Hey guys, within the past few months I've been running Folding@Home on my gaming machine when I'm not using much of it's extra resources. Now, you guys may be thinking, "What is Folding@Home?" Well, simply said it's a distributing project that is being ran by the Stanford University to help find cure for diseases such as Cancer, Alzheimer's Disease, Mad Cow Disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and many more. Since we all know (or should know) that proteins are the building blocks of life, this is why research is going into it. Folding@Home has won many awards, such as making the world's largest supercomputer as well as helping to find medications that would help treat these diseases, and hopefully in the future, help find a way to cure them and eradicate them.
How can you help? Simply by installing a small program onto your PC and using your PC's spare computing power when you're not in need of it, as well as giving it an internet connection. Depending on what hardware you have, you can use your video card's processing ability using nVidia's CUDA platform (GeForce 8 series cards or newer!) or ATI's Parallel Computing platform (Radeon 1*** series and older!). If you have a dual core processor or better yet a quad core processor, or even faster, they have an SMP client which you can run to fully use the CPU for folding. If you have a single core processor, they have one for you as well, and if you're running an older operating system, they have a client for you as well. Simply visit their website which you can find below.
Once Folding@Home is installed and ready to be configured on your computer, why not join this website's folding group? Here's the link to our group. Simply enter in your member name for the group, as well as the group number which is 165451 and your contributions will show up on the below link! And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the F@H Discussion forums on this site.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=165451Folding@Home Website:
http://folding.stanford.edu/Folding@Home download page:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadFolding@Home High performance (GPU and SMP) clients:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOtherFolding@Home Installation guides and FAQ:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQhttp://folding.stanford.edu/English/GuideWhat is even good about this project, as that thanks to a recent firmware update for PlayStation 3 consoles from Sony, you can now run Folding@Home by launching it from the home menu on your PS3! Simply set it up so that the work units go towards this group as well as with your forum member name, and let your PS3 fold away as well
*** Take note that in order to use CUDA and ATI's Parallel computing platform, you must be using drivers that support CUDA for nVidia cards or ATI's Parallel computing platform for ATi Cards. Also, you must have a compatible card. You may ask if your video card is compatible below. Also note that the latest drivers support the widest range of calculations, so please be sure to install them if your drivers are out of date, and keep them up to date.
*** Take note that the SMP client runs the best under Windows Vista, as well as with the GPU client as well.
