Folding@Home is a project by the University of Stanford that studies protein folding, an interesting process. Studying how these proteins fold may be the cure to certain diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS, and Mad Cow. If you know someone with one of these diseases, you know how upsetting it is. If you'd like to help, and stop it with a bunch of other SYMians, get on this!
So, what does it do?
From their website:
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.
In a nutshell: It uses your computer's spare CPU cycles to simulate protein folding (apparently a very complicated process which only takes tens of microseconds to occur in your body but takes 30 years to simulate on a single computer) and sends the results back.
Won't it slow my computer down?
No. I can personally attest to the fact that I have not noticed any decrease in performance. And I actually timed CPU-intensive operations such as ripping CDs to MP3s with and without F@H running. It only uses spare CPU cycles, so if you are doing something that drains your CPU, F@H will just sit quietly in the background and do nothing.
If enough people are interested we can set up a team and see how well we fare against the masses.
I don't know how many SYMians are on dialup, but if you are you can still run it as you can set it up to dial up automatically or wait until you connect. The only reason not to use this is if you have a computer slower than 200MHz or so, because while it will run it won't be very efficient.
I personally recomend the "No-nonsense" text-only console as opposed to the graphical client as I find it less obtrusive (you can't tell if it's running unless you check the processes in your task-manager), but I've never been one for bells&whistles
To install the client (the console one at least), just download the .exe into a new folder (
not your desktop!) and run it. It will create a service which starts itself every time you turn your computer on.
Consider this my second contribution-to-humanity thread (
save a life being the first), but unlike the first one we can actually track how much difference we have made.
If anyone is interested please post here so I can create a team and get cracking! Don't let those idle CPU cycles go to waste. Once the folding bug bites you, you won't stop your PC again and will try to get F@H onto as many PCs as possible
That's what happened to me at least
To change preferences on the console client after you've installed it, run the client with the command
-configonly from command prompt. This will allow you to change team name, user name, max cpu usage, etc.
Do not manually edit your config (cfg) file with a text editor. Extra commands for the console are provided
here. No need to read unless you want more of a 'hands on' approach.
To stop the service, go to start->control panel->administrative tools->services and stop it from there.
Do not simply kill it with your task-manager.
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