Folding@Home Now I'm At 149

FreeRepublic ^ | 9/28/08 | oshkalaboomboom

[xcamel]

http://boincstats.com/stats/boinc_user_graph.php?pr=bo&id=13409

and no, I don’t do folding.

[meyer]

It's with great fortune that I have the wherewithal to fold my laundry on occasion. Beyond that, I have no interest.

[Churchillspirit]

Would you please explain "folding"?

Thank you.

[Grams A]

Sounds like what my golf score is going to be if I don’t get out from behind this computer and go hit some balls for a tournament next week.

[1-Eagle]

What the hay is a “folding team” and how does it help FR?

[nospin2244]

Can you pls explain how this works? I would like to help out the Free Republic team but the link only shows a ton of stats.

[Viking2002]

I was consistently in the top 5% data crunchers of all of the original SETI@home users when Bezerkeley switched to BOINC. Granted, I jumped into it back in March of 1999, and had at least one PC running it in the background at all times. I'm currently running BOINC, but have no idea where I stand on the SETI project.

[LanPB01]

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120

From the Folding@home website:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

[LanPB01]

Texas Booster runs the FreeRepublic Folding Ping List. He can give you all the information you need, if you want to help.

[bpjam]

what the hell does this have to do with FreeRepublic?

[Kirkwood]

Oragami?

[RangerM]

I’m number 1 of 1 on the BOINC list....my wife’s BOINC list.

[EasySt]

“Folding” or more specifically the Stanford Folding@Home project, uses the spare computing cycles of millions of PC’s, Macs, Linux boxes, certain high end video cards and PlayStation 3 gaming consoles to perform scientific simulations aimed at understanding how proteins fold, or mis-fold.

Mis-folding proteins are thought to cause several types of cancers and a number of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's.

If you have any of the hardware mentioned above, you can help with this project pretty easily. Right now, the combined efforts of everyone currently participating has surpassed Four Peta-Flops of continuous computation. That's more than any supercomputer on the planet, outside of DARPA.

FreeRepublic participates in this effort as F@H Team #36120, Free Republic Folders - A Tribute to Ronald Reagan. This team left DU's similar efforts in the dust, long ago. The current FR Thread for this effort is here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2063306/posts

Freeper texas booster has long included lots of help and useful links in these threads, like this one here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2063306/posts?page=5#5

Join us! The mind you save might be important to you!

Free Republic Folders

[EasySt]

PING

[GRRRRR]

Go get a PS3 and start folding with it when you’re not playing a video game...That’s what got me to 34 on the FR team...it has 8 processors and CRANKS out the units.!

[brityank]

Folding@Home - Turning Up the Speed! is the latest thread about the FR team, and has a lot of info on F@H and what it does. No, we don't get paid; no, we can't write it off on our taxes; no, the certificates are not printed on gold foil. It does provide detail and input to the public dissemination of the underlying methods of finding how cells work, and specifically how proteins behave both normally and mis-shapen.

 

[EasySt]

"No, we don't get paid; no, we can't write it off on our taxes; no, the certificates are not printed on gold foil."

Well, if we want the certificate, we have to print it out ourselves, so...

I suppose one COULD print it on gold foil... ;-)

[EasySt]

"Go get a PS3 and start folding with it when you’re not playing a video game...That’s what got me to 34 on the FR team...it has 8 processors and CRANKS out the units!"

Indeed. The PS3 is capable of a sustained 25 Giga-Flops all by itself. Since they can run Linux, a number of folks have been known to tie eight of them together with a Gigabit switch to create cheap 200 Giga-Flop Supercomputers.

You can also get just one, add the PlayStation Eye camera, and play Texas Hold'em with built in Video Conferencing with your friends and family on the Net. (When you're not Folding, that is...)

[Onelifetogive]

>>I made it into the top 200 on June 14.

Your timing is uncanny. When you reported that you cracked the top 200, I read your post and started folding. I passed you today. I am 147.