I'll start off with a few things I found.
First, I agree with this post: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19098#p190959 which states that simplicity is important. Folding@home does some very complicated stuff, so I agree that its important to not overwhelm someone with all the technical workings. But that depends on the audience of course, because if your talking to a biochem major it's a different story.
I stated here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19098#p192560 I think its a good idea to mention that users can back out of donating at any time, and that normally (meaning the uniprocessor client) they can use their computer as usual and shut them down overnight if they want. Also as Dr. Pande mentioned on the same topic, v7 will make everything unified and super easy, which is excellent. Look at how productive we already are when donors have to choose carefully from a long list of clients!
There's a small page on the F@h wiki about convincing a large university to run F@h. Has some interesting ideas: http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Convincing ... nstitution)_to_run_the_FAH_client
Here's a short essay ad I got forwarded to every Computer Scientist at USU which was pretty effective:
I wanted them to join our team, but since this is a team-neutral forum I've replaced every reference with *****
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To every Computer Science Undergraduate,
I invite you to actively pursue a cure for cancer, Alzheimer's, sickle-celled anemia, cystic fibrosis, and many other diseases by running a small and secure program on your computer. Join Folding@home, the world’s most powerful and by far most productive distributed-computing project. Producing an average of almost eight scientific papers a year, and running at five times the speed of the world's fastest supercomputer, Folding@home studies protein folding, misfolding, and other molecular dynamics. Protein misfolding is believed to be directly linked to the onset of diseases such as Mad Cow, Alzheimer's, and many cancers. Pioneered and overseen by Professor Vijay Pande of Stanford University, the project has accurately simulated protein folding on timescales thousands of times longer than were previously thought possible.
Hundreds of thousands of computers around the world actively contribute to the project. The small and highly secure software installed on each of these computers simply downloads a "workunit", processes it for several hours, uploads the results, and then repeats. This process usually runs completely in the background, and often requires very little maintenance. The simulations periodically save their progress, so no progress is lost if it is paused or temporarily shut down. Every contribution accomplishes more science, and users can easily opt out of the project at any time.
You can contribute to the project by running the software on your PC, Mac, or PS3. The Folding@home website, folding.stanford.edu/, contains guides, FAQs, statistics, and the project’s current results. The "Download" section offers a variety of clients, each tailored to different hardware. For beginners, there is a main uniprocessor client. This is the most stable of the available, but is also the least productive. If you own a computer with four CPU cores, there is a highly productive client (the SMP) for that as well. Folding@home can also take advantage of the high power and efficiency of a GPU. These latter clients, although technically in beta, are available under the “High Performance Windows Clients” link in the Download section.
You can join the ***** team! For each workunit that you complete, more points are added to our overall score. These points generally correlate to the amount of science accomplished. Currently, the ***** team has accumulated enough points to be ranked in the top 4th percentile! I invite you to join us in this noble cause. If you chose to participate, simply download the client you want, and upon first launch, a configuration display will appear. [RECOMMENDATIONS AS TO HOW TO CONFIGURE THE USERNAME/TEAM FIELDS EDITED OUT, SINCE ITS YOUR CHOICE] This will identify you on our team, and all of your contributions will be listed on our team page, [LINK TO ***** F@h STATS PAGE]. You can even run multiple clients at the same time under your name, so long as you provide exactly the same username and team number. Every contribution moves science along further. I hope that in several months the ***** will pass up the [RIVAL SCHOOL] team!
Thank you for your time, good luck with your studies, and I hope to see you on the team!
Sincerely,
Jesse Victors
(again with ***** blanking out team names and numbers)
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Computers can think very quickly now days. They think faster and faster every year. But how much processing power do you need to browse Facebook or check your email? Not that much. I could understand needing all that power if your gaming or something, but for most tasks you probably use like 5 or 10% at most of the full computing power. This power is cheap, and sometimes you need all of it, and most people don't even care about it. But the fact is that most of the time the majority of the computing power remains unused most of the time. Now, there are certain problems in science and mathematics that would take thousands if not millions of years on a single computer to solve. Some people believe in aliens and want to analyze radio signals to find an unnatural one. There are so many stars and systems, and so many frequencies that this is a monumental task. There are also very large numbers that for various reasons need to be factored; this is also difficult. Some mathematicians are looking for specific types of prime numbers. So here we have all this number crunching to do, and all these people with gobs of spare processing power. Why not use them? When personal computers are used in this manner it’s called distributed computing, and it’s an excellent and highly efficient tool. You have volunteers helping out your project, so the leaders of the project don't have to pay for renting a supercomputer. The project I'm running on my computer is called Folding@home. It simulates proteins folding up into a 3D shape. Normally this 3D shape is perfect safe, and the protein goes on to do its job normally in the body. But certain major diseases are caused when things go wrong in that process, and Folding@home is trying to figure out the reason behind them. This is why I'm so excited about it. Its legit. It’s not alien-hunting. It’s not irrelevant prime numbers. Its Stanford's front-line highly-productive biomedical research! And the cool thing is that I can help out and still use my computer normally! Now I'm part of this hundreds-thousand-strong global project. Combined, our computing power rivals even the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Since the project launched in October 2000, 84 scientific papers have been written as a direct result, more than all the other major distributed-computing projects combined. I have been participating in this project since October 2010, and my team (the ***** team, #*****) is pretty high on the rankings.
I’d recommend the Folding@home article on Wikipedia. It’s pretty well written, and should cover just about everything. The main Folding@home website, http://folding.stanford.edu, has lots of good information, FAQs, and how to download different clients. They offer clients for a variety of hardware. Their main client is extremely stable and will run on a single processor. They also have clients that use your graphics card, and another that take advantage of multiple processor cores. These last two are highly productive, but aren’t quite as stable as the main uniprocessor clients. They are available for download here: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther. I’ve had no problems at all running them. I’ve been running the GPU and SMP (multicore processor client) on my computer since January.
Back when I learned about this project, I started a team, the *****. I then encouraged others to get involved in the project and join that team. You join a team by entering the team number in the Configure window of the client. Ours is *****. What I like to do is also use my name as my username. That way everyone sees Jesse_Victors on the team. It makes it easier to keep track of everyone and then congratulate them. :)
This may seem like a pretty complicated project. In inside, it is. But to the donors, it’s pretty simple because they don’t have to worry about all the technical workings. I’m just trying to fill you in as to the project itself and how to get involved. Most of the time I’m not using my computer, but it always stays busy running Folding@home. When I need to do something, the clients are designed to back off a bit to give me more processing power as needed. And if I want to restart my computer, they resume from a checkpoint. If I want to quit the project altogether, some other donor will end up picking up where I left off. So it’s all very much volunteer run. I find that with a few small exceptions I can pretty much use my computer as normal. But I’m searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and other diseases at the same time! Donors don’t have to have a powerful computer to join, because every little bit helps.
Anyway, enough said. If you have any questions or need clarification or something, feel free to email me back and I’d be happy to help out.
Jesse V.
but that's just a dream and we'll see how it goes.Anyway, feel free to post any ideas you have below, or insert your own ads in "code" tags. If there's any foldingforum discussions that help out, it'd be great to gather those together as well. Thanks.
). If I made those stubs on wikipedia, I wouldn't be so sure that the editorial overview would correct any possible wrong information.