Any body fold here?

Systems

Any folders at Clubpolk? Who do you fold for? We could start up a Clubpolk folding team

I fold on Club Lexus forums. Im up to about 1100 units (400 from my PS3). I just hit 500000 points, ranked in the 3000's in the world.

I would be willing to rotate a few of the quad core folding units to a new team.
http://folding.stanford.edu/

RuSsMaN

I get what they are trying to do, is there any benefit to doing it (for me), other than contributing to the greater good? I don't mind letting it run while I'm not home, just curious.

bobman1235

I fold unless I have the blind or a high pair.

BaggedLancer

No thank you. None of my computer(s) will have that.

jflail2

I've seen it mentioned for years over at [H]ardocp, but have never tried it. If we get a polk team together I'll be happy to let my PS3 contribute while I'm working during the day.

I don't think there's a personal benefit, but I'm not sure. Someone may award the best teams with something, but I think its more just bragging rights.

petrym

No folding... I do Mersenne Prime number searches on 5 CPU cores (6 when I get the Linux box going), currently ranked 388 in the world.

Rank    Account ID      LL P90*  Exponents  Fact.P90  Exponents   P90 CPU
                        CPU yrs  LL Tested  CPU yrs*  w/ Factor   hrs/day
------  --------------  -------  ---------  --------  ---------  --------
388.    petrym          775.195      275       3.402        8     1952.06

audiobliss

No, I've never done it, but I just got Mom's old desktop that's currently just sitting, so I was seriously thinking of fixing that a little bit and dedicating it to folding.

If we get a CP team going, I'm definitely in!

brijenjas

RuSsMaN wrote: »

I get what they are trying to do, is there any benefit to doing it (for me), other than contributing to the greater good? I don't mind letting it run while I'm not home, just curious.

No direct benefit for you, unless the research leads to a cure for a disease you or a family member may have.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

I currently fold for http://www.dslreports.com/ .

If you Start a ClubPolk team I will put one of my computers on it.

AndyGwis

WTF? Looks like I need to google / wikipedia this folding phenomenon.

Serendipity

AndyGwis wrote: »

WTF? Looks like I need to google / wikipedia this folding phenomenon.

Same here. What is this?

zombie boy 2000

jflail2 -
That's my sig on another forum. Creepy. I'll start sending you royalties first thing in the morn. You take haypennies and schillings?

Systems

I'll explain a bit in broader terms from an IT perspective. Folding just uses this idea.

The future of computers is called "grid networking". 99.99% of most computers spend its processing time completely idle. As the "internet" access grows and its speeds enhance this science is starting to mature. The theroy is that any one computer can tap others for their proc power. Let’s take an example:

In 10 years you may have 10 PC's in your house (I have 7 now).

You jump on one of the machines and start processing something huge. Let’s say you are ripping a home video. For me, even on my best PC, I leave the thing sitting over night to do so. In 10 years your PC's and all of their CPU's will be setup on a grid so that in effect, that PC you are utilizing will reach out to all of the other computers and use their CPU's to boost yours when you start tapping it. Same concept as "multiple cores". So in effect you gain exponential processing power. The plan is to eventually build this network across the globe and could increase the power of your home computer by a million fold. Imagine ripping that 10 hour long video on one computer to seconds using the unutilized processors and computers around your neighborhood..

Folding is using this technology now.

Scientists are "folding" genes to figure out what causes cancer and such.

This traditionally takes super computers that cost millions of dollars that can hit teraflop speeds.

With folding, Stanford breaks the computation into thousands of parts and distributes them to your computers.

A quad core machine can take 20+ hours to do one unit and when done, it uploads the file back to stanford.

By doing this, they have already reached processing speeds far beyond the fastest supercomputer speeds.

These guys are doing some serious research to fight things like cancer and Parkinson’s and such. They publish on the Stanford site their projects and results and many of them have been published now.

Very worthwhile endeavor and its a start to a much great future change in computers.

But the skinny of it is this. You really do need at least a dual core proc or better to process these Folding units in any mannor that would be worthwhile.

jflail2

zombie boy 2000 wrote: »

jflail2 -
That's my sig on another forum. Creepy. I'll start sending you royalties first thing in the morn. You take haypennies and schillings?

Hah, that is weird. I've been using this for years. Sure, send em on. Those haypennys are worth a whole $US penny. They add up...

Somewhere in my closet I still have my "coins of the world" book with all sorts of old English coins, shillings and haypennies included.

Great explanation Silver btw.

Systems

petrym wrote: »

No folding... I do Mersenne Prime number searches on 5 CPU cores (6 when I get the Linux box going), currently ranked 388 in the world.

