A happy New Year to all our Folders and congratulations on helping Team TSA pass another milestone.  Just a few days before the close of 2009 we achieved a score of 2,000,000 points.  But what are these points, what do they mean?  The folks behind Folding@Home (F@H) at Stanford run each type of work unit (WU) on a dedicated PC to determine how much time and resources it’s processing consumes.  They use this benchmarking to determine how many points a contributor to the project will score for processing a WU of that type.

That score is a better measure of how much work a contributor has completed for F@H as WUs vary considerably in the amount of processing they require.  They freely admit that the only reason that a score is given is to encourage competition between people and groups to get more work done.   You can find more details on the scoring here.

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 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.  Last 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 top Folders lists below.

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
Our members are having to work harder now to maintain and advance their positions.  For example, in tenth place in our Top Folders in November was BORTEN a score of 11,525.  To achieve tenth place in December SeaBeorn needed to score 1,300 points more than BORTEN did last month.  As usual you can view the full Top 50 in Jas-n’s forum post.  This month he has also produced a couple of graphs illustrating the Team’s progress and the in-fighting amongst the Top 10.

Top 20s