[texas booster]

FOX News gives the Playstation 3 good marks for utilizing Folding@Home to help cure Alzheimer's, diabetes and cancer. Great publicity, great science.

If you have a PlayStation 3 that is not being gamed on 24 hours a day, please consider going to the Sony Store and downloading the program. Takes just a couple of minutes and you will be part of the reseach that may cure many diseases!

Use 36120 for the team number (FReepers) and your FReep name to start getting credit as the work units roll in.

And PLEASE post here if you have any problems at all.

[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.

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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 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #29 #30 #31 #32 #33

[SunkenCiv]

Oooh. We gotta get some of these... ;')

[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

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to script for the PS3.

[texas booster]

OS Type...........Current TFLOPS*....Active CPUs... Total CPUs

Windows.....................153..............160471...........1626988

Mac OS X/PowerPC......7...............8801...............95463

Mac OS X/Intel.............9................2880...............7452

Linux............................. 43..............25267............216117

GPU.............................. 43................733...............2228

PLAYSTATION®3.......697..............28441.............32064

Total..............................952............226593..........1980312


Not far from the magic petaFLOP barrier, at 4:40 am CST 3/25/07.

It is amazing that 32,000 PS3s are already crunching away. While the PS3 doesn't solve all of the calculations required to fold a protein, it does run the Implicit Water Molecule Solvents amazingly fast.

[texas booster]

Thanks for joining the team, and adding your work with ours.

Your home page is ... interesting. Did you have anything to do with the manufacture of that gun, or did you adopt it?

[texas booster]

Thanks for joining the FReeper Folding team!

Your first points reported today.

Please holler if you have any problems.

[Incorrigible]

Woo! Hoo!

Just cracked the top 100 Team Reagan folders!

Time for a new thread!