Rank    Account ID      LL P90*  Exponents  Fact.P90  Exponents   P90 CPU
                        CPU yrs  LL Tested  CPU yrs*  w/ Factor   hrs/day
------  --------------  -------  ---------  --------  ---------  --------
388.    petrym          775.195      275       3.402        8     1952.06

What are you pulling in daily for points right now? Im averaging about 12000 right now.

I got folding on a few of my new server here at work that have that new dual quad core 2.6 ghz zeon procs. Got 2 of them that get me abut 2600 points per day each.

Systems

Here is some statistics from Stanford about the kind of processing power they have achieved. Note the PS3 numbers. Have no doubt, what you heard about the power of the PS3 chip and graphics is no joke at all. My PS3 can complete work units faster than my dual quad core Zeon 2.66ghz (8 cores) server chips that I mentioned before:

OS Type | Current TFLOPS* | Active CPUs | Total CPUs
Windows 173 182352 1864307
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 9255 108811
Mac OS X/Intel 16 5308 30680
Linux 44 25735 260370
GPU 42 714 4773
PLAYSTATION®3 1094 44101 357855
___________________________________________________
Total 1376 267465 2626796

Systems

petrym wrote: »

No folding... I do Mersenne Prime number searches on 5 CPU cores (6 when I get the Linux box going), currently ranked 388 in the world.

Rank    Account ID      LL P90*  Exponents  Fact.P90  Exponents   P90 CPU
                        CPU yrs  LL Tested  CPU yrs*  w/ Factor   hrs/day
------  --------------  -------  ---------  --------  ---------  --------
388.    petrym          775.195      275       3.402        8     1952.06

Heres mine:

Date of last work unit 2007-12-04 16:25:11
Total score 508500
Overall rank (if points are combined) 3680 of 862611
Active processors (within 50 days) 35
Active processors (within 7 days) 13

AndyGwis

So what are you actually contributing by getting in "the fold?" Just the cost of energy, use of your processor, and the potential risk of these "folders" getting access to your computer and possibly creating some kind of Die Hard 4 scenario where they take down the government with our nationwide, united processing capabilities?

Sounds cool to me. . .

fatchowmein

AndyGwis wrote: »

So what are you actually contributing by getting in "the fold." Just the cost of energy, use of your processor, and the potential risk of these "folders" getting access to your computer and possibly creating some kind of Die Hard 4 scenario where they take down the government with our nationwide, united processing capabilities?

Sounds cool to me. . .

Skynet (T3).

AndyGwis

Agreed. Someone at Stanford probably created a cute little AI program for his/her grad class. The AI then began to tap into all the computers in the Stanford University Network (let's call it SUN for short). SUN then begins to systematically gain access to computers across the United States through spam emails and annonymous forum posts making it out to seem like a humanitarian effort. SUN needs more power and goes solar. People flight back and block out the sun (not SUN). SUN then begins to harvest us for our electric energy, keeping us alive in a pseudo reality program called "Sim City."

We should make something like that into a movie! Add some tight leather/latex, some guns, kung-fo, at Lawrence Fishburne, and we've got a hit on our hands.

nms

AndyGwis wrote: »

Agreed. Someone at Stanford probably created a cute little AI program for his/her grad class. The AI then began to tap into all the computers in the Stanford University Network (let's call it SUN for short). SUN then begins to systematically gain access to computers across the United States through spam emails and annonymous forum posts making it out to seem like a humanitarian effort. SUN needs more power and goes solar. People flight back and block out the sun (not SUN). SUN then begins to harvest us for our electric energy, keeping us alive in a pseudo reality program called "Sim City."

We should make something like that into a movie! Add some tight leather/latex, some guns, kung-fo, at Lawrence Fishburne, and we've got a hit on our hands.

You know, the scary thing is that could actually be a good movie... :eek:

petrym

Silverti wrote: »

Date of last work unit 2007-12-04 16:25:11
Total score 508500
Overall rank (if points are combined) 3680 of 862611
Active processors (within 50 days) 35
Active processors (within 7 days) 13

I don't get points; it's purely a search for massive prime numbers and to get famous in the narrow geeky world of mathematics. Each uniquely assigned number takes anywhere from 25 to 45 days (running 24/7 at 100% CPU use) to calculate factors. Mersenne primes are two raised to the power of a prime number minus one 2^P -1 / such as 2 cubed minus one: 8-1=7.

Willow

I fold the laundry sometimes....

petrym

I fold too much laundry...

F1nut

I fold my money.

