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!
Bump
Let me know what to do. I'm now in a lab with a lot of computers that are always running.
Bump for a great cause.
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!
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!
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.
"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 |
If you're interested in tracking your folding machine(s) over the web, please Freepmail me.
Available features include:
IIRC, I joined around this time last year.
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.
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List of Relevant Folding Links
Why Fold - Watch This !!
Extreme Overclockers Stats for FreeRepublic
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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
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
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)
Some research indicates that Mad Cow is caused by feeding meat protein to cows.
Well done and keep up the great work!
It's amazing how many different ways there are for an average person to contibute to scientific knowledge by using their computer to do number crunching.
I found out about a ste called Einsein@home here at FreeRepublic last year, and have been looking for Pulsars ever since whenever my computer is idle (63,894.23 Units done to date, and counting)
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
Another is the Stardust Project that is looking for cometary particles from the returned Stardust mission. My ranking over there is 880 out of 20,384 people who are also looking for particle tracks; not bragging as much as demonstrating how many people are involved in the Program.
http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/about.php
All of these sites are tremendously fascinating, and deeply satisfying to participate in. Pick just one, and go have a blast with it...
Folding even as we speak. I wish this CPU didn't get so hot, though.
I saw your first points this week. Thanks for joining us!
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=203691
Congratulations are due to uriah. He joined us almost a year ago and will break into the Top 10,000 folders by the end of the month.
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=168170
Way to go.
We passed Team MacNN about 0900 GMT today.
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)
I've been in Honduras on a work trip for the past 10 days but now that I am going through my pings, I see that it's been just over a year since I hopped on.
I'm over a million now and no sign of stopping. Grats to EVERYONE who's contributed. Someone will benefit from our efforts, perhaps we'll get a footnote somewhere in the annals of history :).
Thank you both for adding your power to the group.
Please ping us if you have any questions about folding.
Merry Christmas, ya'll!
How did the upgrade go? I do not have a true dual core cpu, but I did borg a work laptop that is running a Core Dual. I set the CPU % doen to 70% on each core to combat overheating. Maybe one day I will see the laptop again to check out the log.
Have you had any heat issues?