GBAtemp's Folding@Home Team
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Folding what?
Folding@Home, or F@H, is a distributed computing system which allows everyday users to participate in research by Stanford University, lending their computing power to help with the process of protein folding. By running simulations on your computer you help better understand many diseases, including cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and more. This includes simulations related to COVID-19, and we believe that if we come together as a community, our combined computational power can help.
How do I join?
It's actually extremely simple - all you need to do is download the client, set it up on your PC and... start folding! You can either do so anonymously, or you can set up a nickname and join our team - our ID is 53596. COVID-19 is a fairly new virus, so it does not have a separate category just yet. In order to be assigned simulations related to it, you must select "Any Disease" in the client. The client is currently compatible with Windows, macOS, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Centos and Fedora so you can easily find the most suitable version for your setup.
Joining our team is as simple as typing in your desired nickname,
our Team ID and requesting a Passkey to verify your registration
I bet you're asking yourself "do I have to run this thing at full blast". The answer is no, F@H will not interrupt your valuable game time if you don't want it to. If you prefer, you can limit F@H to only using your resources when idle, or to minimise the amount of resources used by the client to a desired amount so that your game time remains uninterrupted. F@H will use your remaining CPU/GPU cycles up to saturation without otherwise affecting other tasks. You don't even need a particularly beastly computer - in the picture below I'm actually running it on a laptop - it's folding!
F@H gives you the option to only fold when idle, both in the Web and Desktop clients
Once your identity is set up and you've adjusted your settings to your liking, all you have to do is press "Start Folding" - you will be assigned a Work Unit your hardware is capable of handling in a reasonable amount of time and the client does all the rest. Your computer will continue to fold until the Work Unit is complete or you manually stop the workload. It's easy!
Start Folding! Our teamI'm a developer, what can I do?
Up until recently, Folding@Home was also possible on Android devices and the PS3. Sadly, the PS3 application and the Android application are no longer maintained, however Sony has graciously released the source code on GitHub and the project continues as open source. This is particularly relevant to users who would like to contribute their mobile processing power, or perhaps with enough work, contribute the processing power of their consoles via Switchroot/LineageOS or other means. The GitHub repositories for the Android branch and the Main branch can be found here:
Main Source Code Android Source CodeWith a little work, these applications could possibly be ported to devices that were never intended to run them - that's where scene developers come in. If you think you can help, try your hands at some real anti-virus software - we can hack this thing.
We live in trying times, but we're not powerless - we're all the strongest when we come together. If you want to help, consider joining the team today!
