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Custom PC's Folding Team (NO 35947)

If, like most of us, you leave your PC on 24/7, but don't actually use it all the time, then you should be running Folding@home. I won't bore you to death with how folding proteins could lead to medical breakthroughs and save humanity, after all, the only reason I fold is to get to the top of the leaderboard.

As with almost anything in the PC world, the faster the CPU, the faster it folds. It's not quite that simple though, as different work units take longer to complete on different CPUs. Tinker units, for example, are optimised for Athlon XPs, while Gromacs units have a lot of SSE2 optimisations and run much faster on Pentium 4s. You can also speed up your folding by running the console version instead of the graphical client or screensaver, which also gives you more control, so if you add '-advmethods' to the end of the console command, for example, it will try to pick up Gromacs work units instead of Tinkers.

Folding@home loves brute force, and to give our team a boost we've set up a farm of dedicated folding systems. At the moment, this comprises three Athlon XP 3200+ PCs, an Athlon XP 2500+, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and a 500MHz Pentium III. The latter folds approximately 12 times slower than the Athlon XP 2500+, but every work unit helps. Also, because these machines are dedicated to folding, they don't need a keyboard, monitor or mouse, which helps to save electricity, money and space. Then, as the farm grows, we'll add a bigger KVM and network switch.

Running loads of machines together in a farm is damn cool, but running multiple instances of the client on a dual-processor system is even sweeter and my own dual Xeon system is currently at the top of our team board. It's a bit more complicated than running one instance of Folding@home though, so here's a quick checklist of what to do:

1. Create a separate subdirectory on your hard disk for each instance of Folding@home you wish to run, numbering each in sequence like 'f@home1', 'f@home2'.
2. Copy 'fah4@console.exe' into each of these directories.
3. Type 'fah4console.exe -config' from the command prompt.


4. Enter your user and team details as usual, making sure that the Advanced settings are set to give each console a separate 'machineid' (between one and eight).

5. Once you've finished configuring each console, set up a shortcut for each one as follows: 'path\fah4console.exe-local'.

Then sit back and laugh at all your mates struggling along folding one protein at a time, the peasants!

If, like most of us, you leave your PC on 24/7, but don't actually use it all the time, then you should be running Folding@home. I won't bore you to death with how folding proteins could lead to medical breakthroughs and save humanity, after all, the only reason I fold is to get to the top of the leaderboard.

As with almost anything in the PC world, the faster the CPU, the faster it folds. It's not quite that simple though, as different work units take longer to complete on different CPUs. Tinker units, for example, are optimised for Athlon XPs, while Gromacs units have a lot of SSE2 optimisations and run much faster on Pentium 4s. You can also speed up your folding by running the console version instead of the graphical client or screensaver, which also gives you more control, so if you add '-advmethods' to the end of the console command, for example, it will try to pick up Gromacs work units instead of Tinkers.

Folding@home loves brute force, and to give our team a boost we've set up a farm of dedicated folding systems. At the moment, this comprises three Athlon XP 3200+ PCs, an Athlon XP 2500+, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and a 500MHz Pentium III. The latter folds approximately 12 times slower than the Athlon XP 2500+, but every work unit helps. Also, because these machines are dedicated to folding, they don't need a keyboard, monitor or mouse, which helps to save electricity, money and space. Then, as the farm grows, we'll add a bigger KVM and network switch.

Running loads of machines together in a farm is damn cool, but running multiple instances of the client on a dual-processor system is even sweeter and my own dual Xeon system is currently at the top of our team board. It's a bit more complicated than running one instance of Folding@home though, so here's a quick checklist of what to do:

1. Create a separate subdirectory on your hard disk for each instance of Folding@home you wish to run, numbering each in sequence like 'f@home1', 'f@home2'.
2. Copy 'fah4@console.exe' into each of these directories.
3. Type 'fah4console.exe -config' from the command prompt.


4. Enter your user and team details as usual, making sure that the Advanced settings are set to give each console a separate 'machineid' (between one and eight).

5. Once you've finished configuring each console, set up a shortcut for each one as follows: 'path\fah4console.exe-local'.

Then sit back and laugh at all your mates struggling along folding one protein at a time, the peasants!

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