I like the furniture. Really. And I like the paint color of his wall. The entire room has an uplifting vibe due to that lively color combination. Also, must admit that the enclosures are pretty neat. All of my respect goes to those people that are able to maintain such an organized environment despite all of the hi-tech components. I'm fed up with clutter and jam-packed offices where there is just a walk-path between rigs from the door to office desks. Judging from the pics, that place looks quite spatious.
By the amount of his hardware, frankly, I'm not that much impressed. Probably because I've been accustomed to working and managing dozens of computers, having components spread all around everywhere, and working on multiple computers at the same type. Years ago I know I would have been astonished to see that many systems in the same room. Now, it leaves me sort of unaffected
emotionally. I'm rather impressed by the quality of images, supposedly made with a powerful DSLR camera. Oh, and yes, his geometrically alligned boxes resembling to the
Towers of Hanoi. The wallpaper is also uplifting.
The bottom-line isn't about the amount of his computers; we must face the reality-- yes, some people can afford more, others less. Life wasn't supposed to be fair. Some people drive five cars, others one, while lots can't afford any at all. Bummer, right? It's the same in this case too. What really matters is that he has built everything from scratch, designed the entire environment, and keeps the farm online just for the sole purpose of folding. This is what, in my opinion, really matters.
His dedication for folding is understandable from what is explained within that story. He is probably fed up with cancer (people affected by the disease) and has an inner drive to do his best in order to fight back. The research of protein folding hits the nail on the thread and resembles with so many people from all around the world. Unfortunately, it's hard to find
anybody that wasn't affected at least
once in their lifetime by cancer, either directly (himself/herself) or indirectly (family, relatives, friends). That is why F@H touches a weak point on most people, much more than other distributed computing ever could--e.g.; SETI@Home.
One thing is for sure, our folding team is amazing not because of the raw folding power that we show off, but rather of the community members that take part in the action. Surely, we may not have that much resource like some do, build folding farms, deploy clients all over our workplace, attempt b0rging, and you name it. But our members do their best according to our possibilities. And because of that, somewhere down the road we may improve, do better on the leaderboard, and so forth. However, that simply to me doesn't matter. It isn't surprising that the most activity lately happens in the DevFolding sub-forums and even TLTE is filled with folding-related random posts. This pretty much sums it up that our team cares for the cause.
On another hand, it is amazing to see the upsoaring performance of the new folding clients. It was to be expected that the folding performance would rise up and exceed our anticipations. Like go figure, we were getting extreme SuperPI benchmarks and folding was still going slow? Finally, Stanford delivers clients that really take advantage of the real workhorses that nowadays are being rolled out. Due to the latest GPU2 clients the worldwide folding does phenomenally great. The entire worldwide folding performance is booming, the main servers can barely resist the amount of requests of WUs. This is an amazing.
In short, it means that the amount of WUs become crunched increases exponentially and in correlation with the Moore's Law, if not even better. This means as time goes by, more work units are being finished, we are getting closer to finding the cure. And by doing so, the entire research leads to a success--happy-end--and the competition between teams was serving symbolically as a subliminal motivating force.
All in all, indeed, it is great to see people being able to dedicate that much to humanity in the shape and nature of digital charity. During the course of our lives we have a hidden desire for contribution. It's all psychological. As long as most of our other fundamental needs (i.e.; Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs -
link) are fulfilled then we are striving for self-actualization. It surely makes us feel good doing something for a great cause. Let it be charity, donations, digital or not, helping somebody out by giving useful advice from our experience, investing our time, or anything--really.
Somewhere down the road I am absolutely confident that I'm going to fold
more for the DevFolding Team. Over the years I've been folding a lot for very few points, struggling with weak computers that met the deadlines only on quite high overclocked speeds. Just because I've stopped since months (summer came) and due to my priorities being rolled out, it doesn't matter that I've forgotten about F@H. Right now I am just after a relatively huge acquisition and few months are required to re-fill the pot again (read as: budget), and after that--I'm planning a new platform change (it's time for DDR2 and PCI-E, really!). And let's not forget that there are other activites through which I'm already contributing to the human kind and will do even more in the next few years. Folding is just part of it.
F2C. This is what we do.
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But there r very few who can afford it 
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