GB's Folding@Home Team - Join us to help COVID-19 research!

It would seem that Folding@Home is working on some projects to help investigating COVID-19. Giant Bomb has a folding team, which you can join to help Giant Bomb get points (precious points!). Whether you are folding with Giant Bomb, or independently, It's great to devote your CPU and GPU time to medical research!

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Some time ago (I think back when the PS3 client was launched) GB started a folding team. I was recently inspired to start doing it again and I joined the GB team just for kicks. I now have it in the top 3500. Progress is starting to slow down, but the team still moves up in rank every day. This is simply a PSA to remind everybody that the team is there and could potentially move up quite rapidly with some help. Thanks all!

P.S. If you create a passcode you can earn points for completing Work Units early. This can make a substantial difference.

Didn't... didn't this close down?

@flstyle: To what are you referring?

@flstyle and @nintendoeats I think you are both talking about different things! The PS3 based fold app did close down but the folding project in itself is still running.

ohhhhhhhhh I see, thanks.

I thought that might have been what was going on. Glad that concern is resolved :p

For comparison a PS3 pulled about 1000 points per day while my 7970 does about 85,000 per day. The PS3 client also contributed to YLOD AND the Work Units have to be custom made for each type of client, so the PS3 was not an efficient use of the project's resources given its low adoption rate.

@nintendoeats:

Cheers for that I had no idea why the PS3 one stopped. I'll take a look at the team when I'm not at work computer!

Looks like there are two to three of us contributing to the folding team.

Is anyone else interesting in joining? I just use a normal PC with the Chrome Extension, no fuss and easy to use!

Link to Chrome Folding@Home App

http://folding.stanford.edu/nacl/

Yeah, i've been meaning to get this started on mine. It'll be a great way to stress my 4790k after reseating it.

Hey guys, sorry I've been vanish-ed. I just moved across the country so I haven't had my desktop set up for almost a month. I'm very happy to see other people contributing :)

woop! We need some people with Triple SLI Titan X setups to start racking up some serious points haha.

@dantad: Yeah. I don't even have an Nvidia card. I cna at least run all day though :)

Oh nice, I've been looking for a new team ever since my last one vanished. Count me in!

I'll be rebuilding my computer later this week so hopefully the work units will go quicker with a processor that actually functions properly.

@ishinji32: That is generally important.

My client is borked at the moment:

Warning: Unexpected response to AS assignment request: error,No appropriate assignment

seems to be a chrome client issue, sigh. I have notice the points going down a lot recently too. They must be having issues.

@dantad: That sucks. The regular client is still working fine for me.

I'm so confused what the hell is this?

@schreibertyler: You run a client on your computer which simulates protein folding with processing power you aren't using. Protein folding is a very complex process whihc is relevant to all kinds of medical research to do with cell degeneration, including alzheimers and cancer.

Close to 10,000,000!!!!

@dantad: And still moving up in rank!

Woooo, top 1500!

Hey, I just downloaded this thing and joined the GB team I think. I have no idea what this thing does, or how any of it works. As long as it doesn't eat up my memory, though, I'm OK with keeping it on to get points.

@ajayraz: The memory footprint is tiny, though I leave it on medium power to keep my computer usable even while it's running (You can even turn off CPU usage and just use the GPU if you go into the advanced client). The GPU only runs at full or off while the CPU contributes so little that I don't mind knocking it down a peg.

I've had my doctor girlfriend explain what exactly we are simulating twice and I still don't fully understand it. I get that it is about understanding how various proteins fold from one form into another and that this has a relationship to genetic mutations which lead to cancer, alzheimers (which both my aunt and grandmother-not-actually-in-law have) and many other bad things. She is very excited about the whole thing so I infer that it really is very useful.

Thanks for joining!

@nintendoeats: I'm close with people who have suffered from these sorts of bad things, and while I still don't really understand how any of this works, at least I kinda have some sort of foundation for what's going on now. Thank you right back for the explanation. It's totally fascinating.

whelp, i was surprised to see F@H Was still a thing.
so i installed it again and joined the GB team!

Lets fold some proteins and remember to eat some to!

Wow, Ok I'm joining. I remember reading the leaderboards from the Custom PC magazine years ago but I was too young to understand what I was looking at.

I didn't know there was an android app! This seems cool. Also, I don't get this cpu gpu split stuff. I'll look for a youtube video to explain it.

@cirdain: Each processor in your machine runs a seperate simulation and each simulation is designed on a particular type of processor. Your CPU will run in low, medium or full mode. The only way they found to run GPUs in a "medium" mode was to flick them on and off very quickly, which is neither useful nor good for your hardware. They are therefore locked at either full or off. I hope that explains it, but if not please ask any more specific questions you might have.

aww yeah working my way into that top 5 =D.

Its funny to see how much points I got last time I used this and I flew by that number with in like a day.
pc's got so much more powerful its scary!

Glad to see more people joining in, hopefully we can break the top 1000 :D

There is a Chrome client too for lazy people like me who can't be bothered to configure stuff http://folding.stanford.edu/nacl/

Also, our team page is here: http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=138884

and you get more points if you set up a passkey: https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-passkey/

@dantad: YEah, good tips. I should have menitoned the passkey thing, it makes a HUGE difference.

Woooo, I am now in the top 10,000!

Yay, I'm in the team's top 10! :D

EDIT: I've been playing The Talos Principle (might be one of my favourite games of all time) which runs fine on my machine at the lowest settings (native1080p) while folding is on 'full' mode.

@cirdain: Looks interesting. What...is it exactly? Or roughly?

I haven't really been paying attention to games for a while.

I just noticed that I have over a million points and the team is nearing the top 1100. Not bad!

In the top 1000!!!

Seeing this thread made me install the client again, gonna let it run when the PC is idle and see if I get some folding done.

Sup guys. I just got back from a week away (computer folding away of course). I'm super excited to see the progress we are making!

Top 900. We must be nearing the point that we can't get any higher without more powah, but we still seem to be making steady progress.

Jumping on the team. I've been meaning to get into Folding @ Home for awhile now.

Shoot, I totally forgot about this. Will try to set my PC up for it in a couple of days.

I stopped this because it was causing some very strange Hard Drive issues for me (that I don't understand), but I wish you guys good luck :)

EDIT: I will continue after I've done a full PC upgrade around October cos' I have a feeling that the problem is my piece of trash cpu (fairly old i5-3570K).

It's cool that someone has bumped this. I will join in.

@cirdain: you can set it to GPU only! GPUs actually do the calculations much quicker anyway.

I just joined again my cpu won't get a work task for some reason though.

@floydeo: There's a known issue if you have a large number of cores (more than 8). Check out this thread and try manually setting your core count instead of auto detect (-1). https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=96&t=28848&sid=3c57fb56436d88f5f33eeefd4fc3beed

Are there any other GB BOINC teams? I'm thinking of eventually dedicating my current MoBo/CPU to lightweight server work and would consider adding a discrete GPU for doing the maths.

@hobbz: Thanks, it's working. Doesn't like an even number of threads apparently.

@jeffrud: Not sure, but Folding@Home is a pretty worthwhile cause! If you think of the genome as the parts of a biological machine, proteins and how they fold are essentially the instruction manual for how the machine works. We know far less about proteomics than we do about genetics and the genome (which is still very little.) Folding@Home directly contributes to understanding a wide breadth of biological functions (and diseases).

We're up to 650th. @flappyhands I have you in my sights!