Folding@Home

anyone else running this? any of you geeks with custom-built computers and powerful GPUs? stocKo and I have started the WATMM team and we've just racked up our first points.

 

for those who don't know, Folding@Home is a distributed computing system that uses your computer's idle cycles (or, in the case of some people with dedicated folding machines, 100% processing power) to simulate protein "folding" i.e. modeling molecular dynamics with the aim of aiding medical research into diseases and new drugs to treat them.

 

it's a noble cause with tangible results and also quite addictive for computer geeks who are into tweaking their hardware, because of the points system. the more powerful your hardware, the more points-per-day (PPD) you rack up. video cards contribute a lot more to PPD than CPUs because of their dedicated graphics capabilities, so obviously the gamer/overclocker crowd is strong here. video card company EVGA is the #1 team in the ladder.

 

so if you're keen, especially you guys with nice video cards who aren't gaming 24/7, dl the client, join the WATMM team (chuck in the team ID 227914) and let's see how many points we can collectively rack up. I've got an i5-4670K CPU and a GTX770 GPU and I'm currently getting about 115k PPD after some driver rollbacks (newer drivers totally crippled it).

Did the SETI@home thing many years ago, might have done the folding thing too, but stopped after my PC got too slow. Doubtful my current PC would do any good. The folding thing is good that it has some tangible use, rather than listening to if ET is at home.

yeah, not particularly keen on SETI@home, although that was the first @home thing I heard of and still a cool idea. but there are better things to be working on.

 

every little bit helps. most of the computers in the system are low-end but it's their combined power that affords researchers the computing power (in excess of 40 petaflops, faster than any supercomputer in the world) to be able to run these simulations.

  On 1/28/2015 at 4:00 AM, usagi said:

 

so if you're keen, especially you guys with nice video cards who aren't gaming 24/7, dl the client, join the WATMM team (chuck in the team ID 227914) and let's see how many points we can collectively rack up. I've got an i5-4670K CPU and a GTX770 GPU and I'm currently getting about 115k PPD after some driver rollbacks (newer drivers totally crippled it).

 

Woah ! I'm only at 700 PPD

I always found that project beautiful, plus it's getting some effective results now...Would love to convince the hospital I'm working in to set it up on their computers (now THAT would add some calculation power !)

We used to run Seti and Folding from Uni, we would log into all of the engineering department computers at night and have them all running for something to do. Quite nerdy fun!

 

My laptop would be useless for this but my new PC is pretty much built and ready to go so I would like to get involved

I've been running the CERN distributed computing system on my i7 3930k@4.5ghz gtx680. Might look into this.

Edited January 28, 2015 by impakt

join! WATMM team ID is 227914

Haha, loving the installer name. fah-installer!

Folding@Home killed both my old 'fatty' PS3s. Stupid diseases.

*edit* lol

Edited January 28, 2015 by feltcher

  On 1/28/2015 at 12:36 PM, mcbpete said:

Folding@Home killed both my old 'fatty' PS3s. Stupid diseases.

I used to run that on my old 60GB PS3...

i remember folding@home being a big thing with ps3's due to their cell processor being so boss. will look into this

My average laptop doesn't contribute much but at least leaving it on while at work is useful now.

  On 1/28/2015 at 4:16 PM, Joyrex said:

 

  On 1/28/2015 at 12:36 PM, mcbpete said:

Folding@Home killed both my old 'fatty' PS3s. Stupid diseases.

I used to run that on my old 60GB PS3...

 

Aye sorry, that's what I meant by the 'fatty PS3' - the big one that looked like a barbecue grill that could play PS2 games as well.

Joined, might be able to slightly contribute when my computer is idle at work....

  On 1/28/2015 at 11:53 AM, impakt said:

Haha, loving the installer name. fah-installer!

09:55:44:WU01:FS01:Running FahCore: "C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient/FAHCoreWrapper.exe" C:/Users/A/AppData/Roaming/FAHClient/cores/web.stanford.edu/~pande/Win32/AMD64/NVIDIA/Fermi/Core_18.fah/FahCore_18.exe -dir 01 -suffix 01 -version 704 -lifeline 4036 -checkpoint 15 -gpu 0 -gpu-vendor nvidia

09:55:44:WU01:FS01:Started FahCore on PID 1396

Cool on my 4th work unit already, 972 points over night. Strangely fun!

I keep dropping juicy high-PPD work units whenever I overclock my GPU cos it starts throwing NAN errors :(

inb4 it's actually mining bitcoin

If you could trade work units in for bit coins / dogecoin I would imagine a lot more people would be doing it!

^ there is "Curecoin"

 

in other news, we've hit one million points.

 

 

Edited February 9, 2015 by usagi

Cool. Glad to have contributed 25000 points (so far) towards that total.

Wow. Only contributed...475 points. But since I'm only using a laptop and it won't fold any protein when I'm running on battery power I guess I can't do much better

Nah thats 475 valuable points. I've only clocked up so many points because I leave the work computer on at night when I go home

  On 2/9/2015 at 10:44 PM, fletcher said:

Nah thats 475 valuable points. I've only clocked up so many points because I leave the work computer on at night when I go home

 

CHEATER !

(but hey it's for a good cause )