Posted on 07/07/2006 5:58:24 PM PDT by soccer_maniac
Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread.
Our FreeRepublic team of 351 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).
Currently, the team is in 85th place (with 908 active CPUs - 47,400 completed Work Units and nearly 8.5 million points).
This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the links posted below (or read one of the previous 19 folding threads)
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 (Folding@home Client Download). 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.
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List of Relevant Folding Links
Why Fold - Watch This !!
Extreme Overclockers Stats for FreeRepublic
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Competition (Not!!) Dummies ..Daily Kos
Dummie Folding Threads #7 #8 #9#10#11 #12
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Other Useful Stuff - Links
How much are those work units worth? And what are they?
All Projects Listed
Point Summary for Workunits
Fahmon Third Party Monitoring Software
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Past FreeRepublic Folding threads
#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #17 #18 #19
(I'll be in the FReeper top 100 within the next five days)
| Free Republic Folders - A Tribute to Ronald Reagan |
| Date of last work unit | 2006-07-07 17:20:45 |
| Active CPUs within 50 days | 908 |
| Team Id | 36120 |
| Grand Score | 8337187 (certificate) |
| Work Unit Count | 47413 (certificate) |
| Team Ranking (incl. aggregate) | 87 of 44542 |
| Home Page | http://www.freerepublic.com |
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I finally got my old Pentium III 550 MHz machine up and folding in a linux environment two days ago. It should be hatching a few hundred points any hour now.
Thanks for the ping.
(How I manage to almost always be posting a comment on the old thread at the same time you're putting up a new thread is beyond me, but I've sure become an expert at it, LOL.)
FReeper Folding Bump.
Feel free to repost your last post from the other thread
Sounds like fun. Painless install. Doesn't seem to use a lot of system resources, either.
I'm in 36120!
These graphs will be periodically updated. You may have to refresh your browser to see the updates.
As of 7/7/06 we are 6 million points ahead of DU.
THANKS for the excellent charts!
DUmmies will never overtake us. What a lousy bunch of losers.
After rereading your final posts on the last thread, it sounds like your still on your fifth on the Seventh.... LOL
Welcome to the team!
Keep in mind, every CPU helps! This is a great cause, it's a fun competition and F@H makes some good use of our unused CPU capacity.
I'm in. My CPU runs nonstop.
Awesome!!! Welcome to the team!
So when I go to bed, this thing has my whole CPU to itself.
As much as I despise academia, whoever thought of distributed computing needs a Nobel.
Our competitors' teams:
DUmmies: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157
DailyKos: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48083
Other conservative teams:
RedState: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48064
| OS Type | Current TFLOPS | Active CPUs | Total CPUs |
| Windows | 151 | 159026 | 1443629 |
| Mac OS X | 5 | 8864 | 87888 |
| Linux | 19 | 16154 | 181996 |
| Other | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 175 | 184044 | 1713513 |
| Total number of donators = 559484 |
| Last updated at Fri, 07 Jul 2006 15:46:57 |
| DB date 2006-07-07 16:36:03 |
| Active CPUS have returned WUs within 50 days. |
| TFLOPS is actual flops from MD, not the peak values from CPU specs. |
Their #12 ended badly....</snigger>
How come my Toshiba laptop is locking up? It is running pretty warm...I also got an out of RAM warning a week ago...This Toshiba is a puny weakling or sumpin'? It's an A15-S129...so the MB shares lots of duties...
Lower your F@H to 85% and you should be OK
If you're interested in tracking your folding machine(s) over the web, please Freepmail me.
Available features include:
OK, but it's a dedicated machine, nothin' else running on it...I'll try it.
G
I haven't had to do that, I simply put a couple of pens under the back corners to allow air-flow underneath.
You can also tilt the display down to about 45 degrees and place it on it's side, vents up. If you haven't already, you will probably want to set FAH to suspend when you are on battery power. I also had to adjust the power management setting to prevent "sleep" while on wall power. It won't fold if your CPU goes to sleep.
Dang.... their #2 guy just hit 100,000 points. I'll be there in the coming week, and I'm clawing just to stay at #10. The saddest part is, by mid September, one of our guys will have more points than their entire team.
You would thing with all the public assistance programs those guys get, they could afford better computers.
Are you gonna let us in on the fun (link please)?
Can anyone help me out with a folding issue?
