What is Folding@Home? A Stanford University project to find out how proteins fold.
Why it's important: Proteins folding wrong causes all kinds of diseases, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and forms of cancer. Folding@Home uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. Through Folding@home, scientists now have the horsepower to study the mechanics of protein folding. With its ability to share the workload among hundred of thousands of computers economically, Folding@home can help scientists understand how proteins snap, or don’t, into their predestined shapes — and may help to explain the origins of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and apparently unrelated diseases. We're fueling research that could end all that.
How does it work?: You download a safe, tested program (see link below) that is certified by Stanford University. It gets work from Stanford, runs calculations using your spare computer power, and sends the results back to the University.
Is it safe? Yes! Folding@Home rarely effects computer performance in any way and won't compromise your privacy in any way. It only uses the computing power you aren't using so it doesn't slow down other programs.
How do I get started folding for Team FreeRepublic?: 1.)Download the folding program from Stanford University's folding download page (see link below). Type in your desired username. 2) Type in 36120 for the team number. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT - if you get the number wrong, you won't be folding for team FreeRepublic! 3) The third question asks, "Launch automatically at machine startup, installing this as a service?" - We recommend you answer YES. Otherwise you will have to manually start the program after every reboot.
How can my computer help? Even if he were given exclusive access to all of the world’s supercomputers, Standford still wouldn’t have as much processing power as they get from the supercluster of people’s desktop systems Folding@home relies on. Modern supercomputers are essentially a cluster of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. But Stanford needed the power of hundreds of thousands of processors, not just hundreds.
There's no reason to not get involved! It's free, easy, and you can know you're helping every minute without lifting a finger.
Folding ping list - currently with 247 members (FREEPmail me to get on or off the ping list)
I'm 50% done with my first WU, and now I don't want to use my computer even though I also want to get some gaming in!
Good job on the new thread. Your efforts are appreciated.
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We need 4 more members to reach 200
http://fahstats.com/ts.php?t=36120
I've got two clients online now. I should have a third in the next month or two.
What's a good monitoring program?
Ok, I joined. Please add me to your ping list!
I'm putting 2 of our office computers on today and possibly a 3rd if I can convince my hubby that his won't blow up if we put it on there :).
Machines are here. The suspect machine is Qo'nos. You can view its log file by clicking on the server name. Unlike the other machines, it's reporting every time if finishes a frame. Unclear what else it might be doing.
Any thoughts or advice would be gladly accepted!
Question for anyone who knows:
What can I do about Firefox crashing while I'm using F@H? I'd love to run it fulltime, but not at the cost of my browser.
Looking at 24 hour point productivity and assuming no rate growth or decline on anyone's part, I think we would fall into around 50th place eventually at this point, although it's conceivable we could hit 25th. Unfortunately most of those teams have about 10 million so it will take us quite a while to catch up. Perhaps when I have some time later I will put together a graph on Excel predicting when we'll reach around 50th place. If we continue growing as forecasted in the next couple months, it could be faster than you'd think!
Hey SS, come check this out when you get a chance. We can use all the help we can get.
Wed. Bump
I really think we should have the moderators change the thread title to note that we passed Microsoft.
Thanks for your original ping on this. It's a worthy cause and I'm proud to be part of our progress! Besides, my PC at work was getting bored looking for ET with SETI@Home for over 5 years. :-)