Folding@Home

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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 4:52 pm

I thought I'd bring this up to see if people would like to get involved. You may already be in a team but it cant hurt to try and get some new people involved.

Folding@home is a way to give to charity without giving money out of your own pocket

The program runs in the background and takes advantage of idle time of your CPU, so when its not doing anything the program takes a bit of it to work out some of its calculations to help in finding cures to various different diseases such as cancer and Altzheimers

Download the program here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Then once your set up simply join the 419eater team (Team number 54186)

So come and join in, do something useful while you're not baiting or post whoring yourself Very Happy

Not quite a Newb Joined: 05 Mar 2007 Posts: 43

I don't really understand it, but I'll run it for a little while to see. Between this and Lad Vampire, I'm such a great person.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 5:28 pm

I'm in a different team already 0.o

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 5:54 pm

Yeah why not, i'll do my bit for a worthwhile cause

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:26 pm

some of you may have come accross my posts and already know this, but I'm a computer illiterate kinda guy...

Is this safe? And how does it work? Does it affect my PC speed and/or internet access?

Won't my Firewall go into overdrive?

I'm more than willing to do my bit for charity (.. ask any Lagos Lad Laughing

).. but am worried about anyone having access to my PC....

Or am I being paranoid?

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:02 pm

I've been doing it for months for another team - however I do recommend only giving it a max of about 50% cpu time if you have a high end or overclocked system.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:05 pm

This program is perfectly safe. It uses the processing power of your PC whenever you don't need 100% of your CPU speed to do complex calculations to work out how proteins should fold up. Apparently this helps biologists to cure diseases (but please don't ask me how, that's not my fort�). This hardly affects your PC's speed at all. If you need 100% of your CPU, you'll get 100% of your CPU. It doesn't affect your internet access at all, except when it sends the results home (and that doesn't take up much). Assming that you have control of your firewall, it won't be affected at all. There is more information here and here.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:05 pm

^^^

No, it's fine to use. All it does is when your computer is just sitting there doing nothing (like when you're reading on here), it uses your computer to run a few calculations and then sends these results to a central computer to compile.

More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

Edit: Damn, beaten by kickstart and ol-fishinbait

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:20 pm

ok... joined the team.....

But if I find my bank account is emptied tomorrow morning (hang on, my wife's got the visa card....better wait to check until after payday...) ...or more importantly : someone messed with my Zuma High Score... I'll send my Lagos buddies around.. Cool

Thanks for the info though !

PS : in the 3 minutes it took me to write this post I haven't heard any suspicious rattling in my PC, so I guess I'm OK ! Laughing

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:29 pm

Its safe from a security point of view, the reason I limit it to 50% on one core is heat, my pc is highly stressed due to overclocking.

You will notice small lags on your computer with folding at 100%, but when it detects you want some procesing power e.g. playing movies etc, it will give priority to that application. Folding runs at "Below Normal" or even "Low" priority.

I do recommend shutting down folding while you play games, the memory overhead and fighting over attenuation can cause the odd crash.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 8:18 pm

I'm disappointed. You didn't manage to get 419 into the team number. Evil or Very Mad

Anyway, I'll still give it a go.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:07 pm

^^^^

Sorry, the team number is automatically generated. I had no control over it Smile

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 1:05 pm

Lol nice to see you there guys, pity i'm already in another team ... GL crunching (and try the other projects as well, there's more)

btw : if your computer is having probs running this when overclocked, get the thingy stable, add some more cooling and get another volt on the core Wink