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The MacRumors Folding@home team has contributed over two billion points to the distributed computing medical research project, reaching this milestone on November 12. It took 11.5 years for the MacRumors team to accumulate its first billion points, but the team completed its second billion points in only 12.5 months, thanks in large part to today's faster GPUs, as well as Quick Return Bonus Points and users running the client software with optimized configuations. The team has risen from #55 to #45 among the over 225,000 folding teams.

We're proud that our supporters and forum members are contributing to medical research by participating in Folding@home, and MacRumors encourages you to join our team as well. Folding@home participants receive work units as computation assignments and completed work units are assigned points based on their value to the project's scientific purposes. Client software is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and users should feel free to ask questions in our Distributed Computing forum.

The MacRumors Folding@home team was formed in May 2002 by MacRumors owner Arnold Kim. The team currently averages over 78 million points per month, almost 40 times its rate a year ago. Over 2000 users have contributed to the MacRumors team effort, with 5 team members (rwh202, twoodcc, Louis_Wu, ChristianFAH, and whiterabbit) each having contributed over 100 million points. Additional team statistics and graphs can be viewed at Extreme Overclocking.

Folding@home, run by Stanford University since October 2000, uses otherwise-idle computers to run protein folding simulation software, helping researchers search for cures for Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, AIDS, influenza, and many forms of cancer. The software simulates how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold, both to gain understanding of how proteins fold into their three-dimensional structure and to study the causes of the abnormal folding that leads to disease.

Article Link: MacRumors Folding@home Team Reaches Two Billion Points
 
Congratulations to the MacRumors folding team

Here's our team's elegant certificate. Clearly worth framing!

MacRumors-Folding@home-2billion.jpg
 
Been a fun and efficient way to heat my office during the cold months! 2 GPUs and a quad core i7 keep my little13x13 office nice and toasty when it is below zero. Always hoping for a cure, and I don't mind the minor blip in my power bill.

Can I still contribute? Is this cause on-going?
Indeed it is! Be sure to donate to 3446, and be sure to setup an identity you can keep for as long as you would like to contribute!
 
Nicely done!

I hope F@H gets GPGPU support on Mac--discussions with Apple to facilitate it were going on earlier this year, but I don't recall anything mentioned for months.
 
So what kind of real world impact has this had? Are the computations only of theoretical worth, where nothing they've ever done has panned out, or are there significant discoveries that have been made that couldn't have been made without having run these computations?

I'm always interested what the best way of helping would be. Should I have my 2007 MacMini which acts as a personal web server (~200 visitors/month) contribute, or would it be a waste? Should I just donate money instead?
 
So what kind of real world impact has this had? Are the computations only of theoretical worth, where nothing they've ever done has panned out, or are there significant discoveries that have been made that couldn't have been made without having run these computations?

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers/
 
So what kind of real world impact has this had? Are the computations only of theoretical worth, where nothing they've ever done has panned out, or are there significant discoveries that have been made that couldn't have been made without having run these computations?
Here's one example: A 2012 article in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, titled Design of β-Amyloid Aggregation Inhibitors from a Predicted Structural Motif, reported on Folding@home-based research that led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer’s Disease.
 
I'm always interested what the best way of helping would be. Should I have my 2007 MacMini which acts as a personal web server (~200 visitors/month) contribute, or would it be a waste? Should I just donate money instead?

You could run FAH on such MacMini; in fact sometimes I do. There is a special client running under Chrome WebBrowser called NaCL. Reason for that version is to have smaller workunits better fitting to older/slower hardware. There are not many points to be done, but still research is linked to it and when running on a web server 24/7 it sums up over the time; in a positive way. We have some MacMinis folding with somewhere between 10k and 15k points per day.
But ensure proper cooling as the CPU will eventually busy whole day long; much more compared to a web server.

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I hope F@H gets GPGPU support on Mac--discussions with Apple to facilitate it were going on earlier this year, but I don't recall anything mentioned for months.

We all hope ... There was some movement on Apple and Stanford sides, but nothing substantially came out. Strange enough, while folding for MacRumors, 98% of my points are made on Linux :(
But I still manage my folding equipment from an iMac, so that's still kind of count ;)

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Here's our team's elegant certificate. Clearly worth framing!

Thanks Doctor Q

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A (very) powerful team with a bunch of experienced members. Some of their individual donors each has more points than us together as team.
 
i would like to congratulate the team on this amazing accomplishment! we have come a long way, and we will continue to push forward!

for those wondering, yes, you can join the cause at anytime. it is a wonderful cause, that you actually get to contribute to the work being done, instead of just giving money that you don't know for sure where it goes.

again, way to go team! here's to the next billion!
 
Congrats!

I may do this with my old Mini. I saw a 300w solar panel kit on Amazon for around 200 bucks. It'll be environmentally friendly at the same time as contributing.
 
Just joined up to this, and joined the MR team, but have a question...... Can i run this on all my computers at the same time, or is it just one machine at a time?

As many computer as you like (and have the authority to install the FAH software). I run constantly a dedicated Linux hardware and a virtual instance. Sometimes adding a testbench and a MacMini or iMac or even an Amazon cloud spot-instance

You just need to make sure to enter the same donor ID and passkey in the config to combine the resulting points.

Thanks for joining team #3446
 
As many computer as you like (and have the authority to install the FAH software). I run constantly a dedicated Linux hardware and a virtual instance. Sometimes adding a testbench and a MacMini or iMac or even an Amazon cloud spot-instance

You just need to make sure to enter the same donor ID and passkey in the config to combine the resulting points.

Thanks for joining team #3446

That's excellent news, as i have a few macs at home, and they can be doing something useful while i'm not using them.

Thank you.
 
Is there any way of getting Apple retail stores to sign on to a program such as this?

Think of it - after closing hours, display models could all dedicate processing power.

Is there any other known corporations / office blocks who do this?

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Not to take anything away from folding@home as I think their project is great.
But is there any other worthy Internet-based public volunteer computing project?

I know of the likes SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_about.php
 
Congrats!

I may do this with my old Mini. I saw a 300w solar panel kit on Amazon for around 200 bucks. It'll be environmentally friendly at the same time as contributing.

Speaking of which, has anyone done the math on how much power consumption (and other costs, directly and indirectly) the average computer would incur?
 
again, way to go team! here's to the next billion!

Hey -- I was going to take at least a day for patting ourselves on the back before gearing up for the charge to 3 billion :p

Seriously though, congrats to everyone who's contributed over the years!

Louis
 
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