How does folding help people?

[Imaginaerum]

Question: How do you know exactly what the folding program is doing? I'm just curious because I remember an episode of NCIS (and this is probably a stupid thing to think of) where a guy hid a program inside the code of an MMO, that basically used every computer playing this game, to crack the encryption of some (insert random government agency) and hack their computer base.

 

Sure its probably something that shouldn't be worried about, but it is a computer program designed to break up the load of a single task (I think) across many many computers.

NCIS is fiction...

 

You can't really see exactly what it's doing because it's probably beyond the scope of most folder's understanding. There is a diagram that shows the protein you're working on, but I think it's more of an artist's interpretation more than an actual visual representation. The program will also list the project you're working on, and that project usually has a description with what it's trying to accomplish in words I can't understand without burning a dictionary.

 

You can tell it to run at all times instead of just with screensavers. The reason it wants you to run when your screensaver activates because Folding uses a ton of resources and other programs might crash it. It can be a background program or you can make your computer a purely dedicated folder, it's up to you.

 

Since folding at home is run by Stanford I don't think you have to worry about it being an encryption-breaking-Trojan.

[dalekphalm]

How does medical research help anyone besides the medical researchers?

Uhm.......

 

 

Are you serious?

 

Medical research helps... well... everyone. It's called modern medical science. It's the reason that we live to 80+ years and the reason why we all don't die of polo or the flu or an infection from a papercut.

[dalekphalm]

Question: How do you know exactly what the folding program is doing? I'm just curious because I remember an episode of NCIS (and this is probably a stupid thing to think of) where a guy hid a program inside the code of an MMO, that basically used every computer playing this game, to crack the encryption of some (insert random government agency) and hack their computer base.

 

Sure its probably something that shouldn't be worried about, but it is a computer program designed to break up the load of a single task (I think) across many many computers.

Pretty simple actually:

 

The program is Open Source. Worried about what it's doing? Learn programming and just look. Obviously there are already tons of programmers looking at the code all the time, so I think you're safe.

 

That sort of stuff has happened before (Not for code breaking mind you). A small eSports tourney installed specialized software on all participants systems that was required for the tourney (I dont recall what the purpose of the software was), but the owner slipped in Bitcoin mining software and made something like $10,000 worth of BTC (These figures are just off the top of my head and are most likely not 100% accurate). I don't believe it ended well for that guy.

[Trik'Stari]

NCIS is fiction...

 

You can't really see exactly what it's doing because it's probably beyond the scope of most folder's understanding. There is a diagram that shows the protein you're working on, but I think it's more of an artist's interpretation more than an actual visual representation. The program will also list the project you're working on, and that project usually has a description with what it's trying to accomplish in words I can't understand without burning a dictionary.

 

You can tell it to run at all times instead of just with screensavers. The reason it wants you to run when your screensaver activates because Folding uses a ton of resources and other programs might crash it. It can be a background program or you can make your computer a purely dedicated folder, it's up to you.

 

Since folding at home is run by Stanford I don't think you have to worry about it being an encryption-breaking-Trojan.

Oh I know NCIS is fiction, derr, I was just curious as to whether or not you could watch it run and see what it was doing. I just thought it'd be cool to see it actually work, like rendering and what not, but I guess that waste's the computer's resources. Is it only done by stanford?

 

 

 

Pretty simple actually:

 

The program is Open Source. Worried about what it's doing? Learn programming and just look. Obviously there are already tons of programmers looking at the code all the time, so I think you're safe.

 

That sort of stuff has happened before (Not for code breaking mind you). A small eSports tourney installed specialized software on all participants systems that was required for the tourney (I dont recall what the purpose of the software was), but the owner slipped in Bitcoin mining software and made something like $10,000 worth of BTC (These figures are just off the top of my head and are most likely not 100% accurate). I don't believe it ended well for that guy.

That's the kinda shit I was thinking of, nothing necessarily nefarious, but deceitful. Not gonna waste electricity to make someone else money.

[dalekphalm]

Oh I know NCIS is fiction, derr, I was just curious as to whether or not you could watch it run and see what it was doing. I just thought it'd be cool to see it actually work, like rendering and what not, but I guess that waste's the computer's resources. Is it only done by stanford?

 

 

 

That's the kinda shit I was thinking of, nothing necessarily nefarious, but deceitful. Not gonna waste electricity to make someone else money.

Folding@Home is specifically run by Stanford, but there are hundreds of other "Folding" projects run by various private companies, universities, and research organizations.

 

There is a visualization that you can watch (Or disable) but yeah it does use a little bit of GPU power to display. And it's also, as mentioned, more of an artists rendition, or a basic 3D simulation. I doubt it's 100% accurate to what you're actually crunching.

[Trik'Stari]

Folding@Home is specifically run by Stanford, but there are hundreds of other "Folding" projects run by various private companies, universities, and research organizations.

 

There is a visualization that you can watch (Or disable) but yeah it does use a little bit of GPU power to display. And it's also, as mentioned, more of an artists rendition, or a basic 3D simulation. I doubt it's 100% accurate to what you're actually crunching.

awesome. if they're mostly doin numerical calculations (I assume) why don't they use your GPU like bitcoin mining does instead of the actual CPU? which I never understood because I always thought the CPU had more processing power than a GPU

[Bloodyvalley]

It's a source of a revenue for me and with that I buy games. Also, it can cure cancer and some other stuff but who cares about that

[daemonowner]

Uhm.......

 

 

Are you serious?

 

Medical research helps... well... everyone. It's called modern medical science. It's the reason that we live to 80+ years and the reason why we all don't die of polo or the flu or an infection from a papercut.

That was my rhetorical answer to the OP. The "...how does it benefit people other then the universities?" part.

[dalekphalm]

awesome. if they're mostly doin numerical calculations (I assume) why don't they use your GPU like bitcoin mining does instead of the actual CPU? which I never understood because I always thought the CPU had more processing power than a GPU

I'm fairly sure that these days Folding is GPU Compute capable (Don't know whether it's CUDA or OpenCL or both though). But you're right, GPU can be way more efficient and powerful in a task like this.