TSA Folding@Home Team: October 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.

Not Just For PS3s

Remember that you do not have to ‘Fold’ only (or at all) on your PS3 to contribute.  Indeed most of my work units have been completed on my work PC where I run Folding@Home at low priority on one of its processor cores.  With the remaining cores free for whatever I am actually supposed to be doing on the computer and the Folding core available if I need it, it does not slow my PC down by any perceptible amount.

There are Folding@Home clients available for Windows (XP or later), Linux (x86) and Mac OS X (PPC and Intel) so whichever of those is your OS of preference there is no reason you can’t have an F@H client running in the background at low priority, especially if you have a multi-core CPU.

For those of you who would like to contribute to TSA’s F@H team but are hesitant about leaving your PS3 Folding for hours at time, for whatever reason, running it on your home PC while you surf the web, read email or type up your latest essay will help you rack up your score of completed work units.  If you have a work PC (and can get permission, if needed) run an F@H client there during the day or over lunch if you have got the CPU cycles to spare.

Folding To Music

The only times I Fold on my PS3 are when I am using it to listen to the music on the HDD, whether that be albums, playlists or Life with PlayStation’s track selection by mood, which actually works quite well.  You can either pick the mood yourself or allow the software to pick an appropriate mood for the time of day.  This is essentially the same as the much-vaunted SensMe feature that has just landed on PSPs with the latest firmware update.  So if you use your PS3 for listening to music stored on its HDD why not Fold at the same time?

With your help TSA’s team should hopefully break into the top 2,000 teams worldwide by the time of next month’s update.

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.

“And here are the rankings for last month, as you can see I’ve now added the change column so you can see how far you’ve moved up, folder’s who are new in the month have new in their change.

“I’ve also added a contribution column, so you can see how much you’ve put towards TSA’s score.”