[Klutz Dohanger]

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 it works:

You download a safe, tested program 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 to starting folding for Team FreeRepublic:

1.)Download the folding program from Stanford University's folding download page. 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 he were given exclusive access to all of the world’s supercomputers, Standford 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.

[Klutz Dohanger]

Summary - Folding Links of Interest (as compiled by Klutz Dohanger on the previous thread)

1. Where to get the Folding@home client
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

2. FreeRepublic.com Folder Stats
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120

3. Extreme Overclockers stats for FreeRepublic.com
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=36120

NOTE:
Only the top 2000 teams are included on Overclockers, and when a team reaches the top 800, individual stats are included.

4. Our Competition:
a. Democratic Underground
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157
b. Daily Kos
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48083

5. Another Statistics Page
a. Sortable Team Member Stats
http://fahstats.com/t.php?t=36120
b. Team Production
http://fahstats.com/tp.php?t=36120
c. Teams on the Radar Scope
http://fahstats.com/tr.php?t=36120

6. Third Party monitoring software
http://fahmon.silent-blade.org/

7. DU Folding Thread.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5672092

8. How much are those work units worth?
a. http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/allprojects
b. http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html

8. Stat Image Generator
a.Link http://www.statgfx.com/statgfx/getlink.cgi?service=folding

[Leofl]

Ping for later perusal

[Americanchild]

I've been running something similar for almost two years. It's run by United Devices and is currently working on a "folding" project too. In the past it was searching for cures for smallpox and cancer. Who knows what's next!

[generally]

Ok, I'm in & running!

I have a question, though. How do I tell how many "frames" I've completed? I'm running on a Mac PowerBook and I get a picture of the protein and a progress bar that tells me 8.25% complete, but nothing about frames.

[Drango]

Sigh-400 frames crunched and I get an error message...

[21:14:49] Finished Work Unit:
[21:14:49] Header on frame 2 differs from expected header
[21:14:49] Got: BB0470-30019-43B345E8-F98F393: 0002
[21:14:49] Expected: BB0470-30019-43B345E8-F98F393: 0001
[21:14:49] Error: ARC file integrity could not be confirmed. Exiting
[21:14:50] [21:14:50] Folding@home Core Shutdown:
BAD_FRAME_CHECKSUM
Deleting current work unit & continuing...

BITE ME YOU STANFORD TWITS!!!

Go Huskies!!!

OK, I feel better now. I'll try and debug!

[Swordmaker]

This is an invitation to all Mac Ping List members to join Free Republic's Folding at Home team. The following is an explanation of what FAH is and why it is important. We are currently ranked at 891 out of about 12,000 folding teams. We are moving up at about the rate of 100 ranks every day right now. Let's show what Mac's can do... pile on guys!

---

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 it works:

You download a safe, tested program 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 to starting folding for Team FreeRepublic:

1.)Download the folding program from Stanford University's folding download page. 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 he were given exclusive access to all of the world’s supercomputers, Standford 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.

---

Thanks to Klutz Dohanger for the succinct information. Now, Mac users and Mac interested members of the Mac Ping List... let's go and really make Team FreeRepublic into a Rocket up the charts.

Remember, our team number is 36120... 36120... 36120

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Alexander Rubin]

Ping the lists. No reason not to get involved in this. Good cause. Check it out for yourselves.

[youngtechster]

If this project was BOINC based [berkeley.edu], I'd be happy to volunteer my idle server for 25% of my computing resources (sorry, Seti@Home has priority). BOINC has built-in support for multiple projects. I'm guessing that Stanford was too proprietary with their project to even allow a BOINC distribution of the project.

As it stands, My computer(server) has 2x AMD Opteron 265 and 4GB of RAM. That's four 1.8GHz 64-bit cores.
Computer Stats with Benchmarks [berkeley.edu].