It's SPRING! And dedicated DUers turn their CPUs to Folding@Home

[mcscajun]

Not laundry, not letters to stuff in envelopes, but proteins! When they misfold, havoc results: Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. Our DU CPUs are busily simulating the folding of proteins to support medical research into diseases and disorders that kill, cripple, and impair human life. Help the work...help find cures! Join the Team DU Folding@Home Project!

From the Stanford website:

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals. Background on the Stanford Folding@Home Project

Want to know more about the science of Protein Folding? Learn About Protein Folding

Every PC has spare computing cycles to contribute to the effort. The program is small and runs in background, can be paused at any time, or closed entirely if your workload or hobbies require more CPU resources. There's even an interesting graphic to let you watch the simulation in progress. Old PCs, Slow PCs, Spare PCs lying around that can be attached to your home network all help the cause. The race may go to the swift, but slow and steady racks up points, too!

Mac and Linux clients are available, also.

Way back when (late 2005) ny_liberal started the DU Folding@Home Project:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=753&mesg_id=753

Since that original thread, over 220 DUers have donated the spare computing cycles of over 270 CPUs to the cause of scientific/medical research. We started out small; our ranking was around the 17,000 mark out of over 40,000 teams. Today's stats:

Date of last work unit 2006-05-03: 15:11:51
Active CPUs within 50 days: 273
Team ID: 48157
Grand Score: 1534366
Work Unit Count: 8754
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate): 274 of 43916

So, if you are interested, Download the software and sign up on the Folding@Home website: http://folding.stanford.edu
DU's team number is 48157
Please, if you can, set the FAH applet to launch on startup. That way, you don't need to remember to turn it on. :)

Have questions? Check out the FAQ

As a side note: the Freepers have a team, and they're way ahead of us, score-wise, if not heart-wise. They have a big head start on us and a "backbone" team member who has co-opted entire PC labs for their team. To make a better showing against the Freepers, we need a couple of hundred DUers to get on board with all the CPUs they can muster. This effort isn't about them, though, competing with them is just an interesting "sidelight" along the way.

This is about cures, about possibilities, about the future. All of these are things progressives understand and support. We should be able to field a larger team with so many progressive hearts and minds on this site. Let's see if we can reach a small goal of 300 CPUs by Memorial Day.

More CPUs!!! C'mon, DUers!!! SPRING Into Action as only DUers know how. :)

Note: This is Folding Thread #11. An archive search for "Folding@Home" will help you locate Team DU history and many questions answered along the way.

[Imalittleteapot]

1. Folding now. kick.

[Roland99]

2. My # of CPUs has been folding like a cheap tent

:(


But, K&R!

[mcscajun]

3. Wha hoppen?

Running into technical problems?

[Roland99]

4. More like employment problems...

[mcscajun]

5. My condolences...

...and good luck with that!

[Roland99]

8. Thanks.

got some opportunities already knocking.

[hobbit709]

6. Done

and connecting 3 computers to this. I have plenty of spare comps.

[mcscajun]

7. WTG and Welcome to the Team!

I look forward to seeing you hit the stat pages when your first Work Unit (WU) is completed. :)

:applause:

[corporate_mike]

15. Terrific!

Please ask your friend/family to join as well.

[mcscajun]

9. Kickin' for the DU Team.

:kick:

[mcscajun]

10. 'nother kick...

:kick:

[Wrinkle_In_Time]

11. See also DU Folding@Home - Thread #11 (link inside)...

... for some more information & history.

Kick & rec.

[Brundle_Fly]

17. I will catch you

my friend...Mr. Wrinkle in time, its just a matter of...er time.

:)

[Wrinkle_In_Time]

22. Heh! I was going to write something about what the other...

Brundle_Fly did to his food when he "caught" it, but it was just too gross! :puke:

There's quite a bit of jockeying going on in the 25-35 rankings. We're all too closely matched. According to the {ever-changing} future projections on , you, KAZ & I are currently almost parallel:

[Brundle_Fly]

23. interesting graph....

but it still wont save you.

added a dual g5 to my 3.2 p4.

;) actually you are talking off way ahead. if only I didnt have to do all this "work" on here.... then the processors could catch up.

[Wrinkle_In_Time]

25. Muwahahahahaaaa! Now I deploy my secret weapon...

... the Fearsome PII450!!!!11ONE!!EXCLAMATION MARK!!11 Actually, I'm tapped out for processors from a practical perspective. The "Fearsome PII450" is gathering dust in the basement and will shortly be donated to charity.

