We have a distributed computing team on http://folding.stanford.edu/

Team name is: LinuxBasics.org
Team number: #43112
Team Page: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=43112

• As of August 28, 2005 our Folding@Home team has gone over the 450 work unit mark, and we are in the top 5% of the teams.
• As of October, 2006 our Folding@Home team has done 1871 work units, and we are in the top 2.5% of the teams.

Folding at home is worthwhile project involving the search for cures for certain diseases involving the way proteins fold. It’s comples stuff, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to help. If you would like to join us go to http://folding.stanford.edu/ to read about it. Then go to http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html to select a username and to download the appropriate installation package.

The Windows package is an installer. Double-click to install. After it is installed, it automatically restarts any time you reboot. It’s very easy. I run it on my machine at work. You have to put in your username and team number at the beginning. That’s about it.

If you run on Linux, you will get a console package. This is the actual client rather than an installation file like you get for Windows. You just make a directory for it in your user’s directory and run it there. You have to be sure to restart it every time you reboot your computer.

I restart mine each time I reboot my machine using a script called ‘fahstart’:

cd /home/ajlewis2/FAH
./FAH4Console-Linux.exe > myfahlog &

This changes to the directory where I have folding’s program sitting ‘FAH’ in my home user directory. Change that to what yours is. Then it runs the program and throws the output to a logfile. The information produced will automatically go out when I am online and a new package of unprocessed info will be downloaded and begun.

When Folding is on a laptop it may cause the fan to run more than one would like. You can cut down the amount of cpu used with the program cpulimit which I found in the repositories for Ubuntu. Be sure that Folding has completely started. Then run cpulimit with the maximum percentage of cpu you want to devote to Folding@Home. This simple script will first print out the running process if it is there and then limit the cpu on that process to 30%. I named this fahlimit and put it in my ~/bin directory and made it executable:

#!/bin/bash
ps ax |grep -i fah|grep "RN"
cpulimit -p `ps ax |grep -i fah |grep "RN" |awk '{print $1}'` -l 30 &>/dev/null &

If you do not see any output when you run this, it means that the Folding process has not started yet, and you should run it again. You can double check that the CPU is at 30% or lower with top.