What is this?

[s_gibson]

WTH is a folding at home?

[GIBSON]

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.

There is this thing called google that gives you quick answers on things like this ;-) :mrgreen:

want to help, read on: http://folding.stanford.edu/

[Das Capitolin]

WTH is a folding at home?

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

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.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.


http://folding.stanford.edu/

[Kougar]

Basically what they all said already. ;) The program is designed to use only the spare computer cycles, and work in the background on the computer. It's unobtrusive enough that I can leave it running while playing a game and it'll not create any lag or other issues, and simply wait until the CPU is free before it resumes running it's simulations.

It's also a quick way to find out that your overclocked system isn't 101% stable, as any .01% of instability will throw the simulation into an error and the WU (Work Unit) will be lost. ;) It's the 3rd best program I know to heat up the CPU as well...

[Das Capitolin]

Don't forget to take a look at our team standings:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/teamstats/team41608.html

[SwedBear]

And it's not a good program to run on a laptop :). It will keep your CPU runing full speed and force the fans to work all the time, something which isn't good for the laptop in the long run.

But on a stand-alone system it's a great program to use. Got to install it again on my main system.

/B

[GIBSON]

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

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.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.


http://folding.stanford.edu/
Didn't I quite post that before you? :confused:
Oh well, I guess you didn't refresh the page before you posted. :)

[Kougar]

And it's not a good program to run on a laptop :). It will keep your CPU runing full speed and force the fans to work all the time, something which isn't good for the laptop in the long run.

But on a stand-alone system it's a great program to use. Got to install it again on my main system.

/B

Well, my plan is to wear out my lappy at least once to get everything replaced before the warranty goes... :mrgreen: I've undervolted the heck out of the Pentium M processor too, so the heat generation is not nearly what it was originally. The fans don't run full bore anymore. :) I'll have to make sure opening up the thing and applying AS5 to the CPU/GPU won't void said warranty, but if I can do this it'll only help further...

One other thing though, not only do you need to ensure the hardware is 100% stable, but also the OS + net connection too... ;) Coming back a day later to find the system rebooted itself due to an update, or errored and halted everything, or completed it's work but has been sitting idle because it can't DL a new WU is not fun!