At home I'm running an AMD Athlon64 3500+ with WinXP and an AMD AthlonXP 1700+ with Kubuntu version 5-Hoary-something-or-other (I forget, it's not doing anything except running F@H). My wife is running two similar CPUs processing F@H for Team DU (although she's not a DUer). For some inexplicable reason, she refuses to sublimate her identity to mine and processes under her own nickname. What a stroppy wench! It's almost as if I married her because of such attributes. ;-)

All four machines are currently running 7x24 and it's getting awfully warm in that room. We have also have an iBook G4 12", but it's off more than it's on and under-powered by today's standards. One of these days (tm) we will buy a Mac Mini for home as a media box and run F@H when idle. Both of us have responsibility for several computers at work, but we won't load F@H on them because they are not ours.

How are you finding the performance of your Dual G5 (2GHz?) vs. the 3.2P4? It's probably hard to measure unless you have had the same WU on both.

BTW: I'm not very competitive and I consider the F@H stats to be good for a chuckle (I suspect that you feel the same way). I really don't care much about who is higher than who, so long as all are contributing to the F@H cause. The jockeying in the middle tier is fun to be a part of. I find it amusing to wave (all fingers) at the faster-scoring people as they go rocketing by. Don't tell the Freepers this, but I'm also glad that they are contributing MFLOPS to the F@H cause, despite their retarded political stance, averagely lower IQ, surfeit of port-a-potties and distasteful reverence to the corpse of Ronald Reagan.

EDIT: removed superfluous stuff. Yes, it was even longer before.

[Brundle_Fly]

27. F@H speeds same for pc and mac... by my guesstimate.

well the dell 3.2 P4 is really fast has a X850 XT, and 1.5 gig of ram, extreme hyper threading...it is sitting there constantly chugging away at FAH, and occasionally gets to play some half-life2.

The G5 is a dual 2.3, and honestly it is probably a little slower than the P4 in things you would notice.... like opening photoshop CS2 might take 12 seconds instead of 7 or 8 on the Pentium, but after that the game is over.... my G5 works day to day chunking on photoshop and illustrator files up to 2 to 3 gigabytes.... with the 4 gig of ram, it is like working on a 5 meg file on the PC (the PC wont even open many of these files.)

For the work I do, the mac is superior....

FYI:
there is a new ibook replacement the rumor sites are buzzing about, called the macbook (sans pro) supposed to be out this coming tuesday.

single core and dual core 1.63 intels...
13.1 widescreen
dunno if they have the intel onboard video mem like the mac mini, but it sounds like a mobile mini.

[mia]

12. Go team!

Today DU ranks #43/2000 in terms of active users.

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php?s=&srt=1

:kick:

[IndyOp]

13. Free Republic Folders - A Tribute to Ronald Reagan ....

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

Shall we celebrate Raygun for his appointing John Negroponte, who created those lovely death squads in Nicaragua?

Shall we celebrate Raygun for Iran-Contra? For bringing the PNACers back to life when their international relations and intelligence skills had been wilting as they worked/cheated their way up the corporate ladder since the Ford administration folded?

Shall we celebrate Raygun for working so diligently to kill off the policies of FDR: the ones that benefited labor, health, the arts, social security, the social safety net, education...

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[corporate_mike]

16. FREEPers are #115 with 1,106 active CPUs.

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120

[corporate_mike]

14. All DU members -- please consider joining our team

Every CPU helps.

[mcscajun]

18. Kickin' for the evening crew...

:kick:

[Brundle_Fly]

19. second

kick.

[BlueStorm]

20. I don't understand this project...

what is it supposed to do? I read the site but I am totally lost...


Blue

[Brundle_Fly]

21. says it right here...

the folding of proteins to support medical research into diseases and disorders that kill, cripple, and impair human life.

think of it like the human genome project of the late nineties....

its for a very good cause, I have been involved for about three months and it doesn't affect my computer at all...

[mcscajun]

24. In a nutshell...you download and install a very small program

that handles small chunks of data crunching and sends the results back to the main computer at Stanford.

It runs in background, doesn't impact your other PC tasks generally, and contributes to the worthwhile cause of medical research. The results are NOT for sale to the highest bidder, but will be publicly available following publication in scholarly journals.

