Ambrosia Software Web Board: Folding@home-Join the team! - Ambrosia Software Web Board

A Ambrosia Webboard Folding@home team has been started.
[url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]http://www.stanford....egroup/folding/[/url]

We're team number 35022(we're with BnB, and I might put this on Just Chat too). I'm using the Terminal version, but have the GUI version on hand for anything even remotely complicated.

Anyway, this is a destributed-computing project; basically, it uses spare processor power to do something productive. I'm not even going to try to expalin what this one is trying to accomplish, but read the background if you really want to know.

If you've done SETI@home, this is similar, but work units take considerably longer-i have a 1.25Ghz iMac, and a 250K-step unit would take about 17 hours if it ran by itself. Thus, most computers will probably need two days, left on, to complete. Obviously, if you have a dual-G5 it will take way less time.

Also, if you're running this alongside SETI, you'll have to modify it's Nice setting, otherwise SETI take about 90% of the spare processor-if this applies and you don't know how to do that, tell me.

I think that's all you need to know.

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The Journalist-An old ambulatory rodent with no tail.
"Sir, please refrain from eating my cat"-Jambo
iChat-High on metal

So, by your calculations and assuming that iMac is a G3, it'll take me almost a week to calculate something. Sorry.

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"Everything is connected, but we don't realize it."

Yep, a 1.25 Ghz iMac G3. No, G4.

What do you have, Av?

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The Journalist-An old ambulatory rodent with no tail.
"Sir, please refrain from eating my cat"-Jambo
iChat-High on metal

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G3s have been discontinued ever since iBook G4s came out. They never reached more then 900mhz I think.

As for me, I also have a 1.25GHz G4, but my net connection is not that reliable and I will be moving to Australia for 6 months on January 24.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

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You don't need to stay online to run it.

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The Journalist-An old ambulatory rodent with no tail.
"Sir, please refrain from eating my cat"-Jambo
iChat-High on metal

I've got a 233 mHz G3. That might change in March, if I can force myself to give up being able to startup in OS9 on occasion.

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"Everything is connected, but we don't realize it."

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Which is why I got a nice and cheap 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4.

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It really sucks to have a boring sig. You know, the kind that drones on forever and never really says anything. I try my best to never have one of those. Every time I make a new sig I try to get it to be a truly outstanding sig. Some people have sigs like that. With neat (EVula) links and stuff. Witty quotes are good too. But then some people have really, really, boring sigs that you'd die before reading more of. They just go on, and on, and on...those sigs really annoy me. I mean, they say nothing and nobody really cares anyway! I pity the people who have those.

I just joined. Downloaded the text thing and started running it. Whee.

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Azzy: Still screwed up.
"Man, I wish I was a Bush. I've always wanted to be some kind of shrubbery." -Pufer
"Hey, I'm not the one who wanted Gay Sex to become a moderator." -Avatara
"I find that unaccountably disturbing."-Sundered Angel

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Ah, okay. I won't press the issue...i had that until about 2 months ago.

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The Journalist-An old ambulatory rodent with no tail.
"Sir, please refrain from eating my cat"-Jambo
iChat-High on metal

I'm signed up.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

Excellant.

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The Journalist-Supporter of slightly mental Christian music groups
"Toasters-I mean, why havn't these things gotten thier fifteen seconds of fame?"
Join[url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]Folding@home[/url] Team 35022

Heh, been runnin it for about a week (8 hours a day) and I'm only 25% done One would think that with 1.4 ghz you'd do a bit better than that.

Wasn't there talk of smaller work units for less powerful computers?

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[url="http://"http://www.evula.com"]Your Cursor is getting heavy.... You feel it coming to this link.[/url][url="http://"http://janus.ambrosiasw.com/~mburch/"].[/url][url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webcam/"].[/url][url="http://"http://janus.ambrosiasw.com/~andrew/"].[/url] | [url="http://"http://www.photobucket.com"]Photobucket[/url] - The free image host - 100 Megs free

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They're "working on it."

