What made you join the cause?

[yahavbr]

Just curious to hear how you started folding?

For me it was via programming forum I was part of (still there actually ), someone posted about folding explaining what it is and some of the members, myself included, followed his lead and started folding as part of his team.
This was about four maybe five years ago, I think the one who posted it is no longer folding, lol..

Your turn.. looking forward to hear your stories.

[HaloJones]

First started Distributed Computing with SETI@Home in the 90s. I was active on alt.comp.hardware.overclocking and someone started talking about Genome@Home and A.C.H.O. started a team. That team morphed into The Genome Collective and was very active in GAH. When GAH turned into FAH, I split the team by starting up with Distributed Folding but when that ended the team re-joined its efforts into FAH.

I fold because I'm obsessive about the points and the battle to get the most I can with my limited budget while ignoring my power bill. I hope that the science is worthwhile but don't pretend to understand it.

[kiore]

I was on a rationalist forum and some members were posting about "folding" seemed such a unusual topic title I had to read it fortunately some people were patient enough to explain the distributed computing idea and offer lots of support and encouragement. I then started reading up here as well and built my first computer just a few months later, I'm now about to build my 4th and my combined points total is fast approaching 20million, so I guess I'm now addicted
I think I would have fallen away pretty quickly without the community support I received here and the comradeship of being in a team.
Cheers.

[yahavbr]

First started Distributed Computing with SETI@Home in the 90s. I was active on alt.comp.hardware.overclocking and someone started talking about Genome@Home and A.C.H.O. started a team. That team morphed into The Genome Collective and was very active in GAH. When GAH turned into FAH, I split the team by starting up with Distributed Folding but when that ended the team re-joined its efforts into FAH.

I fold because I'm obsessive about the points and the battle to get the most I can with my limited budget while ignoring my power bill. I hope that the science is worthwhile but don't pretend to understand it.

That's pretty cool.. so when did you start folding? Right from the very beginning?

[yahavbr]

I was on a rationalist forum and some members were posting about "folding" seemed such a unusual topic title I had to read it fortunately some people were patient enough to explain the distributed computing idea and offer lots of support and encouragement. I then started reading up here as well and built my first computer just a few months later, I'm now about to build my 4th and my combined points total is fast approaching 20million, so I guess I'm now addicted
I think I would have fallen away pretty quickly without the community support I received here and the comradeship of being in a team.
Cheers.

Your 24 hours average (according to your signature) is only 111 - how can that be?

[kiore]

I was on a rationalist forum and some members were posting about "folding" seemed such a unusual topic title I had to read it fortunately some people were patient enough to explain the distributed computing idea and offer lots of support and encouragement. I then started reading up here as well and built my first computer just a few months later, I'm now about to build my 4th and my combined points total is fast approaching 20million, so I guess I'm now addicted
I think I would have fallen away pretty quickly without the community support I received here and the comradeship of being in a team.
Cheers.

Your 24 hours average (according to your signature) is only 111 - how can that be?

I'm on leave at present and only have an old laptop with me, normally a little more than than from 3 quad cores and 9 GPUs

[toTOW]

My distributed computing history is quite long ...

I first started on distributed.net in the 90s on the RC5-64 project ...

Cracking a code finally became boring, so I started to search for a more useful project. At that time, I joined the SETI@Home project. The project suited fine with the computer I had and my 56k connection.

But after a few years, I started to think that searching for aliens was a bit pointless ... and SETI started to move to BOINC which I never liked, so again, I searched for a more interesting projcet.

I wanted to join FAH at this time, but it was impossible to queue WUs, so it didn't suit to my 56k connection so I joined the ECCp project that was in 1999 or 2000 ... at this moment, I got ADSL, but I still had an old computer (P3 450), so the short ECCp packets were great.

When I replaced my machine in 2002 with and Athlon XP 2000+, I finally joined FAH and I soon became more and more involved in the project. And you know the end of story until today

[yahavbr]

My distributed computing history is quite long ...

I first started on distributed.net in the 90s on the RC5-64 project ...

Cracking a code finally became boring, so I started to search for a more useful project. At that time, I joined the SETI@Home project. The project suited fine with the computer I had and my 56k connection.

But after a few years, I started to think that searching for aliens was a bit pointless ... and SETI started to move to BOINC which I never liked, so again, I searched for a more interesting projcet.

I wanted to join FAH at this time, but it was impossible to queue WUs, so it didn't suit to my 56k connection so I joined the ECCp project that was in 1999 or 2000 ... at this moment, I got ADSL, but I still had an old computer (P3 450), so the short ECCp packets were great.

