FR Folding@Home Project Update -- We're Now # 60 of all teams with 15,400,000 Points

Stanford University ^ | November 19, 2006 | Texas Booster

[texas booster]

Time for a new Free Republic folding@home thread.

Our Free Republic team of 402 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).

Currently, the team is in 60th place (with 1,052 active CPUs - 82,250 completed Work Units and 15.4 million points).

This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the links posted below (or read one of the previous 20+ folding threads)

[texas booster]

Folding@Home FAQ for new users:

What is Folding@Home? A Stanford University project to find out how proteins fold.

Why it's important: Proteins folding wrong causes all kinds of diseases, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and forms of cancer. Folding@Home uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. Through Folding@home, scientists now have the horsepower to study the mechanics of protein folding. With its ability to share the workload among hundred of thousands of computers economically, Folding@home can help scientists understand how proteins snap, or don't, into their predestined shapes - and may help to explain the origins of diseases such as Alzheimer's and apparently unrelated diseases. We're fueling research that could end all that.

How does it work?: You download a safe, tested program (see link below) that is certified by Stanford University. It gets work from Stanford, runs calculations using your spare computer power, and sends the results back to the University.

Is it safe? Yes! Folding@Home rarely effects computer performance in any way and won't compromise your privacy in any way. It only uses the computing power you aren't using so it doesn't slow down other programs.

How do I get started folding for Team FreeRepublic?:
1.) Download the folding program from Stanford University's folding download page (Folding@home Client Download). Type in your desired username.
2.) Type in 36120 for the team number. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT - if you get the number wrong, you won't be folding for team FreeRepublic!
3.) The third question asks, "Launch automatically at machine startup, installing this as a service?" - We recommend you answer YES. Otherwise you will have to manually start the program after every reboot.

How can my computer help? Even if he were given exclusive access to all of the world's supercomputers, Standford still wouldn't have as much processing power as they get from the supercluster of people's desktop systems Folding@home relies on. Modern supercomputers are essentially a cluster of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. But Stanford needed the power of hundreds of thousands of processors, not just hundreds.

There's no reason to not get involved! It's free, easy, and you can know you're helping every minute without lifting a finger.

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List of Relevant Folding Links
Why Fold - Watch This !!

Another Folding Clip

Folding@home Client Download

FreeRepublic.com Folder Stats

Extreme Overclockers Stats for FreeRepublic

Another Stats Page

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Competition (Not!!) Dummies ..Daily Kos

Dummie Folding Threads #7 #8 #9#10#11 #12

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Other Useful Stuff - Links

How much are those work units worth? And what are they?
All Projects Listed
Point Summary for Workunits

Stat Image Generator

Fahmon Third Party Monitoring Software

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Past FreeRepublic Folding threads

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #17 #18 #19 #20#21#22 #23

[Egon]

My shameless self-promotion for this thread:

If you're interested in tracking your folding machine(s) over the web, please Freepmail me.

Available features include:

• Timely snapshot of each machine's progress on it's current project
• Point values for project
• Estimated completion dates/times
• Warning indicators for machines that appear to have stopped communicating or folding
• Warnings for machines that won't make their deadline
• Team ranking status box (courtesy of EOC)
• Machine stats like PPD (points per day)
• Project comparison stats: PPD, average time taken to completion, etc.
• It's free-- and always will be
• ...other features as time permits, and people request

[texas booster]

Pings out to the newest members of the FReeper folding team!

[Paladin2]

Freepers folding proteins? Heck ya!

[texas booster]

I don't remember. Are you folding under your FReeper name or another name?

Please join fresh or move the team number to 36120.

FReepers making a difference in medical research!

[Centurion2000]

bump for later

[processing please hold]

I've tried to download again with my new user name and I get nothing. When I click on my desktop icon, it blinks off. What is my problem?

pbrown

[SoftballMominVA]

Got a huge protein right off the bat--first WU should be done Tues/Wed--Folding for the Gipper!

[texas booster]

Hmmm ...

Which F@H are you downloading? The GUI (leaves a little red flower in the lower right corner) or the console version, which is leaves a text box listing all of the work it is doing?

Is there a red flower by your clock?

[processing please hold]

I tried to download the windows xp GPU client console version. 5.05 beta.

All I get is a little white box thing on my desk top, with FAH5.05 beta. Nothing else. There is no flower or anything.

[processing please hold]

I just tried to download the GUI. The server is too busy it asked me to try again later.

[processing please hold]

It says---At present only Radeon x1900 graphics cards are supported. You may wish to consider running our standard client, which you can download at folding.stanford.edu

What ever that means.

[Drango]

You (almost everyone else)need to download the 5.03 version.

[Silly]

I hope this makes front page news, over the fold.

[processing please hold]

5.03? Thanks I'll delete all the other stuff and look for that one. Thanks.

[processing please hold]

I just remembered. I have the console version because we have power outages at least a couple times a week and it would automatically save my wu when that happened.

Would the 5.03 do that?

[Route66]

I see that Pande Lab suddenly emerged as a long term threat. This happened because they posted over 341,000 points in one day but their individual member totals don't show where this huge number of points originated. Very strange.

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=1

[texas booster]

Now it makes sense.

F@H 5.05 is a new client that works woth the ATI X1900 video chipset. If you don't have that exact video card then it won't run.

I run the console version 5.03 as a service on most of my systems. If you have problems with bad electricity then when you install the program, enter YES to change advanded options.

When you get to the part about saving your work, set it to 5 or 10 minutes.

[texas booster]

The point scored does look strange, doesn't it.

My best gues is that the PS3 consoles are starting to report, and if the default name and team number is left alone by the new user, then ...

Both the new ATI X1900 GPU version and the PS3 version of F@H are much faster than any standalone F@H CPU version. Thanks to the magic of code optimization and 48 parallel pipelines, users running those programs on that hardware will see a lot of points, very fast.

Maybe its time for a FReeper bulk purchase of X1900 cards (and new power supplies just to run them).

[processing please hold]

By George-I think I got it.

I'm baaaaack(albeit a different username. :-)