TSA Folding@Home Team: December Update

We did not quite manage to break into the top 1500 last month, falling short by only 77 places.  If you check out the new live updates in the ‘Subscribe to TheSixthAxis’ box (over there –>) you will see we are closing in on that goal and should comfortably reach it before the end of this month.  The TSA team can always use the help of more Folders though so if you have any spare computing power please join us and help propel TSA ever higher up the Folding@Home leader boards.

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.

Team Stats

Member Rankings
Previously we have just published the team’s top 50 members.  We are trying something different this month so let us know if you like it.  While Jas-n will still be posting the top 50 in the forum these ‘front page’ updates will play host to two different sets of rankings that Jas-n has put a bit more work into producing.

The first of the new rankings is the top 25 contributing team members over the past month.  Dedicate all your computing resources to Folding@Home for a month (e.g. stop using Twitter on your PC and playing games on your PS3) and be prepared for any fallout from whoever pays you electricity bill and you can expect to ‘chart’ fairly highly in this ranking.

The second new ranking is the overall top 25 team members.  This is similar to the old top 50 but with one important new caveat; you must have recorded a completed work unit within the last 30 days to qualify.  So no matter how many points you have accrued you have got to keep Folding to keep your place.

Top 25s