F@H - 2013 In Review & 2014 Plans

2013 has been a very active year for F@H behind-the-scenes and now the stage is almost set for 2014 where you can expect some interesting results. Read on to find out more what happened in 2013 and what's in store for 2014. 2013 was a game changer for GPUs.

2013 was a game changer for GPUs. We hired a new programmer, Yutong “Proteneer” Zhao who developed FahCore_17 which uses OpenCL and can run on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Supported GPUs are AMD 5000 Series or higher and Nvidia GTX 400 Series or higher. FahCore_17 brings back phenomenal speed to AMD GPUs and new features across the board. Currently, native Linux support for Nvidia GPUs is possible and AMD GPUs will be supported in the future.

New F@H results were published and various honours were given (Details). Moreover, there has been an exciting development with our work on GPCR which may eventually run on F@H (Details). We also have Projects dealing with cancer. Our goal is to help develop kinase drugs with greater specificity, leading to a dramatic improvement in cancer therapies, especially without the devastating issues of current chemotherapies, which comes from the fact that current drugs are not very specific to a given kinase and effects the entire body, not just the tumor cells, in a very negative manner. To help us in this endeavour, we are collaborating with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Details). Furthermore, we have new results in Alzheimer’s Disease and Infectious Disease which are in the process of submitting for publication.  These results are in the area of drug re-purposing, leading to the ability of the F@H team to go straight to therapies for these diseases using combinations of existing drugs. We are very excited about this direction as it allows us to go quickly to phase 2 clinical trials, getting new drugs in the hands of patients decades before other methods could.

2014 is when all our hard work in 2013 pays off. We will be publishing new papers based on the research done in 2013. It easily takes us a year to gather data from F@H, analyse it and then publish it. We will also be hiring personal who will be responsible for donor relations. That will hopefully solve the current challenge of the science team having to decide between donor relations and getting their science done. By having someone whose sole role is donor relations, we hope to increase our donor satisfaction level. Moreover, we are working with various partners to promote F@H so that there is more awareness and we can increase our donor base. Finally, expect us to release a whole new type of client and back-end server in 2014, which will make it easier for many donors to contribute to F@H.

We would like to thank all of the donors who make this possible and look forward to hopefully working together to make 2014 the best year F@H has ever seen.

One last thing, there has been a recent backlog of SMP WUs (Details) so if you have a CPU and would like to contribute to this worthy cause, please download the V7 Client (Details) and fold on your CPUs. Do remember to support Team Guru3D by joining us, our Team Number is 69411. Happy Folding Gurus :)