When I replaced my machine in 2002 with and Athlon XP 2000+, I finally joined FAH and I soon became more and more involved in the project. And you know the end of story until today

Sounds fantastic.. considering your PPD do you have whole medium scale company folding for you??

[toTOW]

We're just a group of 4 close friends ... all crazy

And there's 100k missing at the moment, I have two machines down for 15 days ...

And while we're talking about past ... when I joined FAH, I remember some WUs worth 0.6 points that folded in 3 hours on a P4-m 1.4 GHz and 1.5 hours on the XP2000+ ... many things changed in the point system in the meantime

[divery4eyes]

Started with SETI, that just seemed futile after just a few months. What if somebody does find conclusive evidence of life, what happens then? Jumped over to RC-72 (or whatever it is called). Found that futile as well.
I was then on Newegg and read a review on a video card on its folding performance, i thinks an Akimbo 8800 gt.
Came to the website, read the forums, and initiated my first wu with a Little Valley motherboard.
1.33 Ghz Yonah core Celeron backed up by 2GB ddr2
Have been steadily upgrading since then.

The best thing I like about folding is the comraderie among all the participants. Go to any forum where the goal is science, not the points and see what I mean.

[tcphillips]

I am a recovering GIMP.

Loved the project, and huge primes appealed to my inner (recovering) mathematician.
After awhile, the processing requirements for finding new primes got to be far and away larger than anything I had (or was likely to have) in the stable, so it was time to look for a new project.

SETI? ==> Not so much. If we find 'em, what if they're not friendly? What if they're not Red Wing fans? What if they don't follow Michigan and State? Too many downside issues...
Folding@home ==> Yeah. With two gals in the family with auto-immune diseases (Rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's) and one war-hero step-father with senile dementia/Alzheimer's, it was an easy decision.

Now everything in the stable folds 7 x 24. OK, well nearly everything. Except for...
Einstein@home ==> The holding tank for machines too old/slow/weak/behind-the-curve to fold. This is their last stop before they get donated.

--Tom

[PantherX]

I first came across F@H when reading Guru3D Articles and did some research. However, since I had dial-up and a Celeron P4, I decided to wait till my next build and to get a ADSL Line. Finally, when I got both of them, I joined F@H in April 2009 and am pretty happy about my decision.

Never bothered about SETI because we, as a human civilization, have too many issues and F@H starts solving the ones that are related to protein folding diseases. Hopefully with the research of F@H, we can hopefully find cures to some diseases and have a better understanding of others

EDIT - It also "justifies" my need to constantly upgrade to the latest hardware

[MtM]

I started folding when I learned about the project and had to opportunity to do so. I am not a person with a thick wallet so I can't purchase or upgrade for the sole reason of folding so my contributions have been small.

Why I fold? My mother died of cancer, my grandfather died of cancer, my gf's grandmother died of cancer recently. That's was what started it, now I'm also very exited because of this news and Vijay's blog post about it. I am pretty sure I have a form of autism, most probable Asperger. So if they can find out what causes it I might have to worry less about my kids. Also, there is the knowledge that I am going to get older, and alzheimer/dementia does not sound appealing though I am not sure if autism has any influence on that ( I already have memory problems and I'm just 31 ). Then, my brother has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and well the pieces just all fit. Anyone who folds is making a difference, and I thank everyone for it!

[Zagen30]

I started in March 2007 when the PS3 client came out. I hadn't heard of the project before, but I recognized that my PS3 was off and doing nothing worthwhile most of the time, so I might as well have it do something useful. I didn't find out until November of that year that there were PC clients, but since then I've been steadily adding computers to my total. F@h inspired me to build my own desktop, something I had never considered before (the fact that I could barely play games at their lowest settings on my laptop was also an inspiration; F@h was probably 70% of the impetus, though).

I'm lucky that no close family members or friends have any of the diseases or conditions being studied. Since I'm never going to improve the fields of biology or chemistry through my own work (I'm studying to be a computer engineer), I feel that this is the one way I can contribute to important research in those areas.

[uncle fuzzy]

I ran across a post on a gaming company forum. It sounded interesting, so I started folding on my low-level gaming rig. A little over 3 years later I have 4 C2Q's, an i7, and 11 various gpus folding 24/7.

It's the competition that keeps me going, but I don't think I'd have spent the money to build new systems if the end result wasn't worthwhile in its own right.