TSA Folding@Home Team: September Update

We have got a great community here at TSA. Community members are always helping out one another and sometimes that help extends beyond TSA and into the wider world.  One of the ways the community achieves this is by contributing to Stanford University’s Folding@Home project.

What is Folding@Home?

It is an application the makes use of your PS3’s processing power to solve biological puzzles.  These particular puzzles are looking at how protein molecules assemble themselves or ‘fold’.  Proteins are exceptionally important molecules and F@H’s biomedical research is currently studying diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s, Parkinson’s and cancer as well as working to develop new antibiotics.

Other research aided by F@H recently has been the, very topical, study of the influenza virus looking at how mutations might affect transmission rates of different strains of the virus to help predict and understand future pandemics.  It is not only biomedical science that benefits either.  Earlier this year two of the principal scientists behind F@H presented a paper entitled “Folding@home: lessons from eight years of distributed computing” at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

By contributing to F@H you are helping advance biology, chemistry and computer science, you get to do your bit for the good of humanity, become part of the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness, and join in with TSA’s community.  If you often listen to music stored on your PS3′s HDD then your PS3 could be Folding while you listen.  So go on, join our team and see how high you can climb in our list of TSA’s top 50 folders.

How do you Join the Team?

The first step is to make sure that you change your PS3’s F@H identity from the default “PS3″ to your TSA ID.  It could be anything but if you use your TSA ID it will help us recognise you.  Then you will need to tell the F@H application you want to be in our team.

This Month’s Stats

Jas-n does a great job each month compiling these stats so credit for the rest of this post goes to him as it is just copied for his forum post.

Here are the rankings for the 1st of September, thought I’d change the format slightly now, make things a bit better.

• You’ll now see your rankings for last month,
• You’ll now see your total Work units
• New users that rank in the top 50 have a hyphen (-) in last months ranking, so you can see the new members.
• The team ranking is now at the top of the rankings in Italics, and you can see we’ve gone up 350.

Remember:

• We only show the top 50 members, for the full list you can view the official stats here.
• Members who have the same points are then ranked on WU’s then username.