Folding@home - Folding Proteins, curing cancer

By creature124. 08/09/08, 04:06 pm

OKAY MAGGOTS, LISTEN UP.

Do I have your attention? Yes? Good.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that studies the way that proteins fold in order to work, and what happens when they fold incorrectly.

No idea what that means? Bear with me.

The idea is that if you pool the unused resources of millions of ordinary home computers, you have total processing power higher than that of the biggest supercomputer ever created. You can then use that power to process tasks that would take months on a supercomputer in alot less time.

Allow me to spell it out. If you take part in Folding@home, every minute that your computer is on you are helping to cure cancer.

From the Folding@home website:

Quote :: 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.

So, in summary:
1. Install Folding@home
2. ...
3. Cure Cancer!

In all seriousness, I can't stress this enough. There are no downsides to this. Folding@home only uses computer resources that are not being used, and going to waste to do it's work. It won't slow down your computer, uses very little internet bandwidth (roughly half a MB ever 8 hours, or 2MB a day), and every hour puts us one step closer to curing cancer.

Please. Go to the <a href='http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download'>Folding@home download page</a> and install the program. Do your part.

**Guest** Guest

sorry I support cancer

By creature124. 08/09/08, 04:16 pm

Yoke wrote:: sorry I support cancer

...die in a fire?

By **Duckeh**. 08/09/08, 04:17 pm

LOL'D~ xDD

YOKE. HAVE MY BABIES NAO.

But srsly?
May download tomorrow. :3 <3

By **jpwise**. 08/09/08, 04:18 pm

I've been in a few distributed clusters over the years, mostly related to cryptography, but yeah, they can be immensely powerful.

That said, if you plan on joining (which is a good idea if you want to) I'd only point on two things.
Firstly it can, and will push your CPU to 100% cpu time. If your machine doesn't have good cooling, or the heatsink is clogged up with dust, expect it to get pretty hot.
Secondly, whilst most people wouldn't notice it, a computer going from ~5% cpu usage while idle, suddenly up to 100% cpu time, even when you're not using it will have a noticeable affect on power consumption. Something akin to turning on an extra 100w lightbulb and leaving it on all the time.

If you're still keen and can spare the processor cycles, otherwise it's a great idea. MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) is awesome for the sheer amount of grunt it can bring to a task. :)

Edit: the above is based on leaving your computer running all the time like I do, if you normally only use it for a couple of hours and then shut it down you won't notice as significant a difference.

By creature124. 08/09/08, 04:21 pm

jpwise wrote:: Firstly it can, and will push your CPU to 100% cpu time.

Actually, this is one of the best things about Folding@home. It doesn't ever use more than 50% of the CPU time, even when the computer is idle. It reserves the rest to preserve system stability and for any program that might need to open later.

**Guest** Guest

creature124 wrote:

Yoke wrote:: sorry I support cancer

...die in a fire?

ok I just wanna have sex with one more hooker on K road and then I'll get right on that.
btw I already have it loaded up on my PS3

By creature124. 08/09/08, 04:28 pm

Yoke wrote:

creature124 wrote:

Yoke wrote:: sorry I support cancer

...die in a fire?

ok I just wanna have sex with one more hooker on K road and then I'll get right on that.
btw I already have it loaded up on my PS3

XD I was just kidding. Good to hear you are running it on your PS3, since thats wicked fast. I'll be running it on my PS3 as well as my computer...just as soon as I get the durned thing hooked up to the internet.

By **jpwise**. 08/09/08, 04:29 pm

creature124 wrote:

jpwise wrote:: Firstly it can, and will push your CPU to 100% cpu time.

Actually, this is one of the best things about Folding@home. It doesn't ever use more than 50% of the CPU time, even when the computer is idle. It reserves the rest to preserve system stability and for any program that might need to open later.

Last time I check it defaulted to 100% cpu usage. However AFAIK it's still a single threaded program, so if you've got a dual core machine (or a P4 with Hyperthreading) you'll only see 50% usage unless you start a second copy. Either that or the settings for the engine have been adjusted to max 50% usage on a single core.

Edit: looks like there's an SMP version of the client aswell that's multi threaded and will spin off another thread for each cpu you have. It's in beta and under the high performance clients (smp/multi core) section.

By creature124. 08/09/08, 04:34 pm

jpwise wrote:

creature124 wrote:

jpwise wrote:: Firstly it can, and will push your CPU to 100% cpu time.

Actually, this is one of the best things about Folding@home. It doesn't ever use more than 50% of the CPU time, even when the computer is idle. It reserves the rest to preserve system stability and for any program that might need to open later.

Last time I check it defaulted to 100% cpu usage. However AFAIK it's still a single threaded program, so if you've got a dual core machine (or a P4 with Hyperthreading) you'll only see 50% usage unless you start a second copy. Either that or the settings for the engine have been adjusted to max 50% usage on a single core.

Edit: looks like there's an SMP version of the client aswell that's multi threaded and will spin off another thread for each cpu you have. It's in beta and under the high performance clients (smp/multi core) section.

Hmm. I had overlooked that actually. You have the right of it.

IN OTHER NEWS,

I have registered a CNZ team so we can tack how much cancer we are curing as a group! Just go into the configuration by right clicking on the client and putting 146932 as the team number.

**Guest** Guest

creature124 wrote:

Yoke wrote:

creature124 wrote:

Yoke wrote:: sorry I support cancer

...die in a fire?

ok I just wanna have sex with one more hooker on K road and then I'll get right on that.
btw I already have it loaded up on my PS3

XD I was just kidding. Good to hear you are running it on your PS3, since thats wicked fast. I'll be running it on my PS3 as well as my computer...just as soon as I get the durned thing hooked up to the internet.

I was as well god everyone knows K road has the worst selection.

By creature124. 11/09/08, 02:16 pm

PPL WHO IZ DOING THIS. Put 146932 as your team number. its a CNZ team i set up especially!

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