Darntoothysam Folding At Home

27 January 2010 ~ 1 Comment

If you would join me now and step into my Way-Back Machine, we will set our destination at Oct. 1st, 2000. Why is it that we are stopping on that particular date? It’s because that is the date that Professor Vijay Pande at Stanford University released his “distributed computing” client called “Folding@home”.

“But it’s 2010, who cares about Folding@home? That fad is over.”

On the contrary dear reader, Folding@home may not have the attention it once garnered but it is still going strong! Some of the most noteable milestones have been:

- absorbed the Genome@home project, March 2004
- 200,000 active CPU’s, September 2005
- September 2007, officially attained a sustained performance level higher than one native petaFLOPS
- February 2009, broke through the 5 petaFLOP barrier
(What’s a petaFLOP? I don’t know but Wikipedia does… “FLoating point Operations Per Second”, basically it’s a measure of computing power)

What does Folding@home actually do?

After downloading and installing the client software, the user donates their unused computer processing power to the Folding program. Basically the software simulates what happens in the body when proteins “fold”, because when they do so improperly the end result is various diseases instead of the desired outcome.

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.
- From the Folding@home website: http://folding.stanford.edu/

Since the project first started there have been dozens of completed projects, and I’m not even going to pretend that I understand the results, nor will I waste our time by linking to the results pages here. If you are really interested, there is a Folding@home Executive Summary in PDF format through this link that makes things easier to understand.

The interesting thing about Folding@home is that they recently released client software for use on the Sony PS3 game system as well as for computer graphics cards instead of the CPU. Both of these changes have drastically increased the speeds at which “work units” can be processed by the users computer.

Currently Darntoothysam Folding at home runs on 4 different computers (CPU clients) here at the office, and one of my workers runs it at home on the GPU (video card) of his desktop computer. We aren’t a huge team by any means, but because we have had it running on at least one computer for several years now we have quite a few work units completed!

We would be happy to have you join the Darntoothysam Folding at Home team! Our Darntoothysam Folding at Home Team number is 149132, please help out with this worthy cause.

I briefly ran the client on my GPU (video card) but found it to be very loud as the GPU fan needed to run all the time due to the extra heat being created. If you run the CPU client on the desktop, you can set the programs CPU usage rate to a maximum level at your discretion. I set mine at 50%, this means that the program can NEVER use more than 50% of your CPU power, and it will NEVER take CPU power away from the programs you are running. This means that Folding at Home will not slow down your computer or make it slower when you are working on it or browsing the internet!

I recommend pausing the program when you are running a game as this may cause the game to run more slowly, but other than that, the program uses very little extra power and you won’t even really know it’s there.

I could go on and on about the Sony PS3 and GPU Folding clients and how it’s much faster than the computer CPU clients and all kinds of crazy numbers etc. etc. but who really want’s to read that? It’s information that’s already available on Wikipedia, so why cut and paste it here?

What do I get out of running Folding at Home?

Honestly, not much. Seriously.

I could go on and on about how you will be saving the world or countless lives of people stricken with Alzheimers, Huntingtons, Parkinsons etc. but we may never actually cure any of them. What is the benefit then of doing Folding at Home? You can feel good that you are contributing to something worthwhile, have a cool screen saver to look at, and look at the rankings pages so you can see how you creep up the rankings. I look at it as a long term game of sorts… how long will it take me to beat Team X or increase my rank to the top 50,000 of all users etc. It’s a long term game with little payout, but once you get started it grows on you.

Most people that install Folding at Home will turn it off and uninstall it within a very short period of time. I believe this is because they feel they are slowing down their computer, spending lots of extra money on electricity or other similar reasons. The truth is that with the “CPU Usage Percent” slider set at even 50% (Right Click the taskbar icon and select “Configure”, then click the “Advanced” tab and you will see it) you will not slow down anything on your computer, so it’s really not a concern.

I own a small digital camera repair business, so my office is full of computers, and I think it’s a good thing that I can try giving something back, even though it might be a very small contribution. I’m not going to save the world by any means, but if we all do a little bit it will add up in big ways.