Folding@Home

[Livewire]

Anyone else do this? I found x10's team from back in 2008 here: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=130950

Ended up joining the team and beating out everyone in one night - F@H added a "GPU2" client at some point, and from my own experiences it beats out their multi-core client by leaps and bounds - it's taking me 2-3 hours to do one work unit instead of 3-6 days


Course me being happy I beat out the other two x10 members is like saying "hey, you just beat people who aren't playing anymore."



Just curious if anyone else does this, and if anyone else plans on jumping on the x10 team - http://folding.stanford.edu/ for more information, http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download for the actual downloads, http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther for high-performance beta clients like the GPU client.

 

[galaxyAbstractor]

I do WCG - World Community Grid. I like WCG better.

 

[ichwar]

what exactly are these things your talking about?

 

[xxll_martin_llxx]

what exactly are these things your talking about?

Exactly! Gone straight over my head too.


On looking at it I thought it was something to do with how good your computer was and you have to try and get people to join up within your community to better other communities with higher scores for better computers.

Looking again, I'm completely wrong!

 

[galaxyAbstractor]

you do research against diseases like cancer and aids

 

[ichwar]

ok, well. I can't join because I know nothing about any of those things. it seems like those kinds of things must have an extremely limitedd audience.

 

[galaxyAbstractor]

ok, well. I can't join because I know nothing about any of those things. it seems like those kinds of things must have an extremely limitedd audience.

no, your computer does it

 

[PhantomChick]

I do Folding@Home... I haven't heard of WCG before now, but that looks very good, too!

However, since I run it on a several-year-old laptop I don't complete work units quickly by any means.

@Livewire -- Just a few hours? That's awesome! What is your computer setup?

@ichwar -- these are programs that run in the background and process data. Basically it's like donating some of your CPU usage to research. The magic of the Internet and distributed computing turns home PCs into a gigantic supercomputer!

 

[themcman1]

On my 9600GSO it will do a 350-odd pointer WU in about 1hr 20 with the 511-pointers taking about three times as long.

I think anyway.

I fold for OC3D.

 

[Livewire]

@Livewire -- Just a few hours? That's awesome! What is your computer setup?

AMD Athlon 64 x2 3.0ghz (which takes like 5 days to do 1 WU >_<)

For the gpu though, I just found myself an alternate use for an nVidia 8800GT - F@H


Seems GPU's are better at most of the types of calculations Folding@Home needs to do; obviously it sucks with some of them, but if it's better with 95% of them and slower with 5%, it's still a hell of a kick in the pants



@ichwar: Just like everyone's saying, you dun have to do much other than install the client and run it - I honestly have no idea what it's doing, other than using 1000's of every-day home computers to do the jobs it'd take 1 gigantic and expensive super computer to do. At some point some really intelligent person'll still look at what results the home-users are turning in, but the client's doing all the work for you - it's just using the idle time your pc has (such as when watching a movie, working on homework, browsing the x10 forums, etc).

I -do- notice it slows itself down (or stops entirely) if something resource intensive starts as well; the GPU client slams on the brakes soon as anything goes DirectX Exclusive (translation: any full-screen video games), so it lets the game do what it wants.



I'm curious if I can run the console client alongside the GPU for no other reason than to just do both, I'll have to experiment and see what it does as far as performance goes.



@themcman1: How do I tell how much the WU is worth? I've never been able to figure that out

 

[Derek]

What is this exactly? I am going to add my three PCS and my PS3.

 

[Livewire]

What is this exactly? I am going to add my three PCS and my PS3.

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases



What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

As for figuring out points, I just figured it out - http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/fahproject and put in the project number indicated (in my case I had to go to the log to find it).


For project 5750 (one I'm on right now) it's 511 points.

 

[ichwar]

ok, that makes sense. It doesn't run on unix systems though does it? I on windows once in never, so the .exe won't do me any good.

 

[IonCannon218]

It is available on linux system, you just have to look for it

 

[swirly]

I used to do the folding thing. But it got to be pretty hard and no matter what I did I couldn't solve some and then it started glitching out on me. The folding thing is where you help to fold proteins. The scientists are looking at how an actual person solves a problem in order to write programs to more efficiently solve the problems.

 

[IonCannon218]

The F@H does the work, you dont have to do anything.

 

[Livewire]

The F@H does the work, you dont have to do anything.

On some of the first clients it was a royal Pain In The @$$, part of the reason I dropped away for a while. Course now it seems more stable so I'm back



And yes it'll run on linux; if you hit the download link it's actually using some data available form the browser to try and determine your OS - it -might- give you the linux download links instead of the windows ones. If it doesn't, scroll down and look for Linux clients (for me they're right underneath the windows ones). Linux'es aren't as far along as Windows's but they'll work just fine

 

[Smith6612]

I've been considering about putting my gaming computer to use while I'm not on it with Folding@Home. There's two sites I currently go to who do FAH, so I'll have to decide which group to contribute to

If you guys really need the points, I have 7 computers here ranging in speed, I don't mind overclocking a few including my retired gaming computer and my current machine a bit for a few hours.

 

[Livewire]

Only reason I'm dumping to the x10 team was cause its an easy way for me to differentiate between me and the -other- Livewire who dumped points in the past, in all honesty.

Course right now the Classic (Console) servers are either having serious troubles or I'm having serious troubles -downloading- data from them - my GPU client's going like nuts, but the console one's failed to get work like 25 times since 12 hours ago - it's been unable to actually -get- work to do from any of the Accepting Full (sending -and- receiving) servers I'm getting assigned to.

Trying to debug it. It's kinda funny, the most stable client is the freakin' BETA client running on my GPU!



Edit: Great, 30 seconds after posting, it connects and snags a work unit. Go figure.

 

[Smith6612]

The servers do get busy from time to time. I'm looking at the status page right now and a few servers are just too full right now. Otherwise, maybe this weekend I'll start doing some GPU folding and some CPU folding. If anything though, I did find that the Folding@Home clients don't support Multi-core yet :\ . There is a trick however, to make it use more than one GPU so I an certainly set that up.