What's not to like? :)

[ny_liberal]

36. This may help

Users simply download an application that runs protein-folding simulations on their desktop computers when the systems are idle.

More than half a million computers across the globe have run Folding@home simulations since the distributed computing project began in 2000. Each computer in the mix boosts performance, allowing scientists to tackle more difficult problems and solve research puzzles faster or more accurately.

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.

[incapsulated]

26. Done!

Go Team! :hi:

[mcscajun]

28. Glad to have you aboard!

I look forward to seeing you on the stat pages.

Go Team DU!!! More CPUs!!!

[incapsulated]

30. When I look up my user status..

My username is "incap", it has:


Date of last work unit None
Total score 0
Overall rank (if points are combined) 549759 of 549759
Active processors (within 50 days) 0
Active processors (within 7 days) 0

Like I haven't done anything but I've done 2800/20000 according to the software, which is running.

?

[incapsulated]

32. And I'm not listed with the team members...

Whaaa! :cry:

Do I have to finish a work unit to even be listed?

I am part of the team, my page says so.

[mcscajun]

33. When the 2800/20000 changes to 20000/20000, then you'll have

your first Work Unit completed, and your numbers will change. :)

[incapsulated]

34. Ok, will I also show up on the team list, too?

Cause I don't now. :)

[mcscajun]

37. Yup.

:)

[mcscajun]

29. Kickin' for the weekend crew...

:kick:

[ny_liberal]

31. I'm back and I'm thrilled to see the progress our team made

I was on an assignment overseas for a few months and I'm glad to be home again.

I never would have imagined that we can be a Top 300 team when I started this team.

Excellent work, DU!

[DFLer4edu]

35. Up to 274 CPUs now

[mcscajun]

38. C'mon, DUers! We're shooting for 300 CPUs by Memorial Day.

:)

That's one new team member a day between now and then.

Recruit a friend here at DU, post in your state's forum. Send e-mails to family and friends. :)

[DFLer4edu]

39. We should make it

We should make it as many people like myself have just joined the project, but have yet to finish a WU.

[mcscajun]

40. Saturday Evening Stats

Date of last work unit:      2006-05-06 16:12:11
Active CPUs within 50 days:      276
Team ID:      48157
Grand Score:      1569999
Work Unit Count:      8911
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate):      272 of 43954

[mia]

41. Sunday kick-off

[mcscajun]

42. Sunday Afternoon Stats...

Date of last work unit:       2006-05-07 13:14:38
Active CPUs within 50 days:       275
Team ID:                   48157
Grand Score:               1581018
Work Unit Count:               8959
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate):       271 of 43963

[incapsulated]

43. I know how to drive up DU numbers on this...

Make a OP with the title:

Knuckle-dragging Freepers BEAT DU'ers at SCIENCE

You will get 25 new sign-ups, I guarantee.

No, I'm not kidding. It's all about marketing.

Edit to add: Also mention that you do not need a broadband connection to do this. I think some people on dial-up think this is the case. The only time you need to be online is when you are downloading a project or sending back the results and the initial download was tiny.

[mcscajun]

44. Run with it! We can use all the Folding@Home Threads

we can get. Really.

Everyone's got their own style. Run with yours. :)

[incapsulated]

45. Lemme do it tomorrow

More traffic, heh. Plus, I really have to finish cleaning the kitchen, lol. I'm procrastinating...

:)

[mcscajun]

46. You, too, eh?

Housework's got nothin' on the attraction of DU. :)

[incapsulated]

47. Unfortunately...

I'm distracted by anything if it means I can procrastinate about housework, heh.

[Roland99]

48. Kickeroo!

[mcscajun]

49. Wednesday Night Stats

Date of last work unit:        2006-05-10 18:08:58
Active CPUs within 50 days:        283
Team ID:                      48157
Grand Score:                      1623771
Work Unit Count:               9134
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate):        267 of 43993

[mcscajun]

50. Thursday Evening Stats

Date of last work unit:        2006-05-11 13:15:45
Active CPUs within 50 days:        281
Team ID:                      48157
Grand Score:               1630799
Work Unit Count:        9161
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate):        265 of 43998

[corporate_mike]

51. DU #265 (with 281 CPUs) - FREEPers #111 (998 CPUs) - dKos #656 (77 CPUs)

DU stats:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157

FREEPer stats:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120

DailyKos stats:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48083

RedState stats:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48064