***************A CALL TO ARMS PROCESSING UNITS!!***************
In my pursuit of a new graphics card (leading candidate) I have stumbled upon a competition between our blogs that has been ongoing behind the scenes for years, the Folding@home distributed research project from Stanford University in its 9th year.
It involves allowing the project to use the CPU, GPU or both from your home computer as a point on a worldwide internet supercomputer to assist them and affiliated universities in performing complex modeling experiments on how proteins fold in the moments after they have finished being encoded. A multitude of diseases are due to abberations in the folding process.
The amount of work done by any individual (allows multiple computers per log-in) is recorded and points for your work can be dedicated to a cumulative team score then ranked by team totals.
Team FReeper is ranked in the low 70's.
Team DailyKos is ranked in the mid 420's.
Team RedState is ranked in the 1150's.
This is UNACCEPTABLE for a site that boasts so many medicine and science buffs!!!!
Details below...
There are ~154,421 teams and >400,000 participants.
Here is team FReep at 585 members.
Here is team DailyKos at 117 members.
Here is team RedState at 27 members.
***
hekebolos is the intrepid founder of team DailyKos.
thereisnospoon has been our most prolific diarist on the topic in times past.
terabytes is our current team leader.
***
The program (client) installs on most operating systems including Win XP, 2003 and Vista, Mac, Linux and the PS3 and come in console/terminal versions and graphical user interface versions, which also allow you to see the work being done visually through a screensaver.
It works in the background and gears down to completely paused in real time as you demand resources from your computer for your own needs, including spreadsheets and gaming.
Your ability to contribute depends on what equipment you have and what parts of it you allow the clients to use.
Described here in an increasing amount of ability to contribute, you can dedicate a single core CPU < multicore CPU or multi CPU board <PS3 < ATI GPU = NVIDIA GPU < NVIDIA CUDA/PhysX GPU (8000 series and up), even if you have dial-up!</p>
Run more than one client for any of these on the same computer, (a client or more for various available CPU cores and one for each of your video cards, eg; SLI or Crossfire set ups) to really lay it down!
It costs about as much power as leaving a standard light bulb on all the time, slightly more if you overclock. I get my electricity from an all renewable source company so no carbon footprint. Computer parts are generally built to last ~10 years, which is about 2-3 times the life cycle of modern systems so wear on your system is negligble.
I have recently joined up and feel this is a worthy cause that is right up our alley: research/evidence based, contributory to the community, unobtrusive, easy, inexpensive, secure and accessible.
Should we be pitching in to this friendly and beneficial competition?
I think.... YES!
Can we allow Free Republic to have any more years of dominance than they have already enjoyed?
I think.... NOT!
Ignorance was my excuse. It can no longer be yours!
SIGN UP NOW!
P.S. I've only been folding since Sunday AM 3/1 and already approaching a 4000 points!