Folding@Home Computer Hope team

I've seen a few other sites and forums start their own Folding@Home team and though it would be nice to start one for Computer Hope as well. For anyone not familiar with Folding@Home it's a project started by Stanford University to help understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. 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.

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.

For anyone familiar with SETI, it's much like SETI except it's searching for cures for diseases instead of other intelligent life. Although being setup late, I think it's a great cause to help and plan on running it here on computers I'm using and don't plan on formatting any time soon. I've setup a Computer Hope team, which will allow any member who is participating or users with PS3's to join and help Computer Hope compete against other teams for ranking.

Computer Hope is team # 67290
Team URL: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=67290
Detailed stats: http://kakaostats.com/t.php?t=67290

The main Folding@Home site is at: http://folding.stanford.edu/

Users who're participating (completed 1 unit) on the Folding@Home Computer Hope team will be marked with a icon in their profile.

[Moderator]

What?
Is this medical, or computers?
(I will have to try and understand tomorrow during the WASL... and no, that dosent mean I live in Washington)

EDIT: Oh... I think I get it now

Care to explain that in normal English? Are we going to find a cure for Alzheimer? 

I used to participate in this, but since I got my laptop I don't think it's such a good idea for me to do it.
If I had a desktop I'd be right in though, I think it's a great initiative and a chance to do some good.

im confused

[Moderator]

im confused

I think I am to

What good does it do, exactly? And is it safe? How much CPU Power?

im confused

I think I am to

What good does it do, exactly? And is it safe? How much CPU Power?

It does good, because it is like having an extremely powerful supercomputer available to constantly crunch complex models of proteins, to help eliminate diseases.
It is safe, unless you have very poor cooling.
You can set it to use as much CPU power as you like, but it only uses idle power.
So it wont suck all of your CPU away from other applications.

A little more details, although Calum explained it pretty good above. The project requires large-scale calculations to be preformed which requires a lot of processing power. These types of projects are usually best done with super computers, however they're extremely costly. So, instead of one super computer the project is using thousands/hundreds of thousands of computers each doing small portions of the calculations to create massive amount of processing power.

By combining merely ~25,000 computers (each with some sort of streaming processor), we could perform calculations on the Petaflop scale (1,000,0http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-FPI.html
Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative00,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) – a level of performance currently unmatched even by the fastest supercomputers.

The small applicate you download utilizes a low core priority utilizing around 1-50% of the CPU. I'm running it on my main work machine and haven't noticed any decrease in performance.

As far as memory it utilizes 12-15MB of memory.

Finally, takes up about 6-10MB of hard disk space. I give a range of disk space because I believe each download is different. But each machine here is running around 7MB of disk space.

To do what for CH?

To do what for CH?

If you join the CH team it helps the team complete more units and get a higher ranking and allows you to see the rankings of other team members. In other words just a place to join if you plan on participating in the project.

And with our processing power we'll help in the creation of a cure for alzheimer.

And with our processing power we'll help in the creation of a cure for alzheimer.

It's possible that what is learned from the project could help in finding a cure for many different diseases. Would be impossible to say with an absolute certainty that it will find a cure.

They have however made several advances.
http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html

[Moderator]

"The Folding@Home stats system is performing an update. Please try back in about 15 minutes."
I was just about to join and everything!
(I will just have to wait)

What if my computer was on a dialup (even though I have ultra-fast 100MBPS fiber running off a 108MBPS Network with a 54MBPS wireless card) ?
And do I need to leave my computer on?

The connection of your Internet does not matter, it's mostly the processor that will affect the speed at which work units are completed.

As far as leaving your computer on, no, you don't need to leave it on. Of course while the computer is off it will not be working, so will greatly extend the length at which each work unit is completed.

[Moderator]

There has got to be flaws to using this type of supercomputing...