Stanford University’s “Folding@Home” Distributed Computing Project
Well, I’ve decided to donate spare CPU time to the Folding@Home project. Sometime in 2004 I got involved in this, more or less as a contest with co-workers to see who can rack up more work units, then I ended up joining a team called Aggies (of course). I currently have 8 CPU’s contributing resources. Two processors are high-end G5 2.5 GHZ PPC processors (running Mac OS X, 10.4), 2 are 2.4 GHZ Xeons (running FC5 Linux), 2 are in dual-core Dell laptop (running Windows XP), a single core old 1.2 GHZ cpu (running Windows XP), and an AMD Athlon xp2100 (running FC5 Linux).
What is really neat about this project is that you don’t even notice the software running. While this sounds counter-intuitive as how this might actually be, keep in mind that computers can proritize programs. The folding software runs at a low priority so the moment the mouse or keyboard is touched, the folding program pauses. Most people don’t realize that personal computers usually sit 99.9% idle. To get the responsiveness down to near “real time” people want fast machines. Because of this, they finish quickly and resort to idle. If you’re not in the midst of a mouseclick or keystroke, the machine is typically idle and waiting for something to do. The folding project takes full advantage of this, and uses this spare CPU time to do real science that could result in something that could benefit us all.
Next I’d like to try and come up with a liveCD and run 100 or so more CPU’s during the next holiday break if I can convince our lab manager to let me ;-).