Ultimate Guide To Folding@home

_JOHN_LENNON_:
1. Doing ANYTHING stresses the life of your processor, but this F@H (Folding @ Home) uses spare CPU cycles, so you dont notice it while your playing BF 1942, or while im playing Halo. But if say you leave your computer for a bit, it will notice the free processor, and pick up the slack.

2. It really doesnt hurt your computer like I said above, I konw people that have this running on no less than 20 machines and have been doing for awhile.

3. Yes, I said 20 MACHINES. People take this very seriously, as over at AMDMB.com.

4. I have been folding for over a year now for the AMDMB.com team, and I think were maybe 5th or 6th world wide. I know from our forums that we have several people like I said with the 20+ Computers running 24/7 just to fold for cancer. (yes the electric bill gets raised a few ticks) I know that also we have taken donation on 4 complete machines, and then given them to people to they can be Folding for the team in the privacy of their own homes. I think were currently taking donations for the 5th one.

5. You guys should all get into this, haha Bigdawg, being about my age I know your parents have asked you around the house at times (whats your computer doing on right now, when your not even infront of it.) Well, atleast now you could say Fighting Cancer Mom! Heh, no but serious guys, every computer can help, even if its just a few work units a month. And we all have Spare CPU Cycles to spare because none of us are maxing out our PC all day. Half the time I have my PC on im just tinkering with some and I have WMP on and Folding @ Home.

6. Now everyone go download the folding at home command Client
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OC TEAM:
What are the system requirements for folding?
You will need to have the equivalent of a 200MHz Pentium to be able to process the work in time. The time limits for turning in completed work vary depending on the size and complexity of the protein that you are given to work on. NOTE: in some cases users have gotten even slower computers than this to fold and get units on time. The slowest i have seen get units in on time is a P166 mhz. If you think it is too slow to fold, give it a chance, what's that worse that can happen.




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What is gromacs?

Gromacs is the new folding core (FAHcore_78.exe) GROMACS provides extremely high performance compared to all other programs. For some calculations, gromacs affords benefits over the current code in FAH (the current code is based on Jay Ponder's Tinker), especially a great speed increase (perhaps up to 10x-20x). This will substantially increase the power of FAH for many calculations.

some ppl say that it actually gives you more points as well...so its a WIn WIN! situation :D

Streaming SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data) Extensions

Processors & applications that do not use SSE process one data element in one instruction, a processing style called Single Instruction Single Data, or SISD. In contrast, processors having the SIMD capability have the ability to process more than one data element in one instruction. In other words the processor can work harder with the same two hands (if you get the metaphor). Using SSE requires support from the application, the operating system & the CPU.

Processors that have SSE are as follows..

Athlon XP
Duron 1 GHz & above (morgan core)
Pentium 4
Pentium 3
Celeron 566 mhz & above (coppermine & tualatin cores)

Processors that do not have SSE are as follows..

Duron 950 & below (spitfire core)
Athlon (K7, K75, & Thunderbird cores)
K6-3
K6-2
Celeron 533 MHz & below
Pentium 2
Pentium
All Via/Cyrix CPU's

Anything released before the processors listed of course does not have SSE.

Any version of Windows after '98 supports SSE (95' may just not sure). Any newer Linux distro should have support as well.

The Gromacs core also uses AMD
 
Yeah, I believe so. I can see it go up to 65% (when the task manager first opens) but FAH only uses 50% of it.

Either way, even if it is only 50% it is still a lot faster then my old one:)

TD
 
I was looking over the team statistics, What I was wondering about is the pts. I see there is a page that you can goto to see what the worth of a package you are doing. How do you get these pts is it after you are done the package or every so offten? Im not really worried about the pts but it would be kool to see how I stack up against other ppl.

One last thing to ask, then I will stop asking so questions.

I was think about how to get my pc fold faster. I thought about running F@H in safemode, So I did. The #'s are hard to read and I only did this for a hour but it seemed to be a bit faster. Could anyone else see if this could work or not.
 
Just a reminder to athlon users - if you are using the advmethods and forceSSE options don't forget to add these options in the Startup area of your start menu, not just the normal Folding@Home area.

Oh, jai and nigel, if you could just move to one side towards the end of this week I'm likely to be coming through there pretty fast. :lol:
 
The original explanation said you didn't need the "-forceasm" option because it would use it anyway if available.

Now that I've added that option I see "Extra 3DNow boost OK" in my log file which wasn't there before, so hopefully things should be working faster.
 


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