that the package still had the old native.val in it from the last protein. Strangely its date stamp is current though so that's how we managed to miss it. Not sure what happened but the packages linked from the download page should have the correct file now. If in doubt, or if you receive an error message about being unable to compute RMSD, check - your native.val should now be 33202 bytes if you have the latest client. Sorry for any inconvenience.

[Guru]

08/23/2003

- The support e-mail address for this project has been swarmed with messages from the latest viruses going around, so if you have tried to contact us and the message bounced, please try again. We are doing our best to delete the virus messages as quickly as possible to avoid a full inbox. In the mean time you can help by scanning your machine for viruses and visitng windowsupdate.microsoft.com to ensure you have all the latest security patches from Microsoft, if running Windows.

[Guru]

08/28/2003

- As we are nearing the completion of the current protein, we will be switching to Protein L on Wednesday, September 3, 2003 at 11:00 am EST. Please try to upload buffered results before then in order to free up more bandwidth on the day of the update.

[Guru]

09/03/2003

- The database backend has now stabilized - it appears it was overloading with an exceedingly large number of connections from users trying to upload previous results

- There is currently a problem with the backend database which we will have fixed ASAP. No work should be lost. Thank you for your patience.

09/02/2003

- A new version of the proxy daemon has been posted, for those who make use of this software. The only real change is the log files should now be a lot smaller and also fixed a bug so that the server would never try to grab the new downloads from itself (which obviously won't work). Get it on the Download page.

[High_Jumbllama]

It's definitely bigger. The service's memory footprint is bigger. Everyone's numbers will drop.

[Guru]

09/15/2003

- The database backend is currently was breifly out of commission - we have got it up and going again and it seems to be functioning fine now.