My kids have a problem with running games on the computer while the folding client is running. Consequently they shut off the folding client and NEVER remember to turn it back on.
Other than selling my kids to the highest biddder, is there a way I can stop the conflict between folding and games so they will not have to stop folding?
Thanks in advance.
One of the DUmmies hotlinked one of my graphs (again) and used it in the title post of their thread #12. I pulled down my graphic and replaced it with a different one.
I only left it up for a little while and then replaced it with the original chart with an admonition about hotlinking added. This only confused them more. Finally, a kind FReeper waded into their discussion and explained the changing graphics on their thread. The entire thread was pulled and the kind FReeper had his DU screen name tomb-stoned.
There are some games that just will not run well while folding. In fact, I have to shut folding off completely when I'm playing SecondLife. Just having it pause isn't sufficient.
HiGuy! That little Toshiba won't sleep with it running and the top open.
WOW!!! I just installed folding on my big box and it HATES my ATI graphics card and freezes everything up ... does NOT want to run on this thing...oh well!
If you are a gamer, you have to remember to re-start the client. (From my experience)
"After rereading your final posts on the last thread, it sounds like your still on your fifth on the Seventh.... LOL"
ROTFLOL
I wish - but I'm thinking about it now - it's just been one of those days, LOL.
I just put 2 PC's online doing this, and have 7 more that I could use, except no place to set them all up. I'll probably set up 1 or 2 more for this project.
"Laptops tend to run hot."
Those are good suggestions, Swamp Fox. Here are some other things I do for my laptop.
I leave my laptop running on ac all night. I remove the DVD drive, battery, and PCMCIA wireless card. All three of these generate extra heat, which as we know, can kill the processor (the extra air flow also helps). I turn it up on it's side, as you suggest, but I leave the CPU at 100%. It gets somewhat warm, but not hot. I have also turned off scheduling AV scans and HDD defragging, and do those manually during the day once a month (stopping the FAH task while doing so). I also set the power settings to turn off the monitor after 15 minutes because it also generates some heat. In the mornings, I plug in the wireless network card for about 30 minutes so it can update stats and upload WUs. (I configured the FAHconsole to pause when running on battery so it doesn't run down the battery or interfere with business when I'm with clients.)
The only problem I've had, is an occasional HDD crash, but I don't think that's related to leaving it on or running FAH. (The HDD might be getting too hot since this is an older laptop. It has only crashed twice in the last 3 months - both times at night, but that was before removing the scans from the scheduler.)
Hope this helps.
RT
Around my house, we use the little laptop cooling pads that run off a USB port. Works great at increasing airflow and cooling them off.
Your stunt with the graphic was classic. Kudos!
No *wonder* you're pulling away from me! ;-)
Cheers!
It didn't help any, that the helpful freeper who pointed out their gaffe, was the one that they hated the most, the king of the borgs, co-opter of labs, evil computing genius of corporate america, and the discoverer of the enhanced work unit hacking ray, which sends coded signals up to Stanford, crediting us with thousands of points, that we never earned.
Whoo! Good timing thread-wise, as I just hit the top 100 (currently #96) yesterday or today! Woulda been higher, except josephw (pinged b/c of etiquette) claimed to have a failed box but still ran way ahead of me that same day :-P
I have basically 6 boxes running FAH 24/7. I'd like to have a seventh, except it's an ancient 566mhz machine, and it wants something like 40 days to finish its current WU. It gets used maybe 3 hours a month, so it has plenty of time to work, but it seems it's too old to accomplish anything. Anyone have a suggestion for it to work through small WUs so it can actually contribute something the 99% of the time it's not being used?
Congrats!
You can install it without the graphic interface and it will not interfere with games, but if you do that it's harder to keep track of how your jobs are doing.
Thanks for the ping. My productions down a bit because we've had thunderstorms lately and my main computer has spent a lot of time turned off. Looks like we're going to be back up regularly now though.
OK, I was here during the 2 hot link cases, LOL. They seem to learn rather slowly.
I didn't see the rest of the 2nd incident. It figures they would tombstone any suspected Freeper, even one trying to do them a favor. And they clim to be more tolerant than us, that's about as accurate as the 'Religion of Peace'.
As long as it finishes it's work units before the deadline, it will be helping, regardless of the size of those WU's. It's just more frustrating to have to wait for the WU's to finish. If it is missing the deadlines, you can request units without deadlines. I don't know if those are smaller, or not.
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