Sunday 13 August 2006

Folding under pressure

No salad today. Instead I installed Folding@home on my main machine at home.

Folding@home is a background process that calculates protein folding. Actually it only calculates certain parts of the protein folding, which is a horribly complicated process. But when thousands of ordinary PCs do this, together they become one of the world's strongest supercomputers. This is needed to find out how the atoms in proteins fit together, and so find out what goes wrong in certain diseases where proteins fail to work as expected. (Among them Alzheimer's and Bovine Spongiform Encephopathy.)

The Alzheimer's part is a pretty strong motivator for me to let this thing run on my computer for free. I have thought about it for a while now, since I am advancing in the years and it is not obvious that I will die from other causes first. If I get Alzheimer's while my body is still healthy, I will probably have to kill myself rather than risk the darkness within me to break loose. Evidently many patients regress to a childish level. In my childhood, I was repeatedly close to killing people. With my current body and nothing to lose, I probably would succeed. So, Alzheimer's is as bad as they come.

I don't think I even wish to touch the theological implications of that paragraph with a pitchfork.

The program does indeed cause the machine to grow hotter. I noticed this already last year when I installed it on the laptop at work. I will probably have to disable it if we get a heat wave again, as we have had more or less all summer. It only uses the processor power that other programs don't use: When the machine stands idle, or when the others are not running full throttle. (For instance, text editing typically uses less than 1% of processing power, web browser 1-2%, but The Sims 2 70-100%. Folding@home detects automatically how much is available at any given moment. Even when the machine is idle, it only uses 50%. Then again it is the newest machine. Modern processors give off quite a bit of heat when working, but not when standing idle. (The harddisk still rotates, producing some heat anyway.)

I am not worried about the processor being used up before its time. It has never happened in the 20 years or so that I have had a PC (my oldest machine, still occasionally used at the office because it can read 5.25" floppies, has a 8MHz 80286 processor with 10MHz turbo mode...) On one machine the power supply broke down (it was stuffed with extra cards), but the others were still limping along when I phased them out because the newest games did not run on them. Except for that first machine, my policy is to buy last year's model at half price, then upgrade after 3 years. It is much cheaper than buying the latest and upgrade after 4. ^^

I have 3 computers that I would trust to run this program without me standing by with a fire extinguisher. When the winter comes, I may run them all. Or I may buy some firewood to heat the house. Either or. Woodsmoke doesn't cure alzheimer's, but it does combat greenhouse warming I think. And it is not at all sure that the nice guys at Stanford will be able to solve the puzzle either. But at least they try.