A brief note of accomplishment

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Thu May 19, 2005 12:36 am

After a couple of years of running, with slowly growing member list, The "Folding at Home" team i created in honor of my father has broken into the top 1000 team rankings -

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main ... mnum=36425

A public "thank you" to those who have participated and contributed. Any and all are welcome to join. If you have a reasonably speedy computer, and can spare some of that horsepower, every bit helps. There's a Folding at Home screensaver that will run when your computer is otherwise idle, or you can run the 'standard' client which uses whatever percentage of your computer's capacity you set it to.

my desire to have the team rise in the rankings is a pleasant diversion, but what really matters is that Folding at Home may find a cure for Alzheimers disease, and other diseases, in our lifetimes. I'm faced with the very real possibility of Alzheimers in as little as twenty years. At least i know i'm actually doing something to help find a cure, without having a medical degree or being able to contribute vast sums of money to research.

By participating, you may be helping yourself.

end of sermon!

lady cop · Post by **lady cop** » Thu May 19, 2005 2:34 am

i clicked on the link Paul, and am going to email it to Carla right away, her life's work is in helping Alzheimers patients.

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Thu May 19, 2005 11:42 am

Paul,

Does it take up much space on your computer?

Do you have to leave your computer running 24/7?

Is it easy to set up,(for those of us that are eejits)?

Do i have to switch off my anti-virus to run it?

Cheers.

By the way, well done!

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Thu May 19, 2005 2:41 pm

abbey wrote: Paul,

Does it take up much space on your computer? 'it depends'. my installation currently takes up 34 megabytes of disk space. however, that's because i run the always-active client, and there's an option to run 'work units' that are particularly large, thus needing both more disk space and more memory. however, you don't have to select those options, so it can use both less disk space and less memory.

Do you have to leave your computer running 24/7?no. whether you use the screensaver version, or the always-running client, you can turn your computer off overnight if you like, or any time for that matter. it just means it won't be able to do any work while the computer's off (kind of figures!). i leave my computer on 24x7, and have it running on some servers as well that are necessarily on 24x7. the average PC with the monitor off uses about as much electricity as a 100 watt lightbulb. so if you do leave it on 24x7, it will burn up some electricity and cost you money.

Is it easy to set up,(for those of us that are eejits)?i don't think it's terribly difficult. you download the installer program, and run it. it installs it, then you configure the program, usually just once - entering a username, a team number [hopefully 36425!], and then selecting a few other options which are fairly straightforward. that's it. if you use the screensaver, it'll only run when you're away from the computer but haven't turned it off. if you run the always-on client, there's a 'slider' to configure just how much of the computer's horsepower you're willing to allocate to it. that's where i think running it all the time is better, as you can turn it down to a point where it won't bother your regular use of the computer, but still always be working on the calculations. i have an athlon 2600+ with 1.5G ram, and i leave it with the slider all the way up - on '11' as they'd say in spinal tap...

Do i have to switch off my anti-virus to run it?nope, won't interfere with or trigger anti-virus at all. it will need to be able to contact the 'mothership' servers from time to time, to download new work units and upload results.

Cheers.

By the way, well done!thanks!

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Thu May 19, 2005 3:05 pm

I am now officially part of team 36425, i think!

Not too sure i've done it right, i have a little red cog on my tool bar & when i point to it, it says F@h:Attempting to get work packet

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Thu May 19, 2005 3:08 pm

abbey wrote: I am now officially part of team 36425, i think!

Not too sure i've done it right, i have a little red cog on my tool bar & when i point to it, it says F@h:Attempting to get work packet
it can take a few minutes for it to retrieve new work units. but it sounds like you're on the right track! thanks for your contribution!

note, if you right-click on the red cog, you can get to the configuration settings, where you can adjust just how much of your computer's horsepower it uses.

David813 · Post by **David813** » Thu May 19, 2005 3:36 pm

Accomplishment Noted! Impressive! I am about 7,346 levels below you on computer skills A so I don't understand a shred of it, but Congratulations anyway!

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Thu May 19, 2005 3:42 pm

David813 wrote: Accomplishment Noted! Impressive! I am about 7,346 levels below you on computer skills A so I don't understand a shred of it, but Congratulations anyway!And i about 7,347 below you David, but i did it and thats my accomplishment

BTS · Post by **BTS** » Thu May 19, 2005 7:32 pm

oK pAUL.........Got it.

Thanks

nvalleyvee · Post by **nvalleyvee** » Fri May 20, 2005 4:56 am

I've got it running on mine now. I've computer shared before with other universities and have never had a problem.

capt_buzzard · Post by **capt_buzzard** » Sun May 22, 2005 2:20 am

I would like to thank the 'Forum Garden team for an excellent website.And may it continue on for many years.:-6

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Mon May 23, 2005 8:23 am

thank you so much to those who have begun running Folding at Home, and contributing their work units to the team. we've jumped way, way forward - when i first posted this, we had just hit a ranking of 999 out of 38,000+ teams. we've now jumped to 983 - that would have taken a couple of *months* before this new wave of participation.

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Mon May 23, 2005 8:53 am

anastrophe wrote: thank you so much to those who have begun running Folding at Home, and contributing their work units to the team. we've jumped way, way forward - when i first posted this, we had just hit a ranking of 999 out of 38,000+ teams. we've now jumped to 983 - that would have taken a couple of *months* before this new wave of participation.Not too sure mine's working, it seems to be stuck on "Starting local stats count at 1" whereas before it was counting up to 250!

Dont need to know the ins & outs, just that its working.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 12:31 pm

just a note of WOW here. the team is about to break below 900! all of you folks who've joined up have made a huge contribution in a very short time. it took seemingly forever to get from 1100 down below 1000 - probably more than a year. now we're just burning through the work units.

many, many thanks. how cool would it be if the team kept growing, and eventually broke into the top 100?

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 1:59 pm

anastrophe wrote: just a note of WOW here. the team is about to break below 900! all of you folks who've joined up have made a huge contribution in a very short time. it took seemingly forever to get from 1100 down below 1000 - probably more than a year. now we're just burning through the work units.

many, many thanks. how cool would it be if the team kept growing, and eventually broke into the top 100?I'd have a few more WU's but they allocate me a wu to count up to 5000 :wah:

BTS · Post by **BTS** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 4:27 am

Paul, wanted to BUMP this thread and invite the newer people to join this great effort.

Since May we have gotten into the top 700...........Yippee

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 7:44 am

yep, thanks BTS - we did indeed just reach into the 700's this past week. an amazing progress rate.

my sincere thanks to all who have participated. it means a lot to me.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 1:33 pm

a little more than two months later, and we've broken into the 600's! we're at 697 today.

a huge thank you to all who have chosen to participate. it's a remarkable achievement, progress on the team was measured in years before.

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main ... mnum=36425

if you can spare a little of your computer's idle time, please consider joining. probably the best option for many is the screensaver, as it won't interfere at all with your normal use of the computer - only doing calculations when you're away from the machine.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 1:53 pm

thanks Arnold.

step 1: go to this address:

http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

click the download button next to the client you want - there are clients for Windows and Macs, and linux.

I've just now tried the screensaver for the first time in a long time, and it's just a slight bit more complicated to configure, but once configured, it's something you can just forget about.

once you've downloaded the client, click on the file you downloaded, and it will install. once finished, it will display the 'readme' file, which is a good backup reference for what i'm writing.

go to your control panel, and configure the Folding@Home Screensaver as your screensaver. the somewhat non-intuitive part is that nothing happens when you click on the 'settings' button (everything i'm writing is in reference to the windows client). instead, click the 'preview' button. give it a few seconds to start up the first time. it will ask you for a username - just make something up ' arnoldlayne' might work dandy. fill in the team number with "36425" for 'our' team. you can pretty much leave the rest at their defaults, or if feeling adventurous, take a look at them and adjust if they make any sense to you.

