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Anyone doing the folding @ Home if not go to http://folding.stanford.edu/ download the screensaver and install it. The site explains further but basically its helping find cures to diseases like cancer etc. If you decide you want to join my team - This is a offer not a request Number: 49610

Oh just to put this into perspective. The likley hood of getting cancer in your lifetime is one in three meaning there will be 1074 people on this forum who will during there lifetime have some form of cancer.

joined

Ah - nice one! I've been after this for a while (the funny name doesn't help), it'll certainly be a good use of all the spare clock cycles when the PC's doing something I don't need to interact with, or just idling.

In my current line of work I see a HELL of a lot of cancer fall-out (only radiotherapists and oncology doctors get through more than us, i'd reckon) so I'm certainly getting involved. It's a terrible thing that, fingers crossed, will turn out to have a simple cause that can be turned off with the right treatment ..... for now we'll just have to continue relying on blasting the offending bits of people into firey radioactive or poisonous chemical oblivion, along with a lot of their healthy bits.

Game on.

Edit: Team joined, super quick and easy download and setup, and even better - it keeps going even when not a screensaver, so making the best of ALL available CPU (but as it's set as "lowest priority", it doesnt chew it when you need the power) - good thing too as it's taken like 5 minutes to do one-quarter of a percent of the first work unit - and its not just cancer research that may benefit, but alzheimers, parkinsons, and a host of other diseases that may have cures derived by protein therapy. The displays that come up are interesting from a biochemical standpoint too, just in seeing all the wacky shapes that come from a few different atoms - its grey for carbon, blue for hydrogen, red for oxygen and yellow for nitrogen, right?

Come on lasses & lads get downloading and get cracking... er, folding

(too bad it hasn't a win95 client, or i'd happily put it on the old lappy and just keep it on 24/7 ... sure it'd be a slow worker, but at least it wouldnt be using much electricity as it plodded through)

So how many peeps do we have on the team so far? The stats were discouraging last time I looked (a grand total of 0 properly completed work units)... get the feeling they take some time to update though as my own PC has plodded through a total of 323 of the things so far, though I'm sure that's not much as its only 80% of one small bit... of one project amongst a couple thousand.

Where y'all at?

w00t...... so, who's cheddarcheese?

what with all those annoying as hell tagworld adverts and the default enabled option of resizing to 100x75, i think imageshack is trying to temporarily drive people away from its gradually slowing service so they can regroup and bring in the field hospital...

edit2: jeez, only just coming up on the second workunit, i can see maybe why other contributors are taking a while if your PCs are slower and get used more intensively - letting mine run untouched from 8am to 4am (when i woke up on the sofa after a chronic day) yesterday I worked out it'd take a little over 48 hours at full pelt to complete each unit. There's probably a HELL of a lot of calculation in each one, but it still SOUNDS slow... and this is with a 1600mhz chip - a 450 like i used to have would take more than a week! Roll on the proposed new version that can use the graphics card's processor for a bit of parallel maths

I don't understand

What does it do?

You install it on your computer and they take some of your computer's power??

it runs as the lowest priority process on your machine... well, one above the "system idle" thread - it becomes the new idle thread, effectively. any time your CPU isn't doing something else useful, it'll be simulating protein folding - and more importantly, misfolding, which can cause disease.

it downloads a small descriptive chunk of data (a "work unit") from the main server, plugs away at it for an age (48 hours when not disturbed, in my case) and then sends the result back in exchange for another chunk when finished.
allegedly it takes more power and shortens your CPU life but i call hokey on that... if you're really so concerned, run it on a junk laptop where the max consumption isn't above 60-70w anyway, and you're not concerned about it lasting. Personally i've never seen a CPU burn out, though the old Athlon 600 in mum's previous PC (always a heat demon anyway) is a bit corroded from a few years of my bro's manic P2P activity.
It's no worse than being a texelhead and playing online games 18 hours a day anyhow

the amount of processing power it's likely to be able to use without affecting you is quite phenomenal - a lot of the stuff you do on a 2.4Ghz machine right now could be very easily dispatched by a 400mhz or less computer, giving the program a good 2ghz or more equivalent to play with.... but it gives all that up if you want to do something that actually taxs the CPU, like play a game.

I used to take part in Rosetta@home which was about protein folding as well. I left them because their Linux client wasn't so good.

Any difference between that and Folding@home?

I'm always happy to join as long as the project offers a Linux client.

For starters, Folding basically romped all over Rosetta and killed it. Then it absorbed Genome@Home too.

It works quite nicely i must say, can't comment on the linux thing but the popularity of it and the number of linux folders suggests that it works as it should. Very simple install, you can basically get a graphical or a console version then set & forget (& get a graphical add-in that can "spy" on the console ones progress), even running it as a service if you want.

Think it might have a bit of a dangerous memory habit under win98 though, at least the graphical one does. I think i may switch to the console type.
edit: except it only offers one for WinXP. Perverse.

come on folks!

i hope all the silence is people staying off the web as they're trying to conserve clock cycles for the cause (or some other scheme, such as the BOINC projects).....