Introduction to Folding @ Home and stats

[Computer Hope Admin]

Introduction

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 and make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to its goals by folding each protein strand wanting to be looked at.

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.

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

Setup

Download link
Use same name as your forum username or let admin know who you are
Computer Hope is team # 67290
Passkey (leave blank -- unless you're worried about other users using your name. Click here for additional information about obtaining and using a passkey.

Once installed the client will download a work packet and then begin to work on that packet, which can take some time depending on the speed of your computer to complete. You can view the status by double-clicking on the icon in your Systray or hovering the mouse above it.

How to load on startup?

If F@H is not starting up automatically each time your computer starts up and you wish to have it load each time the computer starts simply copy and paste or drag the icon into the Startup folder under Programs.

Stats

Team URL: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=67290
Detailed stats:



Here & Here

Member forum icon

Users who're participating (completed 1 unit) on the Folding@Home Computer Hope team will be marked with a icon in their profile. Send Admin a message if you don't see this icon after your recent WU completion.

Signature badge / Info

Add the below code to get the Computerhope.com F@H team stats listed in your signature or post.

Code:

[url=http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,77650.0.html]
[img]http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/sigs/sigimage.php?t=67290[/img][/url]

Your own badge

Code:

[url=http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,77650.0.html]
[img width=468 height=60]http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/sigs/sigimage.php?u=xxxxxx]
[/img][/url]

Where xxxxxx is your Folding@Home Extremeoverclocking user number, this can be found by looking at the URL of your username in the team stats on this page.

Your own personal badge would look like the below example.



Additional information about customizing this can also be found here.

For advanced / adventurous users

If you have a recent NVIDIA / ATI video card the GPU on that card can be used to work on F@H units. Steps on how to do this can be found on the below link.

ATI CARDS
NVIDIA CARDS

If you're running a processor with more than one core (e.g. dual core / quad core) an SMP client can be installed to work on units for each core. Additional information and steps for doing this can be found on the below link.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-SMP