Folding @ Home

[foq]

Folding @ Home is a program that uses your computer's unused cpu time to simulate protien folding. For protiens to be effective, thousands of them have to assemble, or fold. Sometimes this process goes wrong and causes diseases "such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes".

The program is a very basic, simple, and newbie friendly program. It is available for download here:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandeg...04-Console.exe

When it asks you to configure it the first time you launch it, use these settings:

User Name (if you want to be nice and give me some free credit, use hat, otherwise, use your own)
Team Number 50711
Launch Automatically no
ask before sending/fetching work no
use internet explorer settings no
use proxy no
allow work units <5 MB no
change advanced options yes
core priority low
cpu useage requested 80
disable highly optomized code no
pause if battery power is being used yes (if on a laptop) no (if on a desktop)
interval between checkpoints 15
memory in MB to allocate 100
request work units without deadlines no
set -advmethods flag no
ignore any dealine information no
machine id 1

Any questions you may have, go ahead and ask...

[spooker]

foq is curing cancer

[foq]

yes, yes I am.

If anyone is concerned, this program won't slow your computer down at all. The program runs on a low priority so it only gets unused CPU cycles.

Let's say you run F@H and Darkplaces at the same time... Darkplaces launches with a higher priority and gets all the cpu cycles. If there's any left over, F@H gets it.

Think of F@H like a dog at a dinner table... he gets the scraps of whatever the family (your game or whatever other program you are running) doesn't eat.

[IEEE 802.11]

I don't know, according to what you said it can also go wrong and create diseases? So what if in trying to find the cure they create a super disease? Mad bird flu.

[foq]

No, I was explaining that you get those kinds of diseases when protiens natrually misfold. This program simulates protein folding so they can try develop cures for the protiens misfolding.

This wouldn't be a scientific study if they didn't study more than one person's work of the same protien. They may send the same work packet to thousands of different people and go with the result that occurs the most.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Shouldnt Standford be able to provide like,a handful of super-computers for this type of research.

[foq]

From Stanford's FAQ:

Why not just use a supercomputer?

Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer computing cycles than we do with the Folding@home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.

[foq]

Anyone actually going to do this?

[Grim]

Nope.

[foq]

Why is that? It doesn't affect you negatively in any way, except the electricity bill.

[joao93]

You say that cuz you don't pay da bills!

[foq]

Niether do you.

And, I must add: damn.
I figured some of you guys would be a little more generous. The only negative affect it might have on you is the electricity bill. It doesn't slow down your pc at all.

[Fuzznut]

Niether do you.

And, I must add: damn.
I figured some of you guys would be a little more generous. The only negative affect it might have on you is the electricity bill. It doesn't slow down your pc at all.

I'll give it a try little man.

Other potential uses for this thing could be to help scientists decipher recovered DNA strands of extinct animals like Dinosaurs! I believe that is one of the problems they would have in cloning them is deciphering the DNA.

[foq]

Nah, this program is strictly human I believe... although I wouldn't be very suprised if they wrote one for DNA, but work units would take months instead of days, (probably)

thanks for trying fuzz

[spooker]

it's a dangerous way of thinking about the world--if you think that you can make a difference by sitting on your ass running a computer program. change takes action and determination