[texas booster]

Please take the time this Labor Day weekend by checking your folding systems and making sure that they are still folding. You can look inside your folding directory at "unitinfo.txt" or at "FAHlog.txt". This will show the progress of the current work unit.

If the FAHlog.txt shows that the work unit is unable to complete, you should restart the system and ping us. We can save many of the work units and get you back to folding new work units.

Congrats to Klutz, who continues to lead us with 5,800,000 points, and to josephw, who will hit 1,000,000 points within two weeks.

[texas booster]

Folding@Home FAQ for new users:

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 (Folding@home Client Download). Type in your desired user-name.
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 they were given exclusive access to all of the world's supercomputers, Stanford 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.

*******************************************

List of Relevant Folding Links
Why Fold - Watch This !!

Another Folding Clip

The Inner Life of a Cell

Folding@home Client Download

FreeRepublic.com Folder Stats

Extreme Overclockers Stats for FreeRepublic

Another Stats Page

*******************************************
Competition (Not!!) Dummies ..Daily Kos

Dummie Folding Threads #7 #8 #9#10#11 #12

**************************************************
Other Useful Stuff - Links

How much are those work units worth? And what are they?
All Projects Listed
Point Summary for Workunits

Stat Image Generator

Fahmon Third Party Monitoring Software

**************************************
Past FreeRepublic Folding threads

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20 #21 #22 #23 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #29 #30 #31 #32 #33 #34 #35 #36 #37 #38 #39 #40 #41

[texas booster]

Ping to Folders starved for a new thread!

[texas booster]

Ping for FReepers who are starved for a new thread!

[antiRepublicrat]

The Mac SMP client doesn’t seem to be taking up available cycles. Activity Monitor shows the processes are running, but they’re not doing anything. Any ideas?

[2nd amendment mama]

I just joined the team.....:^)

[Drango]

Proud to b foldin’ for the Gipper.

[Route66]

This is a “please join our FR team” bump.

[wastedyears]

This is from my unitinfo:

Current Work Unit

---

Name: p3711_Seq19_Amber03_Native
Download time: September 3 13:52:45
Due time: December 8 13:52:45
Progress: 9% [__________]

[Egon]

My shameless self-promotion for this thread:

If you're interested in tracking your folding machine(s) over the web, please Freepmail me or follow the links below.

Available features include:

• Timely snapshot of each machine's progress on it's current project
• Point values for project
• Estimated completion dates/times
• Warning indicators for machines that appear to have stopped communicating or folding
• Warnings for machines that won't make their deadline
• Team ranking status box (courtesy of EOC)
• Machine stats like PPD (points per day)
• Project comparison stats: PPD, average time taken to completion, etc.
• It's free-- and always will be
• ...other features as time permits, and people request

Links

• Team Page
• Instructions

Please Freepmail me with any questions.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the update TB.

[jaredt112]

I had completely forgot I was a part of this group. I’ll get my quad-core processor, and dual-core laptop processor back in gear to add some stats to team FreeRepublic.

Thanks for the ping.

[JosephW]

I hadn’t paid attention to points in awhile. Had no clue that I’m only about 2 weeks away from a cool million, and I’ve been doing this for less than 18 months. It certainly adds up quickly.

BTW, for the week, I’m equally all of DU so far, but tomorrow looks very bad pointwise so they’ll get ahead. I usually run about 2/3 of their totals. Just goes to show liberal compassion.

[LTCJ]

wOOt!

[generally]

I’m hoping you can help me with a new glitch. It may or may not be related to Folding.

I have a Mac PowerBook, plenty of free disk space, and my iTunes is now stuttering - not just once in a while, but at least once every minute or two, i.e., at least once per song.

I’ve read threads on Mac forums about this and they all seem to say it’s a priority issue, that there is something running that has too high a priority. Folding never did this before. I’ve been folding for nearly 2 years and I’ve only had this problem for the last few weeks.

My guesses
1. iTunes changed and has a bug. (I’ve recently updated.) I think unlikely since there is no mention on Apple forums (that I’ve seen) and they are usually pretty good about airing and fixing these problems.
2. Folding has changed. Who knows? I just blindly fold and allow it to download whatever it needs. I’ve checked FAH forums and didn’t see this mentioned as a problem.
3. Some other software doing some unknown memory hogging activity.

(Note: I’m a software developer, so not entirely ignorant, but threading is not a topic I know a lot about. I thought maybe some of my own software could be an issue, but this happens after a restart with very little running, before I run anything homebrewed. I’ll do a little more testing, but frequently the only apps that have been run or are running are: Finder, Safari, iTunes, iCal, TextEdit, FAH.)