SteveinSTL

Hey Guys,

Thought you might be interested in this program as an apparently harmless way to do good on those long mileage runs we have, or when plugged in at the office. It's called Folding @ Home. Short version: Stanford U has a program that runs in the background on a PC or Mac that uses available processer time to work on complex protein formulas, hoping to develop new pharmaceuticals or understand other medical issues & diseases. When I checked into it and saw the combined names of Stanford & Google, that gave it a pretty big level of credibility for me! Not spyware or anything, just a good cause it seems. ^

So, here's the link: http://folding.stanford.edu/ This'll give you the overview, download options to the left. If you click on team statistics, you'll see the # 2 ranked team are the boys at Google, so they must know a few things about computers I think. Since we're all a competitive lot, I figured we could come up with a "Flyer Talk" team, where all of our combined computers (laptops, home pc's, office pc's) could do a world of good (no pun intended). Speaking of world, click on the map to see how everyone rates. You European's look great. Hmm, wonder if work units completed on trans-Pacific routes will start creating dots over the water!

Some basic feedback about logical questions. It hasn't caused my home or work pc's to crash or lock up - at least no more than normal... It hasn't seemed to make them move slowly or limited any normal usages of mine. Since it needs to connect to the 'net once a unit is completed, you can configure it to pause once done, etc. Hey, I"m not a rocket scientist though - maybe if you use huge CAD programs or such it will slow those down. So far, I've seen only good & no bad.


Once you download, a red gear-like icon will appear in your tray. You should have a chance to select a user name - your choice, and enter a team. The Flyer Talkers team is team #: 39124, just newly created for us if you'd like. Once underway, click the icon once to see your progress in completing the task. Right click to view statistics, and either yours or the cumulative team stats (using the above number). Let's see if we can put all our combined computing power to some greater good!! I wonder how many work units can be completed on a 30K mileage run, or on a JFK-SYD type of longhaul?!

Let me know what you think.

SteveinSTL

@:-) Just a quick update, and a bit of a challenge to a community with thousands of PC laden members! Our family has been doing this with our 4 computers for a bit over a week, and has completed 23 "work units" or studies. Ok, it's a start... If you'd like to check out our progress, it's team # 38778.

Sure hope all the views I've seen in less than 8 hours will turn into some downloads & active units out there. If you like it, leave some feedback & pass it along to other FT'rs. The real power of this community joining together is the collective muscle of what, maybe 10K computers out there? Do we have more than 10K members? How many have 2+ pc's at home, plus whatever strings you can pull in your office or business?! It really staggers the mind.

Go for it!!

SteveinSTL

Guys

Still a newbie to this so help out a bit. I thought this folding @ home was pretty cool, but based on lack of response here on people who are using the Flyertalk team number, I might have misjudged the collective group's interest. Ok, I've done that before plenty of times in other areas!

With all the computers we control, it seemed like a chance to do good. If it is and others have some suggestions (post 'em or PM me). Is this the logical forum, or is another better? Over 100 people at least checked it out, so maybe we're all just too busy to do something like this, but I quite frankly thought it would be well received. So.... i'm about ready to fold the tent - no pun intended! - and give it up. Hey, we're happy, our little home network has 56 units done with no harm. Tell me any suggestions you have.

jazzman

I'm game. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

We'll see how well it plays with my Mac.

cicsman

Sounds like this is similar to the SETI project that NASA ran (or maybe still run).

I have to say though that the thought of giving an outside body access to my PC makes me feel a little uncomfortable.

cicsman

Duplicate post.

birdstrike

folding@home is similar to the distributed computing model that SETI@home uses. I allocated my spare cycles to SETI for awhile, until I replaced my old machine. I didn't bother to rejoin since SETI has more processor power allocated to it then it can currently use.

Both SETI@home and folding@home are reputable groups. I suppose they could be hacked, but I'm not too worried about that.

I joined folding@home after SteveinSTL's reminder.

At the moment I seem to be the only person on the FlyerTalker team....

I think we need more exposure within FT if FlyerTalkers is ever to become a serious participant.

SteveinSTL, why don't you throw your processing time into the FT pool?

SteveinSTL

^ I'll do it! I will move our family's processing to the FT team if we get some more signups. I cannot move work units done, but future ones can be allocated that way. How about this: we've completed about 55 units last time I checked - if we get 10% of that in other pc's that are contributing, I'll make the switch. If we can't get 5 pc's from our vast group to sign up, I'll consider it a lost cause & stay with my current group.

As a real challenge, the person who controls tens or hundreds of work pc's (think engineering firms, law offices, libraries) could make my family's 4 pc's seem trivial indeed!!

I'll check back on the folding @ home progress our group makes & decide accoridingly.

Thanks for the feedback guys, i was thinking nobody cared.

tlglenn

Hmm, I missed this thread when it was first posted. Anyways, I've been running f@h for a few months now on my home desktop. I'll try to remember to switch it over to the FT team.

SteveinSTL

Just checked the website on team 39124 (the FT team...!) and see it's a team of 1 so far - thanks Birdstrike! 13 units done already means you must have some serious CPU you're unleashing! Who else is in? Get me 4 more and i'll move over as promised! Who's in?

winkydink

OK, I'm in too, but I still see Birdsrike listed as the only team member

LIH Prem

If you have a laptop that runs hot (like those based on P4M) I wouldn't fold on it. My Pentium M laptop folds fine. It does run hotter though. (Fans run, normally they don't need to run.) I tried it for a time on a Dell 4150 (P4M) and it ran very very hot. The P4M based notebooks run hot without doing anything intensive. folding/seti/etc are computational intesive. That sort of stuff makes cpus run very hot. Desktop machines should not have a problem with that.

You might want to consider joining an established team.

ie, http://www.project-tweakers.com/ - team 63. If we decide to do that, we can get homebrew to add a link to ft on the home page.

-David

http://signatures.geekfolding.com/in...=d-con&team=63

SteveinSTL

Hey Guys, even though it's only 4 Ft'rs, it's 10 computers resulting in good benefit to society w/o harm to computers. Check out the results ^ - http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/m...&teamnum=39124 Way to go birdstrike!!

We've now done over 130 work units, beating my family group. Y'all must have some smokin' computers churning out results! When our office goes DSL soon, I'll add 10 pc's to the mix. Right now we're too heavily firewalled to do this. Keep up the good work. Anyone else in? Any admin of an office network want to get in??

LIH Prem

Are you sure you don't want to join an established team? Project-Tweakers already has about 5 different orgs folding together for it, and FT would receive a prominent place on their web site if we joined them.

These are my stats, and there's lots of people there folding more than I am.

http://www.project-tweakers.com/html...on-graphs.html

cordelli

I've done several of these in the past, and each time there were issues with it and one of the computers I was running it on. That may be the reason you aren't seeing so many more prople doing it, either they are already doing it (there are at least two dozen other donate your processing time projects out there that I know of, united devices, process tree, seti, etc), or they have had problems in the past.

I eventually just gave up, my issue was that of the three or four I tried, every now and then it would take 99% of my processing time when I wanted to do stuff, and I had to Control-alt-delete and stop the tasks it was running so that I could run stuff again. I access my PC remotly dozens of times a day, and I just couldn't have that not working because of the distributed application. It's a great idea, but for me it didn't work out. I'd run it on a couple old machines I was just using for file storage on, but those are long gone now.