What is the fastest processor for running the DF client and why?
MHz for MHz, Alpha is definitely THE fastest processor for distributed folding. The majority of the program’s time, as I have mentioned before, is traversing pointers (specifically in binary-tree-like data structures). This accounts for 50% or more of its time. Another good but smaller chunk is spent RLE decompressing the data in protein.trj, the protein data file. The expanddb utility that originally came with foldtrajlite uncompressed protein.trj, but we found this made things slower, not faster, probably due to increased loading from disk.
