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Please join the AO Folding@Home Team!

30K views 213 replies 37 participants last post by  Al Faromeo 
G
#1 ·
'Folding' for a good cause
Have you ever considered joining the 'AlfaOwner.com' Folding@Home Team?

What is Folding@Home???

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that is run by the Pandegroup at Stanford University. Their goal is to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

What are proteins and why do they "fold"?

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

For a protein to fold or misfold takes very little time, but it is hugely complicated. Analyses of the folding of even the simplest of proteins requires significant super computing power. The amount of computing power required to perform these gargantuan calculations and to come up with any worthwhile results is massive and most supercomputers today would buckle under the pressure. This is where we come into the picture with the Folding@Home software.

The Alfaowner.com Folding Team

Started in April 2009, the AO Team is now in 311th place out of 187943 teams, having overtaken pretty well all of the other car club based teams, and with the help of a few additional members will be poised to surge into the top 300.

Will Folding@Home make my PC run more slowly?

No it will not. When your computer would otherwise be idle, the software grabs the surplus cpu cycles for the benefit of this research and processes some of the data. When your computer needs to do some work for you the Folding@home program immediately stops.

Folding@home - Download the Folding@home software application

Have you got F@H questions? Leave them in this thread. One of the active folders will try and answer.

Have you joined?: let us know!

(Posted on behalf of the AO Folding@Home Team)
 
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#2 · (Edited)
Thanks for the sticky, PG :thumbs:

It's not really about competition, but it adds a "fun" dimension to the cause :)

If you guys want to see how well we're doing, have a look here to see a list of our team members and points accrued.

Look on the left of that page to view other stats, like the Team Summary to see how we're doing relative to other teams near to us.

If you want to ask any questions about Folding, fire away, we're a friendly bunch :D
 
#4 ·
Ok, is this something that works while your computer is switched on and stops working when it is switched off :confused:
Yes it is, Gibbo: while your PC is running, it just uses the capacity you are not using yourself on doing its calculations. Its activity decreases as yours increases and vice versa. I'm running it all day long and I don't even notice it's there doing its things.

My PC hated doing this, so I gave up....
What? Origami?

(I have to admit I'm going to have to re-install. After having run without any issues for a year and a half, it has now started not doing anything at all...)
 
G
#5 ·
Sorry guys, but it was agreed that this would not become a chat thread or a PC repair thread! It's purely here as a way of encouraging more would be folders to what is an extremely worthy cause, akin to any fundraising thread.

Please only post questions. Any unrelated or unnecessary comments will be deleted to preserve the integrity of the thread :)
 
#6 ·
Just wanted to bump this sticky thread.

We need more members on the folding team. We have a great core of people folding for a very worthy research programme into something very close to many of us.

Please, its painless to install and runs in the background of any computer or server switched on.

:thumbs:
 
#7 ·
I don't do this, but only because I don't leave my laptop on all the time.
 
#10 ·
#20 ·
A question. Is this the same as rosetta@home?? I've been running it for months through BOING Manager.

Plus, at the same time I'm running SETI@home.
 
#26 ·
I've re-started my welcoming new members routine, and have added a sentence to get them to this thread.
I believe in two months of religious welcoming I have attracted 2 new converts.
It would be nice if some of the old folders could be convinced to fire up their client once more...
 
#24 · (Edited)
You could wake up all members to this. But if you really want to win against other car websites, a IT solution is needed! Last time I checked, Core 2 Duo + GF9800 video cards will do wonders.. 50K points per day I guess? They are dead cheap these days. Build a farm?

Anyone interested doing some further price/value research for OS and Hardware? If it's just me, it will feel like work and no fun :(

I used to fold@home in the 90's, I think. Searching for my login and if I can change teams..
 
#28 · (Edited)
Phew! Yeah, not nice when the temps are high. Bad enough when we hit the mid 20's :)

Anyway, the Core2 duo and 9800 gfx cards, aren't going to produce 50K ppd unless you can rig more than 5 machines up! That would be a little uncomfortable :)

The i7-2600 running @ about 4.5GHz is very fast, power (and therefore heat) efficient, and so is pretty much the king if anyone was building a new rig, not so much if upgrading. Processing "bigadv" units would bring in 40+ k ppd easily.

I reckon, again in terms of initial cost and low power draw, the GTS450 is a cracking folder and can bring in nearly 10k ppd (as mine does) for half the power draw of an older producer like the GTX260.

Anyway, this may be too geeky for this thread (we have been warned once) Sorry PG :)

(PS where is PG?)

Edit: {slaps forehead} Looks like I missed her departure :(
Bye PainterGirl - you were fab! :thumbs:
 
#29 ·
With almost all the hardware at home in almost 2 days I did exactly 1 WU? I recall doing much more than that with an Athlon XP with no CPU fan in 2004. The windows client has not improved; it's a mess. 32-bit? Please... And MacOS client should be much better. Sorry to rant here but I don't have access to the other place.

Peace!
 
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