Folding@home Team 56895 and Life with PlayStation

[Pilam69]

Guys, this is REALLY not the place for a philosophical discussion on medicine.

Folding at home is a great way for the PS3 community (or Blu-Ray Community, if you prefer) to give something back to humanitiy as a whole IMO.

If you are going to start folding, might I suggest you join us on the Blu-Ray.com team please.

[Tanman19az]

Thanks guys for the info. I'll be registering later to help cancer!

[actionhank]

Originally Posted by Tanman19az

Thanks guys for the info. I'll be registering later to help cancer!

Not just cancer but Alzheimers too. It's a horrible disease

[Minimejer05]

I didnt know what it was excactly but I knew it was helping something so I started Folding asap.

[actionhank]

Originally Posted by Minimejer05

I didnt know what it was excactly but I knew it was helping something so I started Folding asap.

lol really? I've heard some people do the same, and when they saw it was working on "p3851_fkbprelative_comp_GROMACS core" they thought they were working on some metal gear nuclear warhead project or something haha

[Paden]

Originally Posted by Barnum

The concept is nice but I don't see a cure ever becoming reality. As much as I hate to say it companies are making so much money that a cure is just not in the future. I would like to think other wise but look at how many people would become unemployed. I think it is more a way to waste electricity than anything else. How long has the SETI program been around for a result of a big nothing. We can't even rid the planet of the common cold let alone a disease.

Wow, pretty defeatist.

[JasonS]

Originally Posted by mystiksuicide

It is important that we as a group continue to fold but it's more important to get all the new members involved in folding.

We should be getting a lot of new PS3 owners very soon now that blu-ray has won the format war.

I will be signing up for Folding@Home by this weekend. I've had my 40GB PS3 since the week that SKU was released but haven't put much thought into researching how Folding worked until now. I'll let it run for a couple hours a day.

[doctorsteve]

It's not just about diseases and cures.

It's understanding diseases, creating vaccines, and yes, finding cures. But even more than that - it's understanding ALL the chemicals and genes for life as we know it.

If there were 100 different steps to crumpling a ball of tin foil, and 100 different things that could happen at each of those 100 steps, you'd spend a long frikken time studying the many different outcomes that the ball of foil could look like when you were done.

Where biochemistry is concerned, think more along the lines of 100 steps and 10,000 things that could happen at each step, and then - just by changing temperature, another factor of 10,000, then by changing pH, another factor of 10,000.

Using the PS3's number crunching power is generating more results to simulating all the different things that could happen to a single molecule, at a faster rate than the super computers previously used.

And there are plenty of diseases to go around - so it is not a waste of electricity. Your layman's part in Research is worthwhile. It's like giving blood - it costs you nothing extra - and you are helping others by doing it.

And there are no needles involved...

[Tulsa]

Originally Posted by doctorsteve

It's like giving blood - it costs you nothing extra - and you are helping others by doing it.

And there are no needles involved...

Now if I could only find where my PS3 dispenses the apple juice and the peanut butter cookies I'd have it made!

[JTStarkiller]

Alright, ever since I split from the GameFAQs team and joined team blu-ray.com, my number of work units hasn't been accumulating. It's just stuck at seven. I believe I've done three since then. Any ideas? Is my power going to waste? I'd rather not leave it on if that's the case.

[actionhank]

Originally Posted by JTStarkiller

Alright, ever since I split from the GameFAQs team and joined team blu-ray.com, my number of work units hasn't been accumulating. It's just stuck at seven. I believe I've done three since then. Any ideas? Is my power going to waste? I'd rather not leave it on if that's the case.

The number of units on your TV or the number of units listed on their website (or both)?

[JTStarkiller]

On my TV. Last time I checked online, I had like 15 work units, and I hadn't even been pulled off the GameFAQs team page and added to the blu-ray one. It's all wacko.

Edit: I do seem to be added to the blu-ray team now. Says I've got 1 work unit. Should be 2 or 3, but at least I've been added.

