Posted by Scott Clark @ 4:41 pm
Fighting Cancer With Spare CPU Cycles
Filed under: Research, Software, Strictly Personal
Mar
16
2008
16
2008
I just installed Folding@home today on my two quad-core machines. These are some high-power machines essentially sleep after hours. It does not decrease the in-use performance of your computer since it runs at the lowest priority available under Windows.
Join My Team… it’s #117081.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project, that very simply stated, studies protein folding and misfolding. Protein folding is explained in more detail in the scientific background section.
Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user’s choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.
The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve “work units,” which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.
Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.
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17
2008
Keep in mind that running these clients does increase cpu power wattage, thus will result in your electrical bill to raise a bit. (keep in mind that a Pentium4 Prescott 3Ghz with full load burns 100+ watts..)
think it’s best to find balance in curing cancer and saving the environment.
just my thoughts.
17
2008
I leave two pcs on 24×7 b/c they do backups, etc. off-hours. In 2004 I had four machines running, now I’m down to two multi-cores. My monitors, laser printer, fax, scanners, and other devices all sleep in lo power mode.