Meet the Folder: AdmiringWorm

Admiring Worm, if I’m honest, it’s the sort of name a male would have, based on the ‘Worm’ part. Let me explain, a worm’s found in the dirt, young boys like to play in dirt, boys like to stick worms up their nose or chase girls with them, who usually, in turn, run around screaming. See.

Anyway, from dirt to solving those dirty mis-folding proteins, if only we could dig them out of all those nice, shiny, loveable, correctly folded proteins. This month we have Kim, born in Norway, currently living in Sweden, and going by the name of ’AdmiringWorm.’

Having joined way back in March 2010, AdmiringWorms’ been a strong folder ever since, staying in TSA’s top 25 members, munching his way though a total of 420 work units, earning him 109,495 points. Plus, he’s still going, currently he’s still number crunching, and as a result he’s the 5th most active folder.

So here’s Kim trying to convince you to join the fight, we hope it works.

Profile

Folding Q & A

There are several different reasons why people run Folding@home, be it experience with one of the diseases folding aims to cure, just helping out, or just for community status. But what got you into folding and for TheSixthAxis’ Team?

I had folded for some time before I joined the TSA Team, but since TSA became my main news site and I found the thread about folding I decided to start folding here instead of the dying community I was part of previously.

There are several different platforms that folding@home can be run on (PS3, PC, MAC), what platforms do you use to fold?

I have a PS3 that is set to run when it’s on idle, as well a Windows computer that’s folding whenever I’m awake and not playing games on it.
I also have a Linux computer that’s folding whenever I remember to turn it on, and a crappy school computer I use when it is able to run more than command prompt and notepad at the same time (I’m not kidding either, ever seen the terminal window on a modern computer lag when trying to run ipconfig? well, me neither until I got that computer).

Some people get worried about using the PS3 to fold because they’re worried about their PS3 dying on them. As a guide, how long do you fold on your PS3 for, and in which mode?

I always fold in Advanced mode since when it’s folding I’m not using it at all.
I almost don’t use the PS3 to fold on so I can’t give an estimate of average per day, but it’s usually everything from 6 to 20 hours a month.

The Folding@home software on the PS3 has evolved over the past few years, brining in Music playback and most prominently Life with PlayStation. Is there anything that could be added to improve the experience?
Or is there something that you would like to be removed from Life with PlayStation?

I don’t use most of the stuff that’s on Life with PlayStation since I’m folding in advanced mode, but one thing I miss is the ability to add a Passkey.

There may be some people who might think that their hardware isn’t powerful enough for whichever reason. What Specification are you running folding@home on?

The main computer is a Windows 7 X64 with a AMD Phenom x4 3.2Ghz Processor, 8 GB RAM and a ATI Radeon 4890 GTX 1 GB and it’s running the GPU client.
My secondary computer is a Ubuntu 10.04 X86 with a AMD Atlhon 64 X2 3.2Ghz Processor, 4 GB RAM and a old nVidia 512mb GPU and it’s running the ordinary client.
The school computer isn’t even worth mentioning, and I don’t really know either.

There will be people from the TSA community that will read this who don’t currently fold, is there anything you’d like to say to those members?

START FOLDING NOW.
Seriously…

And on that note, we’d like to thank Kim for the time taken to answer our questions.

Want to Feature?

If you would like to feature on meet the folder, fill in the form over at Folding.Jas-n.com and we’ll get things sorted. Priority is given to the more regular folders.