It will last as long as they have funding. IBM I presume is picking up the cost of the computations, but someone has to analyze the data and proceed with drug discovery.

I agree with your "Long Answer", and that should help keep the funding coming as long as this project is viewed as productive.

I do! But I shut it down at the moment because of the summer heat!

In my own experience (EVGA GTX 960 with a mild factory overclock), the summer heat hasn't been a problem. Even on a hot day with the A/C off, the GPU temperature stays well below anything harmful, and the fans just loaf along. All in all, that card has been one of my better hardware choices over the years.

I once tried to get it out of P2 power state into P0, but it appears Nvidia has closed that off, as following the protocol for doing so yields an "Unknown Error" message. I suspect that if it worked, it might eke out a little more performance, but probably not much. I may be wrong here, but I think going from P2 to P0 would only affect memory timings, or at least that was the impression I got when I was exploring the matter. It might also increase the likelihood of errors, since GeForce cards don't have ECC VRAM, while Quadros do.

Not a problem here for my PC or GPU, but it is for me!