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from the Can-we-make-the-Top-400-by-Halloween? dept.
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:
- cmn32480
- Runaway1956
- Beldin65
- tibman
- LTKKane
- EricAlbers_ericalbers_com
- Kymation
- meisterister
- kurenai.tsubasa
- NotSanguine
Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:31AM
Projects of this kind had their place a decade or two ago, when computers were idling at 100% power. This is history. Modern computers manage power quite efficiently, and there is no such thing anymore as "free CPU cycles". Perhaps, the right thing to do would be to construct a specialized farm with hardware-assisted computations - like the BTC miners; the BTC mining cannot be done on a PC for many years now. However, F@H nodes are free. Why would anyone bother improving things if abundant free labor is available?
I think this is a key insight. That was a different world back then indeed. I guess now the question is whether it is more morally corrupt to
1) run this extra electricity sucking job but potentially generate something useful
2) let your $5000 hardware sit idle
Having said that I will certainly not participate in a project that doesn't share the results and runs on proprietary software.