A reminder a week or so ago got me back into folding. I had forgotten to restart many months ago after swapping over computers. At present I'm only using one computer.

I had a look at my rating and found that after a while I should start climbing slowly back up the listing but then noticed someone coming up fast. Anonymous is progressing at a furious rate and rapidly overtook me a few days ago. They weren't doing anything until April when suddenly they took off like a rocket! How did you do that?

Looking more closely I saw that a few positions above someone else is doing even better. Mostundudelike was plodding along steadily until April (again) when the blue touchpaper was lit. Monthly points total went from a maximum of 3000 (which isn't bad) to over fortysix thousand.

What's the secret?

Intel SMP client. Those of us with PPC just have to watch and hang our heads as they and the PS3s go flying by.

Yeah, between more efficient compilers for the Intel processors and bonus points for running the beta client, the Intel Macs can rack up some serious pointage. My son's 2.0 DP G5 can average about 100 points per day per processor, my 1.73 GHz 7448 upgraded DA G4 gets about 2/3 of that. But a Core 2 Duo based machine or the Xeon Mac Pros can get over 1,000 points in about the same time.

---

voodoopenguin, do you have any big chain stores that carry a selection of Macs that are connected to the internet and are not turned off at night? ;)

---

In tha 360. MRF User Map

Quote
Filliam H. Muffman
voodoopenguin, do you have any big chain stores that carry a selection of Macs that are connected to the internet and are not turned off at night? ;)

Good idea! Unfortunately they all sit there with password protected screen savers.

Reminds me that I bought our first Mac from a chain store. It was an ex-display Performa 400 and when we got it home it still had the automatic protected screensaver. I called them up and they gave me the password but they asked me not to give it out as it was the password used in all their computers in all of their stores. Yes, they actually told me that! Oh what fun we had for a month or two.

I see this "folding" stuff from time to time. What is it?

Quote
voodoopenguin

Quote
Filliam H. Muffman
voodoopenguin, do you have any big chain stores that carry a selection of Macs that are connected to the internet and are not turned off at night? ;)

Good idea! Unfortunately they all sit there with password protected screen savers.

Reminds me that I bought our first Mac from a chain store. It was an ex-display Performa 400 and when we got it home it still had the automatic protected screensaver. I called them up and they gave me the password but they asked me not to give it out as it was the password used in all their computers in all of their stores. Yes, they actually told me that! Oh what fun we had for a month or two.

I don't condone this but a little birdie told me that Anonymous may be cpu at retail stores where machines sit around all day and night on and just waste electricity. This way would make them useful for folding. I would recommend people stay out of trouble with a store but....

Skylane, there is more info in my sig., folding is for helping researches find cures for diseases using millions of cpus.

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Join team 38910 folding! [folding.stanford.edu] multi cpu-[calxalot.homeip.net]

There are 3 teams that different people on this forum belong to (Team MacOS X #1971, Mac Folders @ Macresource.com #38910, and Team MacResource #48057). Some might belong to more than one.

Based on the overtake statistics (from this morning, ~7 AM PDT), in one year, the teams will be placed as follows:

1971 - current spot #9; in 1 year #8 (+2, -1)
38910 - current spot #60; in 1 year #73 (+2, -15)
48057 - current spot #300; in 1 year #379 (+23, -102)

Quote
SKYLANE
I see this "folding" stuff from time to time. What is it?

Depending on how you look at it it is either bragging rights or helping make the world better. Folding@home is kinda like SETI@home but instead of looking for ETs you can look for cures. It is something to do with all the clock cycles your CPU is usually wasting.

[folding.stanford.edu]
-
"What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. "



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/08/2007 09:44PM by wickedsteve.

Quote
Pat
Intel SMP client. Those of us with PPC just have to watch and hang our heads as they and the PS3s go flying by.

---