It has only been six short months since SoylentNews' Folding@Home team was founded, and we've made a major milestone: our team is now one of the top 500 teams in the world! We've already surpassed some heavy hitters like /. and several universities, including MIT. (But now is not the time to rest on our laurels. A certain Redmond-based software producer currently occupies #442.)
In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's and thereby help to find a cure. To that end, SoylentNews' team has completed nearly 16,000 work units.
If you'd like to contribute to our team by donating some spare CPU/GPU cycles, you can get started here. There are clients available for Linux, Windows, and OSX. Once you have installed the software, enter the TeamID 230319 to join us.
Feel free to join #folding on our IRC channel if you need any help, or just want to chat.
Thank you to all that have participated, and a special thanks to our top 10 folders:
Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday August 27 2016, @06:59PM
Thanks for the support and info. I did find the forum but not a link to the source code or a discussion of their security thinking. Maybe if I dig further, but really, they're trying to sell me on helping, so they should be the ones making the effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not me.
I don't truly suspect them of intentionally bundling malware with the client, but just through carelessness, their software could easily expand a user's attack surface. If they are (a) honest and (b) competent they should be out front with evidence of their thinking in this area.
And I don't mind the flamebait mod.. much... I take comfort in the knowledge that whoever classifies security considerations as flamebait will soon fall victim to a breach. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:10PM
Thanks for the support and info. I did find the forum but not a link to the source code or a discussion of their security thinking. Maybe if I dig further, but really, they're trying to sell me on helping, so they should be the ones making the effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not me.
Et voila! [berkeley.edu]
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:50AM
FYI: Folding@Home doesn't use BOINC. They've rolled their own multiple times, despite outreach by the people at BOINC.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:04AM
FYI: Folding@Home doesn't use BOINC. They've rolled their own multiple times, despite outreach by the people at BOINC.
And so it is [berkeley.edu]. My mistake. Apologies for any confusion.
To clarify parent's point, the following is from the FAH FAQ [stanford.edu]:
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr