Folding at Home

About
folding@home is a distributed computing project which makes use of idle CPUs across the Internet to perform computationally-intensive protein-folding simulations.

Configuration
The folding@home client configuration lives in. Additionally, there is a file living at for the folding@home daemon.

Configuring Gentoo Daemon
There are two settings in the daemon configuration, the first one is for the client options to be passed, such as -smp to enable smp work units. The second option is to select the PID file. The typical user only needs to edit the first, FOLD_OPTS variable.

Configuring Client
contains a setup script that will aid in the setup of folding@home.

Question Help

 * User name? - The user name that will identify you. Someone might be using this name already.  In that case you will be contributing to their stats.


 * Team number? - If you are contributing to a team, enter their number here.


 * Ask before fetching/sending work (no/yes)? - If you wish to set and forget folding@home, type 'no'.


 * Use proxy (yes/no)? - Does your connection require a proxy?


 * Allow receipt of work assignments and return of work results greater than 5MB in size (such work units may have large memory demands) (no/yes)? - Larger work units use more RAM, take more time to complete, and require a faster internet connection. It's okay to say 'no' here.


 * Change advanced options (yes/no)? - Do you want to fine tune, you Gentoo user you?


 * Core Priority (idle/low) - Set the CPU usage point at which folding@home kicks in.


 * Disable highly optimized assembly code (no/yes)? - Choose 'no', unless you're experiencing problems.


 * Interval, in minutes, between checkpoints (3-30)? - Time interval between when your work is saved in minutes.


 * Request work units without deadlines (no-pref/no/yes)? -


 * Ignore any deadline information (mainly useful if system clock frequently has errors) (no/yes)? -


 * Machine ID (1-8)? - At this point: 1.

Post-configuration
If you wish to have folding@home run on start up, add it to your default run-level:

Starting folding@home is easy once configured:

Folding on an Nvida GPU
Currently there is no native support for folding on any gpu in linux. However through a cuda wrapper in wine it is possible to run an nvidia gpu on linux. Unfortunatly this is not supportated by the current ebuild so it must be done manually. For more information see the linuxfah wiki or Stanford forums.

Now what?
If this isn't exciting enough, there are some exciting things you can do with folding@home.

Statistics
Standford University offers statistics for all sorts of stuff. ExtremeOverclocking.com offers their own statistics and analytics.

Watching your rank go up is always exciting!

Join a Team
Contributing to a team is exciting.

11298 - Gentoo Linux Users Everywhere

Promote
Get others using folding@home (and Gentoo of course).