Some of my readers will have heard of SETI – the search for ET by using lots of radioscopes to monitor radio waves for predictable patterns, in the hope of finding alien life somewhere in the universe. The SETI institute has a program for home users to donate their computer’s processing power to help crunch all the data, and by and large this has been very useful since it’s free computer power for the school. Folding@Home (F@H) uses a similar principle, where Stanford University has released a program for home users to run software crunching to discover how different proteins and molecules behave.
F@H is largely popular over SETI@Home for a lot of people due to three main factors.
- There is a geek points-per-unit factor, combined with a team aspect. Create an account, join a team of an online community you’re with, and then all of you compete to be #1 F@H scorers for all over the world. Currently, #1 is a team based in the USA by the team name of the [H]orde. #2 rank is a small team from Australia (my birthplace!) called Overclockers Australia (OCAU). For a long time the title of the most points generated swung back and forth between these two behemoths, but due to the size of team [H]orde compared to OCAU the numbers were always in the [H]orde’s favour. Only hours before I wrote this post, team OCAU broke the 2 million points in a single day record when you look at the amount of people involved for both teams. There are actually hundreds and thousands of active teams, but these two are the really big hitters. Google has a team, but that isn’t factored into the competitive results as their folding client is installed quietly on millions of toolbar-user’s machines with the consent of their users.
- Its for CANCER research! What else needs to be said?
- Its a great way to test how well your computer performs. Basically you get the details of your computer (CPU, RAM), fold for a couple days and then look up various repositories online of the comparative results for your computer. Typically the results are compared per frame, rather than as a whole unit. This is because some units have 400 steps to complete, while the majority of units have 100 frames to complete. If you’re really into computers and building your own, F@H can help you diagnose any weak spots in your configuration as well as stress testing for a good cause.
I fold for Team #24 (OCAU) so naturally I have a biased choice on joining a team. If you’re interested in what f@h does, you can find out more about F@H here: