Welcome to AOA's Folding@home Team Pages

This is a tutorial on what I have found out regarding F@H backups, and their value.  If you are running the SMP core you may have already seen that sometimes a work unit just fails to complete. If you are overclocking you may take a look at your system temperature readings, etc. to see if you can find the culprit. The problem is that the work unit is gone by this time and after you make your adjustments you may well be sent a different work unit. All of them behave differently, so it's not a reliable check.

What if you could roll back your WU to a point prior to where it died, make your adjustments in BIOS, or whatever, and start it up again? Then you could see how the SAME WU behaves with amended settings.

I use VMware and Linux on my Windows rigs with better results than I get with the Windows SMP client so I figured I would pass on the info a short how to.. Usually nets me an extra 50-75 ppd so it's not much, but every little bit helps and boosts the team..

There is so much more that VMware is capable such as setting up custom virtual machines, to check compatibility of components within an OS. Comes in handy with some Linux Distros, "cough" Gentoo for finding and repairing broken packages without crashing your real install.

Your CPU must be a 64-bit AMD Dual Core or a 64-bit Intel Dual Core or higher with support for Virtualization Technology.

NOTE: Make sure you don't have Winrar or any other program like Winrar associating itself with ISO files.

Read the rest in the forums!

From Stanford:

Introduction 

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has lead to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project.

Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new, high performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from ATI to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as the new Cell processor in Sony’s PlayStation 3), we will soon be able to attain performance on the 100 gigaflop scale per computer. With this new software and hardware, we will be able to push Folding@Home a major step forward.

Our goal is to apply this new technology to dramatically advance the capabilities of Folding@Home, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer. With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.

From the BBC:

Attempts to understand diseases such as Alzheimers have got a boost from Sony's PlayStation 3 console.

More than 250,000 PS3 owners have enrolled their console in the Folding@Home project which uses it to study the shapes proteins assume.