Folding@Home

A post for both the new and old ;)

Folding@Home Distributed Computing

Goal:
“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 remarkably 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.

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases.”

The method by which this goal is acheived is through the use of specialised clients which you can run in the background of your home PC, or even a playstation 3! Most of these clients can be comfortably run all of the time, but…

The best feature of F@H is that it can utilise most modern graphic cores to make its computations at least a hundred times faster than even the fastest of home desktop CPU’s. The GPU client is compatible with most newer cards from the ATI and Nvidia range, but you will need to crosscheck against your equipment. (Most shouldnt find this a problem). This application will need to be disabled before gaming for obvious reasons (my GTX280 is idling at 79 degrees which is fairly normal for full load, while running F@H. It’s like Linx or Prime95 but for your video card).

Anyway ;0

Team IPX ID:
F@H: 136356

To create your own ID, simply enter your username upon installation of the product. Don’t forget to register IPX as your team!
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

For those with vista 32bit:
This is the slower but much more simple CPU F@H download
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/Folding@home-Wi...

This is the much faster NVidia GPU client
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/Folding@home-Win32-NV-GPU-systray-623.msi

Enjoy!

Edit: At the moment my GPU is doing a protein with 10 000 000 iterations :) at anywhere between 900 and 1300 iterations a second xD

66 percent done, about 50 minutes left. Now THATS number crunching.

10000 points i think.