Category: Folding@Home

  • Folding@Home: How to check your progress

    Once you start folding you will want to check on your contribution and see how you’re faring compared to other volunteers – one of the most popular ways of checking your stats is through the Extreme Overclocking website:

     

    http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/

     

    On the left-hand side you can see a name search field; put your username in there and you will see all of the username results which match. This can be a bit of an issue if you have a common username (e.g. Bob) – doing a case-sensitive search might help a bit there. Once you find your username you can save the URL as it’s unique; for ours, see:

     

    http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=567476

     

    If you click on your username at the top you’ll see your ranking within your team. The rest of the information is easily accessible – you can see your daily and weekly stats in the bar up the top and below that your top 5 conquests and threats. Below that again are graphs showing your future production estimates, past production and a list of your points from the past few months, weeks and days.

     

    The listings are updated every 3 hours, so bookmark the page and check regularly!

  • What is Folding @ Home?

    Do you leave your computer on 24/7? Want to contribute to research into how diseases like Parkinsons, Huntingtons and some types of cancer occur?

     

    Folding @ Home is a distributed computing project which uses people’s spare computer cycles to study the way proteins form in an attempt to understand how that process goes wrong, which is known to be one of the causes of a number of diseases, including the above. The program is run out of Stanford University in the U.S. and has produced a bit over 100 research papers in the past 10 years based on the results from computers around the world.

    You are awarded points based on how quickly you return completed work units to the server; faster computers will generally score more points per day. These points are listed online to encourage friendly competition and you can join teams to compete on a grander scale.

     

    If you’re interested, head over to:

     

    http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage

     

    and download the client from the link in the middle! If you want to join in with the team we fold for, fold for team 24 🙂