Team DU: Folding@Home - We've reversed the trend!

[Roland99]

Until a few weeks ago, the line of work completed was sloping down. It looked like it was mirroring the economy and Congressional approval rates but now it's shooting up at a nice rate, esp. the last few days.

But....

DU's Folding@Home team still needs YOUR help!

For those of you still wondering what this is all about, Folding@Home is one of many active Distributed Computing projects. DC projects utilize your PC's idle time to process work units for the project. The most famous DC project is probably the SETI@Home project (mentioned in the movie Contact). Folding@Home's purpose is to help scientists determine how proteins fold under various conditions in an effort to help cure diseases (cancer, alzheimer's, etc.) This is a very worthwhile project and one certainly worthy of leaving your PC on 24/7.

Some may be concerned about leaving a PC on 24/7 and the costs involved. A newer PC running a full load will use about the same amount of electricity as two lamps left on 24/7. That is to say, not a lot. Personally, I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop that had been running SETI@Home (and now Folding@Home) 24/7 for over 8 years. I have an HTPC (Home Theater PC) running 24/7, too.

There are various clients available at the Folding@Home download page including CLI (Command Line Interface - DOS) and GUI (Graphical User Interface - pretty pictures) for Windows-based PCs, Linux console, and Mac OS X GUI, CLI, and Screensaver clients. Personally, I run the Windows-based CLI as it allows for faster crunching of work units (no graphics displays to slow it down).

All of the apps will only use a PC's idle processing time. I've been doing a boatload of video conversion of 16GB HDTV recordings down to 2GB AVI files (for copies of sports events for some friends) and have not seen any issues with performance with the F@H client running or not.

Below is a screenshot of what the CLI setup process looks like. It only requires input from you to specify your:





User name Enter whatever you want your name to be. This could be your DU screenname, for example.

Team Number <0> <---- VERY IMPORTANT Enter 48157. That is the DU F@H team number. Any work unit processed will be associated with Team DU. If you leave this blank, any work units will be assigned to a generic non-team.

You can press <Enter> to accept the defaults for the rest of the options but I make a couple of small changes:

Launch automatically at machine startup, installing this as a service (yes/no) <---- Type y and press <Enter>. NOTE: - ONLY select this if you are running Windows 2000, XP, or 2003. Windows 95/98/ME will not install an application as a service. You'll want to put a shortcut to the F@H client in your Startup folder manually.

Change advanced options (yes/no) <---- Type y and press <Enter>

Interval, in minutes, between checkpoints (3-30) <15> <---- Type 5 and press <Enter>
I just use 5 min. so it writes out checkpoints more often in case the PC locks up for some reason it won't have to redo so much work upon restart.

Machine ID (1-8) <---- Type 1 for the 1st instance of F@H on your PC. If you have a PC with multiple CPUs, install a copy of F@H into another folder (such as F@H2, F@H3, etc.) for each additional CPU in your PC. When prompted on those other installations of the F@H client, enter the appropriate Machine ID here.

So, that's it in a nutshell.


NOTE: The CLI steps are just a bit different from above with the latest version but that's the important stuff in the screenshot above.

Fast Teampage URL http://fah-web.stanford.edu/teamstats/team48157.html
Detailed Stats Page http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=48157 <--- Look at that! :)


Join the fight against disease and have some (statistical) fun along the way!


Use your PC's power to help find the cure for diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers

[Roland99]

1. And how about this incredible news on scientists cracking the genetic code for cancer

Genetic coding of cancer may lead to improved treatments
http://www.privatemdlabs.com/news/Cancer_Detection_and_Tumor_Markers/Genetic-coding-of-cancer-may-lead-to-improved-treatments$19521956.php

[Cassandra]

2. How about Windows 7?

I only recently got DSL, after which my XP computer fried (unrelated) and now I have 7. I miss XP but what the hell, 7 has some charms.

[Roland99]

3. Give it a whirl. Check out these links....

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=7846

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=12358

Windows GPU2 client installation guide
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/WinGPUGuide

[Fumesucker]

4. I'll point out that if you have a fairly recent gaming computer the GPU client is very powerful..

GPU meaning graphics processing unit, the heart of a video card, the latest GPUs have many processors running in parallel, even something as reasonably priced as an Nvidia 9600gso has 96 parallel processors (called "shaders") and some GPUs have more than that. The F@H GPU client is written to take advantage of the many parallel processors to really crank out the floating point operations (FLOPS) which is the basis for the mathematical work being done with F@H..

http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Verto-GeForce-768MB-Overclocked/dp/B001IDY2PC

[Roland99]

6. I'll have to keep that in mind if I end up building a new HTPC next month

Thanks for the info. :)

[Fumesucker]

9. I ordered a 9600gso last week to put in my PC..

I wanted something to increase the frame rate on FlightSim X anyway and figured I might as well get a card that would help with the F@H as well. The Nvidia cards seem a bit more powerful dollar for dollar and watt for watt than the ATI based ones so I did some searching to see what the most powerful card for the money was, turned out to be the 9600gso with 384 mB of GDDR3 ram. They make the same card with all the way up to one gig of ram but that was more than I could afford and the extra graphics performance would just be wasted for what I do anyway.

[alfredo]

5. I noticed one user cranking out the WU's: usafguy99

I wonder if he is the same as another "99" guy?

[area51]

7. +1

I recently got folding@home to run on my FreeBSD image, using the Linux port.

[Roland99]

8. Cool!

and thanks for the k&r. :)

[alfredo]

10. kick

[Roland99]

11. We should make some bumper stickers!

:)

[alfredo]

12. Yean, because folding isn't just about poker.

[Roland99]

13. WTH? Someone 'unrec'ed this thread???

good grief.

[Systematic Chaos]

14. A kick for all of us.

I'm working this on two iMacs and a PS3. User name is progrocker69 (my first handle on DU, pre-2004) and I've been averaging over 3,000 credit points per day. :)

It would be nice to get more on board!