Folding@home - Free Republic Team #36120 Breaks 30,000,000

Stanford University and ExtremeOverclocking.com ^ | 09/03/2007 | Texas Booster

[texas booster]

Time for an update. The Free Republic Folding team #36120 started about 4 years ago, and became popular in December of 2005. We will hit 30,000,000 points this week and congratulations are in order to all folders.

Our FreeRepublic team of 475 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 56th place (with 1000 active CPUs - 143,600 completed Work Units and 29.975 million points).

Please join us and hellp cure Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinsons Disease. You can make a difference!

[texas booster]

Please take the time this Labor Day weekend by checking your folding systems and making sure that they are still folding. You can look inside your folding directory at "unitinfo.txt" or at "FAHlog.txt". This will show the progress of the current work unit.

If the FAHlog.txt shows that the work unit is unable to complete, you should restart the system and ping us. We can save many of the work units and get you back to folding new work units.

Congrats to Klutz, who continues to lead us with 5,800,000 points, and to josephw, who will hit 1,000,000 points within two weeks.

[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 user-name.
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

The Inner Life of a Cell

Folding@home Client Download

FreeRepublic.com Folder Stats

Extreme Overclockers Stats for FreeRepublic

Another Stats Page

*******************************************
Competition (Not!!) Dummies ..Daily Kos

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

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

**************************************
Past FreeRepublic Folding threads

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20 #21 #22 #23 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #29 #30 #31 #32 #33 #34 #35 #36 #37 #38 #39 #40 #41

[texas booster]

Ping to Folders starved for a new thread!

[texas booster]

Ping for FReepers who are starved for a new thread!

[LanPB01]

I’m still waiting for the temperatures to drop so the upstairs portion of my house will be cool enough to have my PS3 and computer folding 24/7.

[antiRepublicrat]

The Mac SMP client doesn’t seem to be taking up available cycles. Activity Monitor shows the processes are running, but they’re not doing anything. Any ideas?

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[papasmurf]

Thanks for the ping, TB! Being that I am about 60-70% migrated to Ubuntu Linux, I'm chomping at the bit to try and install folding@home on a Linux box. That should happen in the next month or so. Congrats to all folders for your contributions.

[Vermonter]

Don't know anything about Folding@home, but a quick search turned up some Mac related info HERE

Hope it's of some use

[2nd amendment mama]

I just joined the team.....:^)

[Drango]

Proud to b foldin’ for the Gipper.

[ken in texas]

I just joined the team.....:^)

Welcome aboard!!!

[ken in texas]

Thanks for the new thread...

I've noticed that there are many people overtaking me of late. Good for them. One of these days I'll upgrade the hardware I have here at home and try to catch up. :-)

[Route66]

This is a “please join our FR team” bump.

[texas booster]

All it takes is a PS3 or a fast Core 2 Duo and away you go.

I need to upgrade my systems but can’t get approval from the budget committee.

[wastedyears]

This is from my unitinfo:

Current Work Unit

---

Name: p3711_Seq19_Amber03_Native
Download time: September 3 13:52:45
Due time: December 8 13:52:45
Progress: 9% [__________]

[texas booster]

http://forum.folding-community.org/ftopic20602.html

Check out this thread. The folder is using the Mac SMP client and is folding at 0%. Sounds familiar.

Thanks mucho for checking it out!

[dfwddr]

WOW, this week temps stayed below 100 here in Nashville. Meanwhile, while I had my back turned, I burnt up a power supply on one box, a northbridge fan on another, and a third won’t recognize a DVD ROM now. I knew I should have shut down during the day, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I also think I have the same budget committee as TB, so it’s duct tape and WD-40 for now. If I could only get my upstairs office underground somehow.......

[Incorrigible]

Cranking out the CPU cycles to stay way under 100!

[Egon]

My shameless self-promotion for this thread:

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

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

Links

• Team Page
• Instructions

Please Freepmail me with any questions.