This simple website monitors the progress of my personal contribution to Stanford University's Folding@Home distributed computing project, and also serves as a link page to other Folding-related websites.
Folding@Home is a project which aims to further human understanding of the folding and misfolding of proteins, the human body's workhorses. Protein folding is a process fundamental to human life, with misfolding accountable in some respect for many illnesses and diseases such as Alzheimer's. Proteins have nevertheless concealed their secrets well due to their microscopic scale and immense complexity. Folding@Home attempts to extend the boundaries of biological knowledge through a distributed computing model which provides Stanford with immense computational power comparable to the fastest supercomputers. By downloading a simple client application onto your home computer, you can set it to work on a small element of one of these proteins, adding your system's processing power to that of the 200,000 processors already participating in a project whose potential outcome is much greater than the sum of its parts - a cure for many diseases which plague mankind and a healthier future for your children.
Folding requires no technical knowledge to run - if you can navigate this web page, you can install Folding. Almost every home computer is useful to the project, from cutting-edge custom builds to your parents' old beige box! Folding should not affect the performance of your system - it runs at a low priority, immediately giving up your computer's resources to any other program which needs them. You won't even notice it's there.
Whilst people run Folding principally to advance the scientific cause, many Folders appreciate the social aspects of belonging to a team. Whether you're in a team or an independent folder, each work unit you Fold is given a certain amount of credit which is added to your personal account. As a member of a team, your personal credit will be added to the credit of your teammates as you seek to score higher than competing teams, as well as to outscore the members of your own team. This competition is a great way to speed up the scientific process, with many team members bitten by the Folding 'bug' setting up new systems solely to increase their output. However, whether you run one system or one hundred, your input is equally valued by the project.
Current client details
SMP 1 and 2 - these SMP clients run on my desktop and main folding PC, also responsible for producing the real-time statistics on this page. It consists of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU overclocked to 3.2Ghz, running in an Asus P5Q Pro motherboard with 4GB DDR2 RAM. This machine runs Windows Vista, but for increased reliability and output it runs two instances of the Linux SMP Folding client in two Ubuntu Server environments virtualised through VMWare Server. During Uni holidays this machine Folds 24/7, though it's also used for gaming! In term it's mostly switched off, though I keep planning to take it with me.
8800GT - also in the above PC, my 8800GT graphics card has 512MB of memory and runs with its shaders overclocked to 1800Mhz. It runs the nVidia GPU2 Folding client, which is very reliable and generates a large number of points.