[texas booster]

The every popular Cray-1

I believe that a similar AN/FSQ-7 unit was at Griffiss AFB in Rome, NY in the 50's - my father got his start as an electronic tech replacing vacuum tubes here. He described it as "one floor of computers, one floor of air conditioning. Repeat."

ASCI White, circa 2001

NEC EarthSimulator in Japan

Just a correction: Roadrunner is not a BlueGene and it is installed at LANL not LLNL. The BGL at LLNL is far from the fastest computer in the world now. NNSA is part of DOE not DOD, as the US nuclear weapons program is under civilian control, as it has been for many decades.

[JoeProBono]

[jakerobins]

What about Hal??

[texas booster]

It's been a while since we have has a Folding@home thread, and figured that a discussion of supercomputers is a good place to restart.

Here is a primer on Folding@home, and how the combined 350,000 computers work to make Folding@home the largest supercomputer, albeit a distributed system.

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

Folding@home New Forum

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

Dummie Folding Threads #7 #8 #9#10#11 #12
Hey DUmmies, can't ya'll post a new thread at least once a year?

**************************************************
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 #42 #43 #44 #45 #46 #47 #48 #49 #50

[frankenMonkey]

I’ve worked on seven from Top500 supercomputers back in the day...

[sionnsar]

Geezer Geek ping.

This is a very low-volume ping list (typically days to weeks between pings).
FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this list.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

The Naval Ordnance Relay Calculator, designed by Howard Aiken and installed at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground to facilitate ballistic computation, was really the world's first supercomputer.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks tb.

[grey_whiskers]

(Sound of grey_whiskers purring.)

Cheers!

[Chode]

and i remember when i thought our VAX750 & VAX785 were speed daemons...

[Petronski]

...Cray XT Jaguar . . . boasting a massive array of 45,000 AMD Opteron processors...

Is that a typo?

Forty-five thousand?

[cynwoody]

A cluster of 200 Playstation 3 game consoles. Used to brute-force the MD5 digital signature algorithm and successfully create a false SSL certification authority:

[ShadowAce]

[martin_fierro]

And so we've seem supercomputers come and go

Proofreaders, too.

[texas booster]

To all who may be running the Folding@home SMP client:

6.24R3 windows SMP client released --Expiration July 4, 2010

We have posted the drop-in replacement binary for the windows v6 client. This can be found at:

http://www.stanford.edu/~kasson/folding ... 32-x86.exe
MD5 checksum: 5c14c566e11b69273477d7ca102c40c4

Refreshes of the full packages will follow.

This client has only minor modifications from the 6.23 client (it is near-identical to the 6.24 client currently released for Linux and OS/X). We are anticipating a major set of changes to the SMP client over the next several months, but we aren't quite there yet. Keep your eyes out for updates. (There are some big improvements to the SMP cores underway, and they will necessitate some new client code.)

As stated in the thread title, the 6.24R3 client will expire July 4, 2010. Assuming our new SMP cores are on schedule, you may wish to upgrade earlier, however, as we hope to phase out the SMP A1 core as we switch to the new future cores. But we'll release more details when the new software is released (date TBD--development is still ongoing).

Thanks for contributing to the project!

[kalee]

ping

[Ancient Drive]

what is the passkey?