Diesel
03-03-2005, 09:24 PM
As many of you know, Jason and BRiT are key staff members over at AlienSoup.com. Several years back, we started an Alien Soup team in the Folding@Home distributed computing project. Jason asked me to come on over and say a few words on behalf of our team, and the Folding@Home project in general.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by some researchers at Stanford University that seeks to help find the origins of various diseases, and hopefully the cures to those diseases, by investigating the way in which proteins fold at a molecular level. As this sort of work is extremely resource-intensive, the project aims to have many people contribute their computers to processing small chunks of the calculations to allow for faster processing of the data.
To date, the project has been very successful, and Alien Soup has had a team participating in the program since just about the very beginning.
All that's required to participate is for you to donate your unused CPU cycles by running a client on your computer that processes the data and returns it to the researchers at Stanford. The client is very small, unobtrusive, and runs at idle priority, so it won't interfere with any running programs you might be using. You can safely run it on your computer, and see no performance hit. There's also a screen saver client that displays some nice graphics and only runs at times when the computer's not being used at all (although the graphics take CPU cycles away from the data processing).
I'm extending an official hand to welcome you to join us in the project. With enough participation from WTF'ers, we might even change the team name to Alien Soup/WTF. If you're interested in participating, you can get information about the project from http://folding.stanford.edu/, as well as download the client. To join the team, just run the client, and enter team number #77.
I'll be happy to answer any technical or project-related questions, and hope to see some of you "in the fold". Hopefully, together, we can make a team that's a real force to be reckoned with.
- Diesel
PS. Because we believe in the project so much, we strongly encourage you to participate in the project, even if you decide not to join our team. While we'd love to have your support in the project, the project itself is worthwhile, and it's important that it benefits from the extra participation.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by some researchers at Stanford University that seeks to help find the origins of various diseases, and hopefully the cures to those diseases, by investigating the way in which proteins fold at a molecular level. As this sort of work is extremely resource-intensive, the project aims to have many people contribute their computers to processing small chunks of the calculations to allow for faster processing of the data.
To date, the project has been very successful, and Alien Soup has had a team participating in the program since just about the very beginning.
All that's required to participate is for you to donate your unused CPU cycles by running a client on your computer that processes the data and returns it to the researchers at Stanford. The client is very small, unobtrusive, and runs at idle priority, so it won't interfere with any running programs you might be using. You can safely run it on your computer, and see no performance hit. There's also a screen saver client that displays some nice graphics and only runs at times when the computer's not being used at all (although the graphics take CPU cycles away from the data processing).
I'm extending an official hand to welcome you to join us in the project. With enough participation from WTF'ers, we might even change the team name to Alien Soup/WTF. If you're interested in participating, you can get information about the project from http://folding.stanford.edu/, as well as download the client. To join the team, just run the client, and enter team number #77.
I'll be happy to answer any technical or project-related questions, and hope to see some of you "in the fold". Hopefully, together, we can make a team that's a real force to be reckoned with.
- Diesel
PS. Because we believe in the project so much, we strongly encourage you to participate in the project, even if you decide not to join our team. While we'd love to have your support in the project, the project itself is worthwhile, and it's important that it benefits from the extra participation.