FR Folding@Home Project Update - We're Now #58 of all teams with 16,800,000 Points

Stanford University ^ | 12/17/2006 | Texas Booster

[texas booster]

Happy Birthday to the many folding FReepers who joined our little band last December. While we had been folding as a team for a long time, systematic was instrumental in rekindling interest in the team, and all the growth starts with his efforts.

We had just passed into the top 2000 of teams when December started. No Klutz, no lrenh, no malsua.

Uriah was our big gainer, having posted over 2000 points in less than a week!

BoT was folding that first week and is still folding away for us.

The research that we help advance will truly make a difference one day, for you or for one of your relatives.

Please ping us if you have any questions or need help - we do respond!

[texas booster]

Our Free Republic team of 412 members is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing. We have banded together to donate our 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 58th place (with 1,050 active CPUs - 88,500 completed Work Units and 16.75 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).

Thank you and a very Merry Christmas to you and your families!

[JCEccles]

Bump

[aruanan]

Let me know what to do. I'm now in a lab with a lot of computers that are always running.

[texas booster]

Pinging over to a new thread. We will be looking back at what we have accomplished the last year and Howdying out to friends that we have made.

Keep on folding!

[Drango]

Bump for a great cause.

[Incorrigible]

I'm currently back to one processor as the old laptop was nolonger up for the task. I'm still hoping to break the top 100 so I'll have to do something!

[texas booster]

Pinging over to a new thread. We will be looking back at what we have accomplished the last year and Howdying out to friends that we have made.

Keep on folding!

And Merry Christmas ya'll!

[Drango]

Home computers aid disease fight

The scientists use spare capacity in home computers

More than 150,000 home computer users are helping scientists to find new ways to treat diseases like Alzheimer's.

They are signed up to Folding@Home, a global network of computer users.

Scientists use spare capacity in these computers to test algorithms designed to show how potential drugs will bind to proteins in the body.

Many diseases are caused by protein malfunctions. Scientists say the project is starting to reveal what type of drugs could fight these diseases.

Folding@Home was set up four years ago by scientists at Stanford University in the US.

Users download a programme, which enables scientists to use spare capacity in their computer to test their algorithm.

New drugs

Speaking at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in Philadelphia, Dr Vijay Pande of Stanford University said the project could help to find new drugs for a wide range of diseases.

The programme is designed to show how certain molecules, the key ingredients of any drug, will affect specific proteins.

We can do things that the major pharmaceutical companies cannot do Professor Graham Richards, Oxford University

In the past, computer-based algorithms have not proved accurate enough. But Dr Pande says his programme gets around that problem.

"For almost 20 years, people have been talking about doing drug design computationally but the real challenge has been getting sufficient accuracy," he said.

"Our main goal was to come up with methods to really push that accuracy to the point at which our methods are pharmaceutically useful."

Dr Pande says computers can be used to simulate work that would take many years to complete in the laboratory.

"We can do the hard work. We can study the things that would be hard to investigate just synthetically and then make suggestions for which ones should be followed up.

"I think it may open the door to a new range of therapeutics that we just can't access very readily right now."

Dr Pande said the results are promising. "I think we're at the point where pharmaceutical companies start to get interested."

Cancer drugs

Researchers at Oxford University set up a similar project to try to find new treatments for cancer.

The Screensaver Lifesaver project now harnesses the power of 2.8m computers around the world.

Professor Graham Richards, who set up the project, said such schemes are playing a major role in drug research.

"We now have 2.8m PCs signed up so we actually have more computer power for this type of work than all of the pharmaceutical industry put together," he told BBC News Online.

"We can do things that the major pharmaceutical companies cannot do."

The Screensaver Lifesaver project recently completed research into potential treatments for anthrax and smallpox. The results have been passed to the US government.

It also identified 14 potential targets for fighting cancer. The computers are now being used to try to hone in on these targets and identify those most suited to being turned into drug treatments.

"We are trying to narrow those results down. It costs money to make and test these drugs," said Professor Richards.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3597738.stm

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[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]

You are starting out just like our top producers did. Having responsibility for a lab of computers sometimes means getting rid of flowers and fishy screensavers and allowing the CPUs to do real work in the off time.

I'll post better instructions after church, but for now go here and download the GUI Folding@Home 5.03 to get a feel for the program:

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

We will eventually move you to the 5.04 console version, but it makes more sense if you can see the program in action.

Very important - you need a user name (we mostly use our FReeper names) and the team needs to be 36120. Leave everything else as default for now.

[processing please hold]

You're welcome, and Merry Christmas to you and your family too.

IIRC, I joined around this time last year.

[Egon]

Let me know what to do. I'm now in a lab with a lot of computers that are always running.

"Borg" them all!!

...assuming it's not against company policy.

Your best bet is to visit the Stanford link and download the console version (not the GUI version) and place it on one of the lab machines. Run it from the DOS prompt with the -config option, follow the prompts and you should be off and running.

There are two files to monitor shortly after starting, to make sure that you've got access to F@H:

• FAHlog.txt
• unitinfo.txt

Reading through FAHlog.txt will quickly tell you if your machine is able to access the F@H servers to pull down work units, and push up the results.

Looking at unitinfo.txt will tell you what the status is on the current work unit.

If you're going to be controlling a lab of folding machines, I'd recommend getting an application to help you keep track of all of them at the same time. There are links to a few up above, or you can FreepMail me for instructions on how to gain access to one that I wrote.

Keep asking questions on stuff you don't understand, and we'll help you through any issues you have.

Happy folding!

[JCEccles]

I don't have access to a lab but I do have eight personally-owned computers (actually six: two them have dual core CPUs) churning out almost 1000 points a day.

[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 they were given exclusive access to all of the world's supercomputers, Stanford 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.

*******************************************

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 #24 #25 #26

[Egon]

We will eventually move you to the 5.04 console version, but it makes more sense if you can see the program in action.

Forget what I said about the console version right away. TB's advice is better.

[Drango]

After you get started and your first result post, the best place to check results and progress is this link.
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=36120

[LonePalm]

By my calculations, we should move ahead of Team MacNN sometime Tuedsay afternoon.

We are making steady gains on AoA Forum and MozillaZine too.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[texas booster]

It was fun at the start to pass a team or two every day.

There are not too many teams ahead of us to pass, and most of them have been folding for many years.

We keep growing and gaining on all but a few mammoth teams, we keep passsing someone every month.

I seem to remember a certain DUmmie team that used to talk smack at us ...

[stockpirate]

Some research indicates that Mad Cow is caused by feeding meat protein to cows.