Distributed computing: protein folding

[flaninacupboard]

Just curious to know if anyone else on here runs seti@home or folding@home. thought ti would be fun to ally everyone who does into one team, and see how high we can get our score....

The protein folding seems more worthwhile to me, the SETI project is interesting and all, but even if we contacted other life, we wouldn't see any practical benefits from it. any information exchaged would take hundreds if not thousands of years to get to us. finding a way to fight aids and understanding DNA and RNA better seems a more worthy cause...

Folding: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

Seti: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[i_am_dave]

I cannot get it to work on my computer, keep getting a runtime error, memory cannot be written.

[flaninacupboard]

Hmm. there's often problems if your CPU is overclocked or running at the non standard voltage.

[i_am_dave]

nope, standard non modified dell. (Precision 530 with dual Xeon)
I am at work, I suspect some kind of driver interaction or something going on. Might try it again at home tonight.

[g_shocker182]

Why dont they just hook up some Cray's to do the work?

[jeex]

Why dont they just hook up some Cray's to do the work?

because its probably cheaper and faster to have thousands of people running the program and using their combined proccessing power to do this..

and i betcha that thousands of "average" computers are faster than a few crays..

[BJ_M]

CRAYs are sorta not the top of the heap anymore in supercomputers after SGI sold it off ... and dr. cray died ... sgi kept the buss modulus (says CRAY in fact on my sgi system on the BUSS interconnects) ..

jeex is right .. couple 1000 home computers can blow the doors off a lot of supercomputer ... most modern supercomputers are just made up today of intel or amd cpus in big configs /// but some are still using other cpus (sgi, IBM , NEC , HP -- but they swing both ways at times)

[BJ_M]

here is the list of the top 500 supercomputers

http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/06/

[g_shocker182]

BJ_M, jeex,
You are right. Seems the fastest computer in the world is just 5,000 NEC processors tied together. And I bet more people have downloaded that program to over-do it. Oh well. I've got to go find another bet to lose.

[tenders]

@ BJ_M

just curious....how big would one of those super comps be?/ if someone was standing beside it?

[BJ_M]

@ BJ_M

just curious....how big would one of those super comps be?/ if someone was standing beside it? :)

that one in the picture is 77inches tall

[i_am_dave]

that one in the picture is 77inches tall

Jeez, we used to have a VAX that was ar least that big, and it had the power of a Pentium II computer!

[tenders]

looks nice,but no cdrw or dvd? i mean....what on earth were the inventors thinking about!


wonder how fast it would be to cook a movie on that puppy

[jeex]

probably faster than you could rip and burn the movie..