that's pretty much it. to get the maximum activity, set your screensaver wait period to five minutes or so, that way it will kick in sooner rather than later.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:15 pm

ah, the graphical client. that's what i use. it just leaves a little red 'gear' in the system tray. i prefer it because it's always running.

if you find it makes your machine sluggish, you can right click on it, go into configure, and on the last 'tab', you can drag the slider further to the left to lower the percentage it uses. or, what i do when i need to fire up a particularly resource-hungry application, is right click on it and select 'ause work'. then when i'm done, unpause it.

thanks for joining in Arnold - you're doing something for all of mankind, really.

OpenMind · Post by **OpenMind** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:22 pm

That didn't take long. Glad to find a distributed computing project that's worthwhile other than finding nuts in space.

Nomad · Post by **Nomad** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:31 pm

OpenMind wrote: That didn't take long. Glad to find a distributed computing project that's worthwhile other than finding nuts in space.

This is about me isnt it ?

Isnt it ?

OpenMind · Post by **OpenMind** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:34 pm

Blimey, Nomad, are you floating again?:wah:

Bez · Post by **Bez** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:47 pm

...............

OpenMind · Post by **OpenMind** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:49 pm

Whatever you do, Bez, don't tell them you've found the space nuts. They'll be jealous (let alone the journalists all queueing up your path.:wah:

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 2:52 pm

ten years ago, there were an estimated 500,000 americans with alzheimers. today there are 5 million. in twenty years, it's estimated there will be 50 million.

if a cure for alzheimers isn't found, it's estimated that caring for those 50 million afflicted will consume all of the financial resources and medical care resources of our country. think there's an impending crisis in social security? that's small-time compared to the looming alzheimers crisis.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 3:01 pm

the age profile of our population - the baby boomers will be hitting the beginning ages of alzheimers in the next ten years. as each decade passes, our overall longevity increases due to medical advances, nutritional advances, etc.. - there's a big population 'hump' in the country of baby boomers with alzheimer's looming not too far in the future. there's an approximately 20 year interval in a given person's life when they are likely to develop alzheimers - nobody knows why it starts at a given age, but there's this large window during which it's likely. so all those factors come together to suggest that if current trends continue - trends of the population hump aging, and longevity increasing - cases will skyrocket.

CARLA · Post by **CARLA** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 7:41 pm

Paul,

Your fact are correct and right on target. I work for the Local San Diego Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association I see it each and every day, have been apart of the organization since 1990. I started on the helpline as a volunteer when I was off work for 10 years. I help designed and implemented our chapters database, they hired me in 2000.

I agree if a cure isn't found the aging population with the disease will over take all the health care resouces available period. There are great studies on the horizon but time isn't on our side.

Thank you for your efforts in bringing this to the forefront, a cure must be found.

THE MIND MATTERS.

http://www.alz.org/maintainyourbrain/overview.asp

http://www.alz.org/Resources/FactSheets ... rStats.pdf

OpenMind · Post by **OpenMind** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:53 am

Thanks for that info Carla. I already know that you have to keep the brain fit, especially as it controls all the body's functions. But so far, I have not known a lot about Alzheimers. Those stats are alarming, to say the least.

I'd be interested in learning more about your work, if you have the time, that is.

CARLA · Post by **CARLA** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:44 pm

OpenMind,

I will make time for you, just PM me if you like ... I would be glad to chat with you ..

nvalleyvee · Post by **nvalleyvee** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 9:03 pm

flopstock wrote: here's a stupid question..i have this machine set up to require a password if i'm away for a lenght of time. Does this stop access until i sign back in? I assumed it didn't since my session is still up but thought i might check to be sure.

