Mar
13
2010
I am a Folding@home contributor (Team 183338)
Author: Steve Martin
What the heck is Folding@home? That’s what I thought when I stumbled across a forum talking about “folding”. People on this forum were talking about their computer’s specs and processing power and how much folding they had done. It got me curious so I kept reading to see what they were talking about. I finally made my way to Stanford University’s website talking all about folding and what it is. It is very interesting.
Folding refers to protein folding and misfolding and how that relates to various deseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Mad Cow, Cancer, and a bunch of other deseases. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences such as these and other deseases and conditions. In order to study the folding process, a lot of processing power is needed to do molecular simulations and calculate all that biological stuff. So, rather than spend millions of dollars building or renting time on a super computer, they have created one of the fastest super computers for free. It is made up of thousands of individual computers around the world. At the time of this writing, there are over 350,000 active CPUs which contribute to the project. That is quite a few CPUs considering that the project has been around for just under 10 years.
So, I decided to join the movement and contribute to hopefully finding cures for some of these deseases. It is fairly simple to help out, you simply download a small program from Standford’s site and install it. It will ask you some questions about how you want it to install and you are able to choose a username (not required) and can even join a team (also not required). If you would like to join my team, put in team number 183338 when asked. You can then track how much our team is helping and see your own stats for your username.
I have an old server down in my basement that doesn’t do much but sit there and drain my electricity. So, I thought I would put it to use doing something worthwhile. It is now crunching away on it’s first folding project. After you have installed the software, your computer automatically downloads a project from Stanford’s servers which needs to be computed. Your computer then crunches away on that project and does whatever calculations are needed. Once your computer finishes with the project, it uploads it back to Standord’s server and begins working on the next project. It can take days for your computer to finish a project. You’re probably wondering what kind of drain this has on your computer resources, well, it drains it a lot when the computer doesn’t have any other tasks to do but drains it very little, if any, when your computer is busy with other tasks. You see, the process is set at a very low priority. So, any other processes on your computer take higher priority than the Folding@home process. So, when your computer needs the processor to convert a movie file, or run your browser, it is able to take just as much of the processor as it would have without Folding@home being installed. Folding@home will drop to 0% processor usage if needed so that your computer can do any other tasks it needs to. On the other hand, when you are not using your computer for any processor intensive tasks (probably about 95% of the time), it will use as much of the processor as it can. So, you may see your processor at 100% whenever Folding@home is working on a project. Don’t be alarmed, it will allow any other task to use as much CPU as it wants to immediately if needed. So, it won’t slow down your computer at all.
So, why not give all of that idle processor power over to something useful and rewarding for everyone by doing your own folding. You’ll feel better about being a part of something so important and it it doesn’t really hurt you or your computer to help out. And agin, if you want to be part of my team, use team number 183338 when you install your software. Together we can be a part of the solution.