It now seems that all the work units have 250,000 steps, regardless of how long it takes to do them. So i guess you got a huge one...i think i did too, it's taking 40 minutes a percent (instead of 10)

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The Journalist-Supporter of slightly mental Christian music groups
"Toasters-I mean, why havn't these things gotten thier fifteen seconds of fame?"
Join[url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]Folding@home[/url] Team 35022

woo for me! I completed my first work unit.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

Moonshadow: you signed up for the Ambrosia SETI team?

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Um, Moonshadow hasn't posted in this topic.

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The Journalist-Supporter of slightly mental Christian music groups
"Toasters-I mean, why havn't these things gotten thier fifteen seconds of fame?"-LawnGnome
Join[url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]Folding@home[/url] Team 35022

Who's Moonshadow?

Would someone mind telling me what "folding@home" means? I thought it was some crazy way of having fun folding laundry, but I guess I was wrong. Help boys? Damsel in distress here!

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Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

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Computers are smarter then you. They get mad at you if you just use your powerful CPU to surf the net and type boring word documents. If you listen very hard, you can hear the millions of G5s, G4s, P4s, and Zeons screaming in pain as they spend another day simply processing AOL instant messenger commands. Folding@home is a way for them to do something challenging. Folding@home gives your processor that opportunity to flex its muscle. Your processor has to analyze what proteins do right before they do something else. While the proteins do this the "fold". Your computer analyzes this. This is a good thing because 1) your computer stays happy and 2) you are pushing forward the science of proteins.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

[This message has been edited by Trah (edited 01-17-2004).]

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Good news, we now have six work units done! The Journalist is in the lead, with three done. I'm hoping I'll finish mine before the deadline, but it might be down to the wire.
To answer your question, Folding@Home is the official name of what a certain group of people are running on their computers right now. It stands for the fact that if you are running folding@Home, you are running a program that is calculating how proteins fold on your home computer. Thus, you're folding, at home.
The reason to run it is that protein folding is what proteins do to become functional. First they are made, then, as soon as they are finished being made, they fold and bend into their final, complex shapes. This happens in a very, very short amount of time. The importance of protein folding is that if the protein folds in the wrong way, the protein will not work. In fact, many genetic related diseases are caused by incorrect protein folding. Protein misfolding is believed to be the cause of Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even some cancers.
Now, the problem is, protein folding happens in so short of a timeframe that it can not be properly understood. The amount of time that it takes for the proteins to fold is so short that the best supercomputers in the world are not capable of breaking down and analzing protein folding. They just simply don't have the power. This is where the folding@home program comes in. Instead of running the program on just one supercomputer cluster, the program runs on thousands of normal computers, using spare CPU and memory to run in the background of the computer systems without affecting performance. Each computer is given a very small piece of a protein folding squence to figure out. The computer runs the program, and in a few days, will finish and will send back the data to a central server. So, the computer is given a small enough work unit that it doesn't take weeks or years to finish, but, when enough computers are all working together using this program, the effect is as if a supercomputer had spent years on the same amount of data. By speading the work out, the group of computers that run the folding@home program in effect become a supercomputer cluster. And the more computers that join and run the folding software, the faster this virtual supercomputer becomes. If every computer in the world ran the software, the whole project would probably only take half a year or so to finish. So that's why we're running it, more power to the project.
Edit: I just realized that this post is about five times longer than most posts on this forum. I am so sorry for wasting all of your time.

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A wise man is one who knows when he is being a fool.
Join the [url="http://"http://folding.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/teampage?q=35022"]Ambrosia Folding@Home Team[/url] and donate your spare CPU cycles to help the [url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]Folding@Home[/url] distributed computing project! Ask me if you have questions.

[This message has been edited by WraithSniper (edited 01-18-2004).]

Can you make that a BIT easier to read? It's late. Where's Pufer when I need him?

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Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

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mine was shorter, but had less info. I will summarize:

Use you home computer to analyze proteins folding. Proteins fold so they can do stuff.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

Who's huwr?

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The Journalist-Supporter of slightly mental Christian music groups
"Toasters-I mean, why havn't these things gotten thier fifteen seconds of fame?"-LawnGnome
Join[url="http://"http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/"]Folding@home[/url] Team 35022

Are you talking DNA protein? Or something else?

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Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

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Any protein. If I remember my biology, DNA and protein are not related.

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My [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, golf log, and IRC tutorial.

Hmm, I thought they were.
I still don't get it

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Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too