BUMP - and no it doesn't. BTW - we are 668 of 41363 in the conquest of this disease. Let's make a good showing for FG and defeat this disease here and now.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 10:14 pm

a minor update: we've reached 650. while not a 'major' landmark like hitting 600 or 500, it's becoming clear, as we push our way towards the top, that the road is getting steeper. even with all our wonderful participants, our rate of rise in the standings has slowed quite a bit. we're starting to 'go up against' the more powerful teams now, so it's going to get harder and harder to make progress. so, more participants would be lovely!

start the new year right, by making a money-free contribution to the search for a cure for this - and other - devastating diseases!

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 11:54 pm

well, for comparison, our team at rank 650 has 26 active CPU's working. the number 1 team, overclockers australia, has 8,308 active CPU's working. so, we have a rather long way to go!

the team at rank 100 has 198 active CPU's working. it varies widely though - the number of CPU's relative to rank - because, obviously, some people have screaming fast machines, and others don't. The team at rank 500 currently has only 13 CPUs active.

Post by **spot** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:37 pm

To the members in general - I'm going to have to pull out of this for at least the time being, and that's going to drift the ranking in the wrong direction unless some of you see the thread and decide it's a good idea and join in. I've been running it for a while and never had any problem on my computer as a result. The package sits in the XP system tray, you can click on it to look when you feel inclined, otherwise it's purely a background function adding worth to a project of considerable potential. A couple or three AMD64s added would really push things along, and some of you must have bought a computer in the last year or two.

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Mon May 01, 2006 11:53 pm

Re: re folding at home

Quote:

Originally Posted by abbey

Hi Spot, did'nt want to post this on the forum because i did'nt want to put people off FAH.

I had to stop folding in Nov because the fan on my laptop was running all the time and it was really sluggish, so i stopped running the programme and it was fine, just wondered if there was any way round this?

None at all - laptops are tight airless claustrophobic places and people want them to be quiet, so the makers put throttles on the noisy-by-nature fans and let the processor idle when it's not needed for a while. When something needs to think hard they trip in. The nature of FAH is to run flat out all the while, and laptops really don't get on with that happily. They tend to have the minimum memory installed too, and FAH can swap stuff out when it's active in those circumstances.

By all means copy/paste this into the FAH thread, I think it's relevant and it'll only put people off who need to be. Laptops aren't the best kit to treat that way.

Thanks Spot x

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Wed May 03, 2006 4:28 pm

spot wrote: To the members in general - I'm going to have to pull out of this for at least the time being, and that's going to drift the ranking in the wrong direction unless some of you see the thread and decide it's a good idea and join in. I've been running it for a while and never had any problem on my computer as a result. The package sits in the XP system tray, you can click on it to look when you feel inclined, otherwise it's purely a background function adding worth to a project of considerable potential. A couple or three AMD64s added would really push things along, and some of you must have bought a computer in the last year or two.

thanks for your contributions, spot.

anastrophe · Post by **anastrophe** » Wed May 03, 2006 4:32 pm

abbey wrote: Re: re folding at home

Quote:

Originally Posted by abbey

Thanks Spot x

indeed, all quite true. i've tried running FAH on two laptops over the years. my old 'tank' from work, circa 1998, a dell w/300mhz PIII and 384M ram. it would routinely lock up and crash, and since it's currently being used as a remote console into our server complex, that was rather....problematic.

tried running it on the laptop the wife uses now to log in with. PIII/1.4Ghz. it would run - but as noted, fans would be going ALL the time. which made for an unhappy machine, and the wife too!

one thing that can be done is just to 'turn down' the usage with the slider under the 'advanced' tab. but then it'll hardly run at all, and, well, then what's the point?

yep - laptops and FAH - not a good combination, sadly.

flopstock · Post by **flopstock** » Sat Oct 04, 2008 7:51 pm

There ought to be a way to make this pop up every few months or something...

I've swapped out a couple of machines since this and it never occurred to me to put this back on....

seems a shame..

abbey · Post by **abbey** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 12:36 am

I still use a laptop so I can't run it because it made it run slower

but when it dies I shall be using a pc and shall run it once again.