What is folding?

Ice Rich

Ice Rich

Ice Rich

Soldato
Joined
3 Dec 2004
Posts
2,641
Hi all,

I know this must get asked a lot and I have tried doing a google but it left me confused.

Is folding basically putting idle/spare PC's to use by working out calculations and then uploading them? What is the aim of it (i.e what are you trying to find out?)

Is there any financial benifit? Ive read a few posts in another part of the forum of people trying to get to 1000000 points first?
 
You should be able to find most of the information you need here
http://folding.stanford.edu/

It's basically working out how proteins fold, there's no financial gain in it at all but it at least gives you a sense of well being knowing that your PC's are doing something worthwhile when your not using them.

By understanding more about how the do fold, it's hopefully that these deseases (from the F@H site)....
Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
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Greenlizard0 said:
What are more computers dedicated to? I presume for the fact that folding proteins is more important that this would win, but am not sure.
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I would hazard a guess that F@H has edged ahead of SETI in recent years. PC Magazines now have dedicated features on F@H, and it's not that often you hear anything about SETI these days.

Of course SETI's still going strong and it hasn't died out though.

I'd still say F@H is more popular.
 
Folding allows you to put your unused CPU cycles to use conducting medical research and get a warm feeling inside :p Specifically, you'll be studying the misfolding of proteins, which is thought to play a part in many diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. My personal involvement started after I lost a couple of grandparents to cancer and wanted to do whatever I could to stop other people from having to endure that hardship.

The great thing about Folding compared to other distributed computing programmes like SETI is that Folding has already produced a wide range of useful scientific results which are proving significant in the fight against these diseases.

Folding@home is surprisingly entertaining, particularly when you get competitions going with other members or with other teams. It's also surprisingly addictive - plenty of people have been known to build systems specifically for F@H once the bug has bitten them. Each participant is awarded a certain number of points for each work unit which their machine completes, and this is where the competitive element comes from.

OcUK has a pretty active Folding team which is currently 25th and rising on the overall team statistics. We're always looking for new members, no matter how much or how little you can contribute. You can fold on your CPU (multi-core CPUs are much more productive as there's a multi-core client), on your graphics card (Geforce 8-series / Radeon HD3xxx or above) and even on your Playstation 3.

If you're interested or have any more questions, come to the DC forum and we'll set you up!
 
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Ben M said:
I didn't think that 8 series cards could fold? :confused:
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It's a pretty recent development - Stanford released the nVidia client about a month ago, which works on any Geforce card from the 8-series and up. GPUs do lots of science and are worth lots of points - for example, my 8800GT is worth about 5,000 points per day where my overclocked quad-core can manage about 4,000. Of course, you can run both at the same time :)
 
Mattus said:
It's a pretty recent development - Stanford released the nVidia client about a month ago, which works on any Geforce card from the 8-series and up. GPUs do lots of science and are worth lots of points - for example, my 8800GT is worth about 5,000 points per day where my overclocked quad-core can manage about 4,000. Of course, you can run both at the same time :)
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Ah, I knew that nvidia cards could now do it, but I assumed that it was an update for new cards ;)
 
Yeah, obviously the high-end cards are the most productive. But you can even run it on low-end laptop stuff like an 8400M GS if you like :)
 
Mattus said:
Folding allows you to put your unused CPU cycles to use conducting medical research and get a warm feeling inside :p Specifically, you'll be studying the misfolding of proteins, which is thought to play a part in many diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. My personal involvement started after I lost a couple of grandparents to cancer and wanted to do whatever I could to stop other people from having to endure that hardship.

The great thing about Folding compared to other distributed computing programmes like SETI is that Folding has already produced a wide range of useful scientific results which are proving significant in the fight against these diseases.

Folding@home is surprisingly entertaining, particularly when you get competitions going with other members or with other teams. It's also surprisingly addictive - plenty of people have been known to build systems specifically for F@H once the bug has bitten them. Each participant is awarded a certain number of points for each work unit which their machine completes, and this is where the competitive element comes from.

OcUK has a pretty active Folding team which is currently 25th and rising on the overall team statistics. We're always looking for new members, no matter how much or how little you can contribute. You can fold on your CPU (multi-core CPUs are much more productive as there's a multi-core client), on your graphics card (Geforce 8-series / Radeon HD3xxx or above) and even on your Playstation 3.

If you're interested or have any more questions, come to the DC forum and we'll set you up!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the great explanation Mattus, much appriciated.
 
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