Introducing our new annual Folding @ Home awards

primesuspect

Folding @ Home is an extremely important part of the Icrontic community; recently @Linc brought up the fact that if it wasn't for this project, Icrontic would probably not exist today (at least as it is now). The story is very long, but the TL;DR is that when the site disappeared, it was the Folding team that the community was able to rally around and rebuild.

We've had our ebbs and flows. As one of the first 100 teams in the world (we're team 93!), we've been at this a very long time (there are over 90,000 CPUs folding at this moment). At one point we were one of the top ten teams in the world, in fact. Today we're at a still very respectable 43rd place in the world, and that's just with our scrappy little team of stragglers. Earlier this year we had a rally, which did result in some new team members but the costs of the project outweigh the practicality for a lot of people and the team ebbed again.

One of our very dedicated, long-time folders came to me a few months ago with an idea. He wanted to present real-life awards for Folding achievements, and he wanted to use Expo Icrontic as the venue for it. He created the design, helped us choose the recipients, and went out on his own dime and bought the awards and had them etched and shipped. Therefore, I'm very happy to announce our first annual Folding@Home achievement awards which were unveiled by their creator, @Sonorous, at Expo Icrontic 2016. Thank you so much for your amazing contribution to Icrontic culture, Rick.

We decided to go with a lifetime achievement award for hitting the 100,000,000 point mark. Hitting a score this high represents a serious dedication to the project which involves getting multiple devices contributing, maintaining the program on those machines for several years, and constantly improving and tweaking the performance of the contributing devices. This is an award that, while difficult to reach, is achievable by anyone who dedicates themselves to it. It felt right to award this very high level of accomplishment.

In addition to the lifetime achievement awards, we decided to come up with a Folder of the Year. Much like the IC Person of the Year, the award represents a variety of factors; dedication, helpfulness, activity in discussions, cheerleading, and overall contributions. You don't have to have a supercomputer, tens of thousands of dollars of equipment at your disposal, or a datacenter to achieve this award. You only have to care about the community, the project, and your fellow Icrontians enough to be supportive, awesome, and helpful.

The 2016 inaugural award winners are:

100,000,000 point Lifetime Achievement awards:
@_k
@Leonardo
@sgstair
@Tushon

And our first of many Folder of the Year award goes to @Snarkasm. Snarky wasn't able to make it to Expo this year so we weren't able to award it in person, but we'll be shipping it to him. Snark is always willing to help people tweak their settings, is always on hand to answer their questions, and has consistently been dedicated to the team. Thank you so much for your contributions, Snarky! We love you!

See you next year, Team 93!

Snarkasm

Aw, thank you, guys! Thanks to Papa Prime and @_k, who have frequently pushed people to get back into the fight, and thanks to @Sonorous for a great idea. I regret at the moment that I can't contribute as much while I try to nail down the energy costs of the new house, but I'll get the clients back online as soon as I can, and help in other ways if possible.

Sonorous

Congratulations @Snarkasm, and a very sincere thank you to our lifetime achievement winners. The cause that Folding at Home benefits is both monumental to the scientific community and deeply personal for not only me, but other members of Icrontic. Additionally I want to thank everyone who supports our team, no matter how small the contribution. Everything matters. Let's try and get a few more people up to 100 million mark!