If I came home and told my wife that I started ‘folding’ today – she would ask me why I don’t do it at home. I had never heard of ‘Folding’ before recently discovering it on hackaday. However, it looked very interesting so I began investigating.
What is Folding?
Folding@home is a distributed client computing effort by Stanford University intended to help understand how proteins assemble or “fold.” Exactly how proteins assemble themselves is a mystery, and why proteins sometimes fold improperly or “misfold” is also not fully understood. Many serious diseases are related to the misfolding of proteins, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Mad Cow Disease, and several forms of cancer. By donating your CPU’s spare cycles, you are contributing to an effort to understand how proteins fold, which is the first step to understanding how basic proteins work and how we might treat these diseases. When you are not using your computer, the processor will run simulations of different proteins and the way they assemble to better help scientists understand why they do what they do.
The Setup:
One great thing about this project is that there are several ways to begin folding. I had (10) Wyse 9440XL Thin Clients that were doing absolutely nothing. These machines run at 400Mhz and have 256Mb memory and use a type of flash (Disk on Chip) for storage. As with most all thin clients, PXE boot was supported.
Using these instructions, I was able to setup an environment that does not touch existing software on your computers. It will simply boot to a very small Linux kernel from the network, load the F@H client and begin to work. Data that needs to be written for backup, etc. is copied back to the tftp server. This is so you can resume the process from where you left off in case there is a machine with problems.
Picture of Wyse Thin client setup:
I also had another Dell server lying around with a bad raid controller – therefore not able to boot from it’s SCSI hard-drives. The machine is out of warranty, so I figured it could be put to use for the time being as a folding client. Using the same process via PXE, it was up folding in no time.
Other various machines are also contributing when not being used for other things. For Windows computers the best client to use is the console version , then the gui, and lastly – the screensaver option.
Yes, there is a competitive nature to this… However, who says you can’t have fun at the same time you’re contributing to great research projects. There are several teams you can join – I chose to use teamhackaday, there are many(thousands of) others.
In case you want to follow my progress, Here are my current stats.
Folding@Home Project
If I came home and told my wife that I started ‘folding’ today – she would ask me why I don’t do it at home. I had never heard of ‘Folding’ before recently discovering it on hackaday. However, it looked very interesting so I began investigating.
What is Folding?
Folding@home is a distributed client computing effort by Stanford University intended to help understand how proteins assemble or “fold.” Exactly how proteins assemble themselves is a mystery, and why proteins sometimes fold improperly or “misfold” is also not fully understood. Many serious diseases are related to the misfolding of proteins, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Mad Cow Disease, and several forms of cancer. By donating your CPU’s spare cycles, you are contributing to an effort to understand how proteins fold, which is the first step to understanding how basic proteins work and how we might treat these diseases. When you are not using your computer, the processor will run simulations of different proteins and the way they assemble to better help scientists understand why they do what they do.
The Setup:
One great thing about this project is that there are several ways to begin folding. I had (10) Wyse 9440XL Thin Clients that were doing absolutely nothing. These machines run at 400Mhz and have 256Mb memory and use a type of flash (Disk on Chip) for storage. As with most all thin clients, PXE boot was supported.
Using these instructions, I was able to setup an environment that does not touch existing software on your computers. It will simply boot to a very small Linux kernel from the network, load the F@H client and begin to work. Data that needs to be written for backup, etc. is copied back to the tftp server. This is so you can resume the process from where you left off in case there is a machine with problems.
Picture of Wyse Thin client setup:
I also had another Dell server lying around with a bad raid controller – therefore not able to boot from it’s SCSI hard-drives. The machine is out of warranty, so I figured it could be put to use for the time being as a folding client. Using the same process via PXE, it was up folding in no time.
Other various machines are also contributing when not being used for other things. For Windows computers the best client to use is the console version , then the gui, and lastly – the screensaver option.
Yes, there is a competitive nature to this… However, who says you can’t have fun at the same time you’re contributing to great research projects. There are several teams you can join – I chose to use teamhackaday, there are many(thousands of) others.
In case you want to follow my progress, Here are my current stats.