With all due respect, how do you know that any distributed computing project is actually doing what they say they do?

None of them are currently open sourced that I am aware of. This is to prevent the data from being corrupted by malicious or malformed results. Keeping the client closed keeps the integrity of data which cannot be verified by any means other than duplication of effort.

Is the project compelling enough to overcome your doubts? At some point we all need to ask ourselves if there is enough inherent trust in the organization to donate our resources. With organizations like the WHO, Mayo Clinic, IBM, the EPA, the UN Development Programme, CIT, the Argonne National Laboratory, and the NSF on the Grid's advisory board I am inclined to believe that our results will be used for peaceful purposes and for the good of mankind.

Given that distributed computing will be rapidly evolving over the next few years, it will be interesting to see how projects address this issue. In reality though, for those of us a bit more jumpy, you really don't know if you are modeling proteins or modeling nuclear yield effects; searching for "ET" or searching databases for terrorists. I prefer to believe that we're modeling proteins here.

Incidentally, although the smallpox results did go to the DoD, the results were for a smallpox cure. Again, depending on where your belief lies.

Semper Paratus

If these are precached protein shapes they must havea lot of them. I've been watching for repeats and have as of yet seen none. Considering ALL of your processing power right now is going towards calculating their shape, adding a few colored spheres as place holders every 2 minutes or so is HARDLY a taxing process on your processor.

This is like the ID arguement that evolution is impossible because it's too complex, which begs the question, if this is too complex to be random, then why is it so simple? You think this is the best their graphics design department could precreate. If I were one of the 3d artists for the projects I would have had some sick procedural animation of schnazzy looking molecules, not these incomprehnsible blobs of primary colors.

Experimentation is how I can solve this. I just used a max script to create somthing that looks like a complex molecule on demand based on a few simple variables. Now these wern't just little simple colored spheres I decided I wanted to actually have a nice presentation. Each Sphere had about 1000 faces. Each "Molecule" was 3000 atoms. Total processing time was less than a 4 seconds on an Athlon 2600 including rendering the first frame. With a sphere w/ 100 faces processing time was approximate 2 seconds. If we are in fact producing protein shape calculations it seems simple enough that they could format that into a visual representation based on a simple vertex array.

Now as to little processing power.

Right now it looks like every minute or so the picture will update. Which means we are only seeing a processing loss of 3% processing power. Thats not to say we wouldn't lose that if the shapes were already predefined. Even if the shapes were predefined by an algorithm they would require that much loss.

So do we KNOW that they are not showing us what is actually being processed. No. Is it feasible they are actually showing us some of our work. Yes.

When I was in the reset mode, I was downloading a new workunit every hour or so, but I didn't look at the graphic or notice any specific workunit serial number. I've had a lot of workunits myself, but only a couple completed. Maybe that's the case for other users as well

With that you are assuming that if there is now grid, these supercomputers would be used for the same projects that are run on the grid. Do you think that the corporations and governments interested in weapons testing etc. would use the supercomputers they control for humanitarian project, just because there is a need for it.
And do you think that these people need an excuse like "why replicate the effort". Projects that are going to be run on the grid have not been suported by these people until now and will not be supported by them in the future, be there a functioning WCG or not.