OK, firstly apologies to anyone who already Folds, as you will be aware of this information, but if you don't it's a short guide to what
Folding@home is about. If you haven't heard of it, hopefully this will help and then you can maybe join the forums new team and forward medical research with your computer(s). It's simple to do and makes use of something you possibly sit in front of daily, without realising the actual potential of today's powerful CPU's.
Folding@home according to Guinness, is the world's most powerful distributed computer project and in simple terms you can contribute by donating some of your computers CPU power, by processing data. This data is the research of protein folding to better understand the development of diseases such as sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases. The project is run by Stanford University in the USA.
To join the project you download a very small program (370 KB) that when installed with it's default settings in a Windows environment, will run automatically - but you can easily configure it to run when you want and how you want. I use both the Windows and Linux clients and have it running in the background when my PC is on and as most people tend to use their computers for web browsing, email and music etc., you will never be using your CPU to anywhere near it's full capacity. The client is well developed and runs on hundred's of thousands of computers daily and can be as un-intrusive as you like.
How it works:The link to download the client program is at the top of the page, or just
click here. There are Windows (XP, Vista & 2000), MAC OS and Linux versions to choose from. Most will choose the
Windows 2000/XP/Vista Graphical client Version 5.03. Once the client program is installed it automatically downloads a 'Work Unit' (WU) then starts processing until that WU is finished. Once completed it sends the result back to Stanford and gets another WU and so forth. The WU's are small (unless you choose to download large ones over 5MB) and only take a few seconds to upload/download with a broadband connection. You can pause the client if you want to and it saves itself when you shutdown your PC.
Before first running the client you need to choose a user name and the notaussiefloyd team number is
132987. Joining a team is the fun bit, as you get points for all your completed WU's and get a ranking in the members league table, as well as helping the teams overall world ranking. Unfortunately we are a few years behind the leading teams, who have millions of points - but it's not the winning, it's the taking part. When first running the client you will need to enter your User Name & Team Number - do this carefully, as if you enter the wrong name/team you could be donating WU's for somebody else!. You can check if your name is available from the download page. Most of the common names will already be taken, but it will be useful to know who the members are by keeping your Forum ID if possible? This could be done by adding something first, i.e. Aussie_Your ID or Your ID1234 etc - up to you? Of course if your ID is available, then you're sorted - I'm already signed up as GreatGig. The user names are case sensitive and you cannot have spaces.
If you decide to start
Folding@home with notaussiefloyd you will be joining one of the world's largest computer communities. The modern computer you have in front of you probably never really gets used to it's full potential, this gives you the opportunity to support a worthy cause by helping a medical research project - there have been many successes already through the help of this on-line community.
I used to contribute to the SETI project, but thought helping medical research was better than looking for ET! I have been folding for awhile for another team, so can help with any questions you may have, the Wiki link below also answers most FAQ's . . . so just ask away and Keep Folding?
notaussiefloyd.com
