Yep, I know. I rock. I am the best.
Check this link for more info: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... cunnington

Hang on, what is this? Explain it to me. What is WU?

A WU is a Work Unit. I download them automatically when I run the Folding@Home client, and when my processor is idle it will process all the information and hopefully find a cure for cancer, or something similar.

I'm running the beta SMP client on my machine at work right now. SMP stands for Symmetric Multi Processing, and it will take advantage of as many CPU's and cores as it can find. It runs pretty well. It only accepts special SMP WU's though, and they are a lot larger than standard WU's, so seem to take longer.

Process what information?

The information in the WU.

I don't know what information's inside the WU, I just process it!
More information on WU's and folding in general at http://folding.stanford.edu/

Ah ha, I see now. It's like those rendering farms at ILM, where all their PCs work on something at night and such like.

Basically, I believe you are contributing to their research by helping their computers to calculate stuff faster. Genius...

Yeah, with the only difference that mine is running 24x7 and just uses any idle processing power. I'll show you a screeny...



I never know it's running because it only uses idle processing power. The System Idle Process hardly uses any CPU time in my machine. So far it has used 28m 42s, but my FAH processes have taken up about 55m for 2 processes and 1h 50m for the other 2 processes.

Nice work, Aaron.

Met, distributed computing was thought up by someone thinking "we have all these computers in the world with their power going to waste" so they invented a way to send stuff to be processed over the internet. When millions of people are contribute, that's more power than anyone could conceivably purchase in one machine farm. Then they made it into a competition with a leaderboard so people could see how much they're outputting compared to everyone else.

F@H "folds" proteins into new proteins, which furthers medical science, and they have already made a fair few discoveries.

Seti@Home is a less Earthly project, which basically is used to process all the data SETI collects.

There are some others, but those are the most known, and personally I'd got for F@H.

Aaron, you used to be able to use multicores without the multicore client, by just running separate command line clients on each core, bit of a hack though, really.

Also, an interesting fact - F@H released a client for the PS3. The PS3 processes insane amounts of data compared to computers, even one's like Aaron's get left in the dust. PS3 does have a use, afterall.

Apparently they interrupt with each other on occasion, so while one core is smashing through it, the other core is lifeless.



I think within about the second week of the PS3 F@H client being released, it hit the number 1 spot. I don't think it will ever fall down!

Well it might do in a year or so. Still, that shows the incredible power of the PS3... That is completely wasted (no games for it uses it).

Sure, it has a great CPU, but the GPU sucks.

Well it doesn't really need a good GPU, it's a console... But anyway, I was more referring to the fact it has no developer support and no developer wants to even bother using it's potential, it would cost them too much.

Anyway, you've got quite a nice pointscore, I believe. Points are awarded on the "difficulty" of the work units, aren't they?

That's right I have been folding for about a year now, I guess. Or just over.

Ah, so not really a high production rate, or did you take a break at some point?

You plan to get any more of your machines folding?

Yeah, I had a break. I'm installing the client on a few more machines at work.

Awesome, with or without permission?

Without. But it doesn't adversely affect the machines, so why not do it? It's for a genuinely good cause, and not good as in I get more money (for once), but good as in potentially saving lives and all of human kind.

I did once consider putting it on every school computer, but that would probably get me in serious trouble, get uninstalled as soon as they found it and the IT dept would never agree to it. Would have been awesome, though.

What do you think, Aarons next possible post? :

Aaron buys a PS3 (for folding obviously)

Nah, while Aaron likes folding, I doubt he'd buy a PS3 just for it.

Stranger things have happened...

Actually, dont think about that! No really, dont!

While Aaron likes to spend a lot of money, he wouldn't spend £400 on something that he would only use to fold.

It's a console. Nuff said.

What did I tell you, people?

Anyway, I got this error yesterday...
At least, I think it's an error.