Folding WOOT!

Info & FAQ for Washington Chapter of FTE Folding Team 53449

Folding@Home Project Wants Your Computer
(from Stanford F@H FAQ)

Folding @ Home is a computer simulation of Protein Assembly to discover cures for diseases caused by mis-developed proteins. Installation is a small download to configure personal settings by adding your User Name and Team Number 53449, and then automatically downloads a human-protein-assembly project to process a Work Unit.

The protein assembly simulation, Folding, works at the lowest priority, is user adjustable and does not interfere with operations like surfing, word-processing, or gaming. If gamerz have a "minimize" problem just uncheck the "Main Title" and/or "Logos Enabled" in the Configuration.

Downloads are OS specific.

Ford FTE Forum thread.

Ford FTE Stats at F@H Stats.

Ford FTE Stats at Extreme Overclocking (Our team will have full stats when we reach rank #800).

Current Projects Points of Work Unit Packets

SMP, multiple clients

ATI GPU processing

FAH Tools: Like Electron Microscope and FahMon for stats or multiple machines on a LAN.

Folding News and F@H Server/Computer News.

GUI vs Console Clients

Uninstalling

"Folding" uses an internet connection only to download a Work Unit Packet and later to Upload the results back to Stanford University; it does not need a connection between download and upload.

DialUp users may need to Check the "Ask Before Using Network" box in the Configuration menu, or the connection could be left open after transfer.

Folding will work in conjunction with SETI@ Home and other distributed-computing projects. The 'Graphical User Interface' GUI version download is the easiest, the 'Console' version is for command-line users and to run two Foldings on HT machines. A GUI client plus a Console client for SMPs. There are no server privileges needed, and online access is configurable thru firewalls.

What are proteins and "Folding"? (ref Stanford):

Proteins are the nano-machine workhorses of biology. Before proteins can carry out their functions in the body they assemble themselves, or "fold". Protein folding is fundamental to all biology, and the assembly details are slowly being discovered via these computer simulations.

When proteins do not fold correctly there are serious effects, including diseases like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's.

Folding@Home is a distributed-computing project that works on any personal computer. The more processors the better, as the human body makes over 50,000 different proteins in hundreds of thousands of combinations.

Stanford's computational methods (algorithms) and large-scale distributed computing simulates geologic timescales thousands to millions of times faster than current time.

Since October 2000, over 1,200,000 CPUs in the world have participated in Folding@Home. Every additional CPU gives an added boost in performance."

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-Proteins are necklaces of amino acids -- long chain molecules -- and the basis of how biology gets its work done.

As enzymes, proteins power our biochemical reactions. As structural elements, they make up our bones, muscles, hair, skin and blood vessels. As antibodies, proteins recognize and destroy invaders. For this the human genome has been sequenced, aided by Genome @ Home, which is the blueprint for all of the proteins in human biology. The genome contains the DNA code specifying the sequence of the amino acid beads along the protein "necklace."

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Graphical User Interface Configuration Options (Win95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista & Linux).

Setup: After installation, right click the Red Cog icon in the System Tray, then
-Add your User Name.
-Add the FTE Folding Team number 53449 .
-The "CPU Usage Percent" slider is a per-individual setting for your particular machine, somewhere between 85% & 100% works best. The more CPU usage allowed, the faster the Folding is. I use 98% on a FX-53 at 2.4GHz. Folding is an intense workout for our CPUs, and an Overclocked machine will usually, but not always, bomb out.

DialUp Users may need to Check the "Ask before using Network" box, so you will know that Folding opened your connection. Then you can close the connection when it's finished.

Gamerz: Uncheck the "Main title" and "Logos enabled" boxes, if needed, to prevent minimizing games.

To send completed WUs that might be stuck in Queue, Add " -send all " to the FAH shortcut 'properties' command string. ie: quit FAH, go to Start>Programs>Folding at Home>Right click the FAH shortcut>Properties then add the " (space) -send all " to the shortcut target string. Without those quotes. Then Restart FAH, and it will attempt to send again. FAH will automatically try and resend stuck WUs every 6 hours or less.

Looks exactly like this: "C:\Program Files\Folding@Home\winFAH*****" -send all

a space before the -send all, no quotes around -send all.

Later, you can take the " -send all " out of the command string, though it doesn't hurt anything and may just return a message "Nothing in Queue to send" if the queue is already empty of completed WUs. The command does not mess with a WU that is processing.

*You can also send a single work unit stuck in queue, by typing "-send XX" where XX equals the queue slots 00 thru 09.

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"Large" WU Processing

Check or enable the "...Allow units greater than 5MB..." in configuration. As of 23OCT05, the -advmethods flag is not used to get the "large" WUs. (-advmethods flag is used to receive Betas only now.)

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Console Client Configuration Options for Linux and Windows:

-config
To change their configuration information: user & team names, whether or not to ask before a network connection is made, set up proxy servers, CPU usage (5-100%), whether or not to use deadline information, Machine ID, etc.

-configonly
Same as above, but will exit following configuration instead of beginning the simulation work.

-delete x
Delete item #x from the work queue. This option should only be used if there is a serious error with the current unit that the client does not automatically recover from. You know that it caused a crash. Never happened yet on my machines. If this happens, would you send FAH Stanford the FAHlog.txt file for it. Copy The FAH log and paste it in a post on the Stanford Folding at Home Forum.

-license
EULA.

-queueinfo
Gets information on any queued work units. It includes the status (READY/FINISHED/EMPTY), the unit type, the originating server, and the GMT times of work done and the deadline.

-send x
Send a result back to server. X is the queue position number 0 thru 9 that the completed WU is in. If there is not a completed work unit the client exits without doing anything.

-send all
Uploads all processed WUs if they become stuck in Queue.

-verbosity x
Sets the amount of details shown from 1 to 9. The default is 3. Use a higher number to see more detailed client output.

-oneunit
Instruct the client to Quit following the completion of one work unit.

-forceasm
Instruct the core to use SSE/3DNow assembly instructions if possible.

-local
Uses configuration files from the local directory. This option has no meaning on Linux, but is vital on Windows and Macintosh for running multiple clients on a machine. It instructs the client to read its config information from the client.cfg file in the current directory rather than on Windows from the installation directory, or on Macintosh in the Library/Folding@home directory.

Information such as the user name, team name, proxy information, machine ID are maintained in the client.cfg file. The flag ensures that processing does not conflict.

Use "-local" only if you are planning on running more than one instance of Folding@Home running on a multi-processor machine. Create as many directories as there are processors. Copy the ***** files and client.cfg file into each of these directories, run "FAH3Console -local -config" on each and specify the unique machine IDs for each directory, under Advanced Settings. From then onwards you may run each copy by switching to its directory and running with the -local flag. (Check FAH Stanford page for latest on SMPs).

-help
Lists the command line flags available

Linux Specific:

-freeBSD
For the Linux client on a machine running FreeBSD, see the Stanford Folding Forum FAQ for details. With this flag, all Cores downloaded will automatically be branded as being a Linux executable.

Windows Specific:

-pause
Pause after finishing the current unit.

-service
Run in service mode for programs such as firedaemon. This prevents the client from exiting when it detects the current user is logging out.
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