I'm Folding again

[malada]

Folding at Home, that is.

I was Folding for awhile because cancer sucks... but I dropped it when I switched from Ubuntu (XFCE) to Mint (Cinnamon).  I wanted to make sure Mint was stable and I was comfortable with it before Folding again. 

I'm tempted to take my spare system in the basement - which I use regularly when doing laundry - and making that a dedicated Folding machine along with my main rig.  With a 1050TI graphics card it's weaker than my main rig with a 1660 Super but hey, the  more Folding the better.  Most of the Folding is done with the GPU so the bigger and better the graphics card is the more proteins get Folded.  

Comments

[armiphlage]

If the AI bubble bursts, I hope that all the existing hardware gets repurposed for useful computing tasks like this.

[warriorsavant]

Confessing my ignorance time. When you said you were Folding, I was thinking Origami. Please enlighten me.

[malada]

Folding at Home is a distributed computing set up where individual computers download a set of protein models and the program starts folding them (which activates them) in different ways. The results are uploaded back to a central site for analysis. From the website:

"Folding” in our community refers to running simulations of proteins, the molecular machines that perform most of the active processes we associate with life, from muscle contraction to sensing light and digesting food. We exploit the biological insight these simulations provide to inform drug discovery and other efforts to combat global health threats.

https://foldingathome.org/

You can choose to select a particular disease or ailment to concentrate on. It can be used on any computer from your bog standard desktop to a super computer. It got real popular when COVID hit and they added COVID to the list.

[warriorsavant]

Super cool