Refefer

Silverti wrote: »

Here is some statistics from Stanford about the kind of processing power they have achieved. Note the PS3 numbers. Have no doubt, what you heard about the power of the PS3 chip and graphics is no joke at all. My PS3 can complete work units faster than my dual quad core Zeon 2.66ghz (8 cores) server chips that I mentioned before:

OS Type | Current TFLOPS* | Active CPUs | Total CPUs
Windows 173 182352 1864307
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 9255 108811
Mac OS X/Intel 16 5308 30680
Linux 44 25735 260370
GPU 42 714 4773
PLAYSTATION®3 1094 44101 357855
___________________________________________________
Total 1376 267465 2626796

It's not so much that PS3 is faster than the xeon processors, just that they're much more strongly geared to the math that's required for this type of science than a general purpose cpu

hearingimpared

My wife folds my jockeys! When I stand up my butt cheeks unfold.

bobman1235

Silverti wrote: »

The future of computers is called "grid networking". 99.99% of most computers spend its processing time completely idle. As the "internet" access grows and its speeds enhance this science is starting to mature. The theroy is that any one computer can tap others for their proc power. Let’s take an example:

I think you overstate it SLIGHTLY here. This is a method that willb e used more in the future, but it's not the future of computing. I work in distributed processing, and there are very few applications for which it's useful. Gene mapping and calculating prime numbers, or in my company's case, interpreting radar data and the like are some examples, and there are a bunch, but for the average home user, the processor is RARELY if ever the bottleneck for their operations. For distributed processing to be worthwhile the time spent processing has to far outweigh the time spent transferring the data between the processes, AND any overhead associated with the distribution. Aside from multi-core PCs, I don't think you're going to see that much of a proliferation of this kind of thing for the average user, it's just not worth it.

nms

bobman1235 wrote: »

I think you overstate it SLIGHTLY here. This is a method that willb e used more in the future, but it's not the future of computing. I work in distributed processing, and there are very few applications for which it's useful. Gene mapping and calculating prime numbers, or in my company's case, interpreting radar data and the like are some examples, and there are a bunch, but for the average home user, the processor is RARELY if ever the bottleneck for their operations. For distributed processing to be worthwhile the time spent processing has to far outweigh the time spent transferring the data between the processes, AND any overhead associated with the distribution. Aside from multi-core PCs, I don't think you're going to see that much of a proliferation of this kind of thing for the average user, it's just not worth it.

There are also different degrees of distributed processing.

For example, over the internet, network bandwidth, latency, etc become major issues because the nodes are separated by physically long spans of network of varying capability.

On the other hand, a Beowulf cluster is a bunch of computers right next to each other over a very high bandwidth network that covers a physically small space. Here, latency and transfer times are not such a huge issue. Beowulf clusters have been extremely cost-effective supercomputers for years. You spend less time dividing the jobs up and sending them off compared to an internet-based cluster. For all practical purposes, it functions as a single computer.

Am I making any sense??

bobman1235

Sure, like I said I work in the field, my company produces products that are essentially high-end compact Beowulf clusters. I understand their applications. But they do not act as a "single computer" the way we think of them. Most day-to-day operations do NOT require the kind of processing power, and even when you minimize interprocessor latency, there is still an overhead associated with splitting a process between multiple processors and then recombining the results at the end. That overhead can be significant unless you're talking about VERY computation-intensive applications.

I don't mean to refute that they are powerful and useful systems in the business, military, and research worlds; they just are not viable or necessary in the home computing world aside from very niche applications.

mrbigbluelight

I used to do the SETI thing, I guess that's folding.

Anyone have an idea for how to strip down a machine so that it runs flat out running just this single application ?
I don't recall the specs, but the SETI forums used to discuss how the "faster" machines of the time (500 mhz, etc) actually computed much slower than a stripped down machine (an old 486DX100 running DOS) that didn't have all the overhead of drivers, etc. I'm sure I have the actual numbers wrong, but you get the idea.

I have enough crap underneath the stairs to build half a dozen boxes (Dam you, bensbargains.net and Newegg !); it'd be interesting to throw some together and let 'em run !

Systems

AndyGwis wrote: »

Agreed. Someone at Stanford probably created a cute little AI program for his/her grad class. The AI then began to tap into all the computers in the Stanford University Network (let's call it SUN for short). SUN then begins to systematically gain access to computers across the United States through spam emails and annonymous forum posts making it out to seem like a humanitarian effort. SUN needs more power and goes solar. People flight back and block out the sun (not SUN). SUN then begins to harvest us for our electric energy, keeping us alive in a pseudo reality program called "Sim City."

We should make something like that into a movie! Add some tight leather/latex, some guns, kung-fo, at Lawrence Fishburne, and we've got a hit on our hands.

HAHAHAH! Thats pretty good! lol! Sim City!