What is Protein Folding?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
How does this work?
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.
Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
Why Fold?
Because you're helping to understand and cure these diseases.
Guide to installing and using F@H
Note: This is for the console client only
Impt Note: Console version runs faster then the GFX UI version.
Step 1: Download the software here.
Step 2: Unpack it into a directory. (Eg. C:\F@H) If you're using a dual-core or hyper-threading machine, create 2 different directories. (Eg. C:\F@H, C:\F@H2)
Step 3: At the command prompt. type what I do in the following picture.
i) Of course change your nick to your own. You can use mine also.
ii) Use the same team number! 48269
iii) If using dual-core or hyper-threading , use a different Machine ID for every core!
Step 4: Only for dual-core and hyper-threading users that want to run 2 instances of the program You have to use the -local arguement or 2 instances will not run! (Eg. C:\F@H\FAH504-Console.exe -local, C:\F@H2\FAH504-Console.exe -local) This will write the work files into their own directories.
This is how my shortcut looks like.
Step 5: Your done! Start it up! You should be seeing something like this below.
Tweaks
1) Using the -forceasm seems to benefit AMD CPUs and not Intel CPUs so much.
2) Use -advmethods only if you have a decently fast machine as you will get larger work units. The units might crash now and then, but also the points per WU is higher.
3) If you allow F@H to send work units larger then 5mb, you will really need a fast machine. Usually it'll take 2-4 days on a A64 3200+ machine to complete.
4) My shortcut reads "C:\F@H\FAH504-Console.exe -local -forceasm -advmethods -verbosity 9". Verbosity is supposed to help get more points. I'm not sure about this.
Different WUs
1) Tinkers (200-300 points, 2nd best WUs to get)
2) Timeless Tinkers (do not set to timeless units. not worth the points)
3) Ambers (worst WUs to get, very few points <100)
4) Small Gromacs (same as ambers)
5) Big Gromacs (best points per hour ratio. 200-400 points, try to get these)
6) Double Gromacs (very varied, 80-1200 points)
There are other types (eg. GBGromacs, QMD), I'll need to confirm them later on. Of course, the higher the points, the longer it takes to compute.
Edit: The people at [H] seem to try to go for QMD the most. Not yet sure why.
Other stuff
1) Go to www.dcsig.com if you want a cool signature like mine. Updates almost in real-time.
2) Get the Electron Microscope III here. This will give a GFX UI output for the console version.
The VR-Zone F@H URL is : http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/m...&teamnum=48269
I can't think of anything else now. Will update later on.
56 points each.
Linear Mode
21 OCZ Fans!
