Folding@home

[dave406]

Does any one does this for seti of the medial ones if so what ones and should we make a team?

[rwb]

I think I have it running on an old server at work

[steve_earwig]

Does any one does this for seti of the medial ones if so what ones and should we make a team?

I have no idea what the means, S.E.T.I. or settee? Medial ones? Those that are towards the middle?

[dave406]

Sorry Crappy voice typing

S.E.T.I and Medical ones being 'world grid community'

[highlander]

S.E.T.I. is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the long-running programme that uses radio telescopes to scan the night skies for any signs of artificial signals that may be indicators of alien civilisations (i.e. picking up their radio/TV broadcasts, etc).

Somewhat affiliated with the S.E.T.I. project is "SETI@home", which is a distributed computing project. The idea is that raw data collected by the worlds' radio telescopes is broken up into uniquely identifiable chunks of data. People at home download the free SETI@home client, which downloads a piece of data from the SETI@home work servers and begins processing the data. Once it's been processed, the work unit is returned to SETI@home and marked as complete (so nobody else gets it again). Your account shows how many work units you've completed.

You can set up a SETI@home team, so that everyone in your team contributes their work units towards your team's score.

Similar to SETI@home is the Folding@home project. It's very similar, except that it's not searching for extra-terrestrial life, it's working through simulated protein folding, a vital piece of the puzzle in researching medicines and treatments for various types of illness including cancer. In my opinion, this is a much more worthwhile project.

Things to note about these distributed computing projects:

1) Work units can take many hours to complete
2) Work units will expire and be returned to the global pool for someone else to complete if you don't finish it before it expires
3) PCs with a good 3D-capable graphics card and a client designed to use the GPU to process work units will perform much better than PCs with crap graphics hardware which will just use the CPU to process work units. That said, quad core PCs are better than dual (or single) core PCs, as the client is designed to work on one work unit per core - so a quad core machine will work on four work units simultaneously
4) Your PC, unless the client is configured not to do this, will run at 100% CPU/GPU load, all the time - the client is designed to use idle time on the CPU/GPU, so while it shouldn't cause slowdown while you're working/playing games on the PC, it will mean the PC is consuming a lot more power, generating more heat, and the fans will spin faster, making your computer noisier
5) There is/was a Folding@home client built into the Playstation 3 - not sure if it's still there, or if there's one in the PS4 - the PS3 was a good platform to run this on, outperforming a lot of low-to-mid-performing desktop PCs, while consuming less power and making less noise

[mjb]

4) Your PC, unless the client is configured not to do this, will run at 100% CPU/GPU load, all the time .... it will mean the PC is consuming a lot more power

Just want to emphasise this. If you leave the computer on 24/7 running one of these things, you'll be paying probably around £20-£50/month more on your electric bill depending on how powerful the computer is

[dave406]

I guess for me it's not so bad as I have a server running 24x7 so I have restricted the usage to only 50 percent and only the twilight hours

[mjb]

I guess for me it's not so bad as I have a server running 24x7 so I have restricted the usage to only 50 percent and only the twilight hours

Dependent on the CPU power of the server, the difference between idle and 100% can be a significant cost - a quad-socket xeon can pull as little as around 150W idle, going up to about 800W under cpu load depending on chips. That'd be £1200/year at average domestic rates! (17p/kWh)

If by "server" you actually mean something low-end, perhaps a little single-socket i5 desktop jobbie, you're still looking at an increase of about 60W, which when multiplied 24/7 will cost around £100/yr extra

Some time ago I came to realise computers run 24/7 can really cost a lot of money in the long term. Sold a whole rack of kit and reduced myself to just one machine with low power components and careful power management configuration