[AlaskaDon]

I just joined the team last night

[dentalrep]

I am knocking on 100 after only 2 1/2 weeks of folding!!!

[Zeagle]

Is anyone having any issues today uploading or downloading WU's?

[dentalrep]

How come some people get so many more points per WU than others? I have two PS3's and two computers on a high speed business connection. 8K down and 1.4K up. I am trying to stay ahead of "bahamutxd " and he is gaining on me. I have like 20 more WU than him.

[iceman]

Originally Posted by dentalrep

How come some people get so many more points per WU than others? I have two PS3's and two computers on a high speed business connection. 8K down and 1.4K up. I am trying to stay ahead of "bahamutxd " and he is gaining on me. I have like 20 more WU than him.

Some WUs are larger than others and take longer time to do, hence you get more points for them.

[Zeagle]

Larger work units will get more points, but I only get the larger WU's on my Mac Pro's. My PS 3 takes ~8-9 hours to complete versus ~16 Hours on my Mac's.

On your computers check for an option to run Work assignments larger than 5 MB this may help, but pay attention to see if your computer can handle the memory requirements.

Originally Posted by dentalrep

How come some people get so many more points per WU than others? I have two PS3's and two computers on a high speed business connection. 8K down and 1.4K up. I am trying to stay ahead of "bahamutxd " and he is gaining on me. I have like 20 more WU than him.

[actionhank]

Originally Posted by dentalrep

How come some people get so many more points per WU than others? I have two PS3's and two computers on a high speed business connection. 8K down and 1.4K up. I am trying to stay ahead of "bahamutxd " and he is gaining on me. I have like 20 more WU than him.

Internet speeds don't really matter because the program doesn't constantly send data up or down your connection.

From the F@H FAQ:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Points

How do you decide how much credit a work unit is worth?

Points are determined by the performance of a given machine relative to a benchmark machine. Before putting out any new work unit, we benchmark it on a dedicated 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 computer with SSE2 disabled. (more specifically, as reported by /proc/cpuinfo on linux: vendor_id : GenuineIntel, cpu family : 15, model : 2, model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz, stepping : 9, cpu MHz : 2806.438, cache size : 512 KB). This machine runs linux, so all WUs are benchmarked with the linux core. Note: Currently the linux and Windows fah_cores run at the same speed, so this does not impact points performance.

We plug the results of this into the following formula:

points = 110 * (daysPerWU)

where daysPerWU is the number of days it took to complete the unit. This equation was chosen to match the points for previous Gromacs WUs from the previous point system. The upshot is that Tinker WUs will be worth more than before we set up the new point system (i.e. before April 2004).

Please note that the very concept of a reference machine will mean that some WU performance will vary from the performance on your machine. Even between P4s, there are significant differences in architectures over the years. Moreover, variations between FAH WUs can also lead to differences in benchmarking points.

Our goal is consistency within a given definition of a reference machine setup (described above), but beyond that, the natural variation from machine to machine and WU to WU will never allow any point system to perfectly reflect what you get on your machine.

Why are some projects given significantly more points than others?

Certain projects require substantially more computer resources than others, either in terms of more disk space, more network transfer, or more RAM used. By default, these work units are given out to clients that opt in to request them. To reward those contributors for donating resources beyond the typical client, we currently give bonus points for these larger work units.

If you really want to get maximum points get a SLi computer running linux and run the GPU client. Even the PS3 will be humbled with that power

[dentalrep]

Originally Posted by Zeagle

Larger work units will get more points, but I only get the larger WU's on my Mac Pro's. My PS 3 takes ~8-9 hours to complete versus ~16 Hours on my Mac's.

On your computers check for an option to run Work assignments larger than 5 MB this may help, but pay attention to see if your computer can handle the memory requirements.

Thanks, I switched to run the larger WU's last week. I also run both PS3's on advanced mode. My laptop has 2gigs of memory and my Dell XPS desktop is running 4gigs of memory.