About Folding@home
Shippensburg University is proud to be a member of the Folding@home community. The Folding@home program is a distributed computing project which combines the processing power of any Linux, Windows, Mac, or PS3 and creates a large supercomputer. This processing power is then used to simulate the folding of proteins.
Why would we want to simulate proteins one may ask? According to the main Folding@home page:
"Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. " (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main, 2009).
By simulating these folds, the scientists behind this project can more adequately understand why the folds happen as they do.
By joining the Shippensburg University Computer Science Department's Folding@home page, you will not only be helping cure the above mentioned diseases and more, but you will also be helping our team's rank increase. Currently, we are in the top 600 teams in the world, and quickly approaching the top 500. My personal ultimate goal is to break into the top 100 teams; this may or may not be possible with only the University's computers, but with your help we can surely break that mark. So please donate your spare CPU cycles to a worthy project. You can follow the above links to some more information on setting up folding on your computer or PS3, bur first take a look below to find some useful information about getting started with folding.
Guides
Firstly, you will want to choose a unique user name. This user name can be whatever you wish, but you will want to make sure is unique by checking at the following link:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download#ntoc2
**Note that you do not need a user name; the user name can be left as anonymous, and all your contributions will simply be donated as user "anonymous" (obviously) but your points will still count towards the greater good. If you wish to track how many points and work units you have accomplished though, you are going to need a user name.
Secondly, to ensure that no one uses your user name as their own, you will want to get a unique key mailed to you that will be entered in your client. You can get a unique key for your username at the following link:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/getpasskey.py
Once you have your user name and key, you are ready to move on and begin to setup your client. By following the links above you will find some brief guides I have put together using information gathered from many different places on the internet. These guides are by no means complete or mean to be a definitive guide above all others. Rather, it is meant to be a gathering of useful information in one place for ease of access. Below are some links I think you will find useful if your just getting into folding.
Main Stanford Guides Page:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Guide
Main Stanford Download Page:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
Once your completely setup, here is where you can go to see the current stats of both your own folding, and the team as a whole:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Stats
Here is the Folding@home forum, there is a great deal of useful information here, if you have problems setting up your clients or need further clarification, this is a great resource of information.
http://foldingforum.org/index.php
Here is a link to the page for setting up the GPU client on a Linux based machine. This process is briefly explained on the Installing on Linux page on this site, but this link has much more information: