Folding@Home: October 2011 Stats & Competition

The end of September usually brings some warm weather before Autumn comes into effect, which unfortunately means a drop in folding. Come winter though, we might get a boom as the electricals we use will heat up our homes nicely. During the first 3 weeks of September the weather was near neutral which meant we could get a fantastic run, earning us over 100,000 points per day, which would have brought us up to 3.1million. Damn that hot weather.

Win TSA Badges

If you were looking for something more substantial as a prize, then shame on you as, A) TSA Badges are awesome (check out mynameisblair’s) and 2) Mr. Peter “Bringer of Chaos” Chapman has limited funds.

Peter has kindly donated 13 badges for me to distribute amongst you. Here’s how you can win 1:

1. Be one of the three special contributors I pick,
2. Write a comment below (using a special phrase), you don’t need to fold to comment, however we’ll be disappointed with you. Five qualifiers will be picked at random.
3. In old FAH competition style, submit at least one WU within the next seven days. Five qualifiers will be picked from random.

The lucky 13 will be announced next week.

August Highlights

Reaching 100,000PPD was a massive step to our contributions to Folding@home and allowed us to potentially reach over 3 million points over the month. To put that into perspective, we only started breaking the million points per month barrier back in February, and that took us 6 months of trying to get to that level. Obviously each member has their part to play in the team, but these are the ones that stand out the most.

RedStarGlow – For a long time RSG’s been the backbone to the team, sitting at number 1 for over a year, which in its own right deserves a mention, but this month’s mention is because he’s pumped out over 756,000 points, more than we, as a team folded in December.

Deathbrin – Deathbrin has been on our folding team for nearly 2 years (previously stopping on the 25/02/10 with 2,252 points) but made a serious come back this month, beating RSG to the number 1 active spot, and in total folded over 761,000 points this month.

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, Huntington’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…

UPDATE: Stats on page two have been updated.