Folding@Home

[Livewire]

Anyone else do this? I found x10's team from back in 2008 here: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...teamnum=130950

Ended up joining the team and beating out everyone in one night - F@H added a "GPU2" client at some point, and from my own experiences it beats out their multi-core client by leaps and bounds - it's taking me 2-3 hours to do one work unit instead of 3-6 days


Course me being happy I beat out the other two x10 members is like saying "hey, you just beat people who aren't playing anymore."



Just curious if anyone else does this, and if anyone else plans on jumping on the x10 team - http://folding.stanford.edu/ for more information, http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download for the actual downloads, http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther for high-performance beta clients like the GPU client.

[galaxyAbstractor]

I do WCG - World Community Grid. I like WCG better.

[ichwar]

what exactly are these things your talking about?

[xxll_martin_llxx]

what exactly are these things your talking about?

Exactly! :laugh: Gone straight over my head too.


On looking at it I thought it was something to do with how good your computer was and you have to try and get people to join up within your community to better other communities with higher scores for better computers.

Looking again, I'm completely wrong!

[galaxyAbstractor]

you do research against diseases like cancer and aids

[ichwar]

ok, well. I can't join because I know nothing about any of those things. it seems like those kinds of things must have an extremely limitedd audience.

[galaxyAbstractor]

ok, well. I can't join because I know nothing about any of those things. it seems like those kinds of things must have an extremely limitedd audience.

no, your computer does it

[PhantomChick]

I do Folding@Home... I haven't heard of WCG before now, but that looks very good, too!

However, since I run it on a several-year-old laptop I don't complete work units quickly by any means.

@Livewire -- Just a few hours? That's awesome! What is your computer setup?

@ichwar -- these are programs that run in the background and process data. Basically it's like donating some of your CPU usage to research. The magic of the Internet and distributed computing turns home PCs into a gigantic supercomputer!

[themcman1]

On my 9600GSO it will do a 350-odd pointer WU in about 1hr 20 with the 511-pointers taking about three times as long.

I think anyway.

I fold for OC3D.

[Livewire]

@Livewire -- Just a few hours? That's awesome! What is your computer setup?

AMD Athlon 64 x2 3.0ghz (which takes like 5 days to do 1 WU >_<)

For the gpu though, I just found myself an alternate use for an nVidia 8800GT - F@H


Seems GPU's are better at most of the types of calculations Folding@Home needs to do; obviously it sucks with some of them, but if it's better with 95% of them and slower with 5%, it's still a hell of a kick in the pants



@ichwar: Just like everyone's saying, you dun have to do much other than install the client and run it - I honestly have no idea what it's doing, other than using 1000's of every-day home computers to do the jobs it'd take 1 gigantic and expensive super computer to do. At some point some really intelligent person'll still look at what results the home-users are turning in, but the client's doing all the work for you - it's just using the idle time your pc has (such as when watching a movie, working on homework, browsing the x10 forums, etc).

I -do- notice it slows itself down (or stops entirely) if something resource intensive starts as well; the GPU client slams on the brakes soon as anything goes DirectX Exclusive (translation: any full-screen video games), so it lets the game do what it wants.



I'm curious if I can run the console client alongside the GPU for no other reason than to just do both, I'll have to experiment and see what it does as far as performance goes.



@themcman1: How do I tell how much the WU is worth? I've never been able to figure that out