Ah September, when the Kids go back to school and the sun tends to come out. Thankfully being at uni means extra time to enjoy any more sun, and do more folding. That being said August was an exceptional month for folding, we managed to produce 2.3 Million Points, and at one point almost 100,000 points per day.
August Highlights
In addition to the mass of points described above there were a few members that stood out, so let’s give them a special recognition here.
SilverCider – Clearly he’s hacked into someone’s folding farm, and changed the settings to his user. Usually totalling at 20,000 points per week, he’s tipped 200,000 points a week this month and is currently going at 140,000, over 50,000 more than our old favourite RedStarGlow.
gclarkey – Seemingly coming from nowhere, (s)he’s stormed through, becoming the 3rd most active folder within the team.
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. In 2009 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 PC/PS3’s F@H identity from the default 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.
Next for stats…
stueeeee
Hm not too bad, but I can’t get folding enough coz my dad keeps turning the ps3 off for using too much electric…maybe if I give him some free sausages it’ll shut him up…..!
eye8have9you3
Getting very close to being in the top 50 active folders now, does anyone know why some people have a higher score than me, but less work units, doesn’t quite seem sausages… uh I mean fair, I’ve got twice as many WU’s than phonebox101 but less points?
Jas-n
So close… only 2 places, so by next month you should be there.
Regards to points, different hardware gives a different amount of points per WU.
PS3 WU’s mainly give out 251 points, uni-core PC WU’s give around 70-170 points, GPU clients and multi-core clients tend to give 2,000+ points per WU.
Basically the longer a WU takes and the more CPU power it needs the more points you get. For example, the PS3 folds for ~6 hours and produces 251 points, in the same time, my OC’d 3.8GHz i7 with 8 cores running at 100% gives out 2,000 – 4,000 points.
XisTG
I’ll soon be out of the top 10. Sausages :/
Jas-n
Soon as in December 12 2012?
Anyway, what happened to your folding?
XisTG
It all comes down to budget cuts. My 24/7 folding PS3 started folding only from 00h to 07h, since the electricity is cheaper in that time frame (taxes on electricity went from 6% to 23%), and 24h on Sunday. That’s pretty much it. I know it doesn’t spend that much, but since my pet turtles have grown I now have an external filter and heater for the aquarium running 24/7, so something had to give. And I love those critters too much to let them be cold or in filthy water :p
When the weather get’s colder I’ll fold again on my imac, but this thing heats up too much with the current temperature.
SilverCider
Use the heat from your imac as a heater for your turtles ;)
Deathbrin
Holy Sausages
ShovellyJoe
Sausages@Home.
Hopefully i can fold more next month (September) when i can stick my PS3 on when I leave the house.
SilverCider
Thanks guys and well done to the team :) it’s nice to see it increasing in sausage potential (that is in no way a reference to any filthy activities btw). You could say my huge increase in folding was a short ‘experiment’ to future folding efforts… Might not be long until those figures are the norm on my side (fingers crossed XD ) Either way I hope that I gave Jas-n and RedStarGlow a little scare!