Folding@home proposal letter to my school

[ruth]

January 10, 2008
Dear Mr. Rudnick,

I am a freshman at South, and I want our school district to help scientists study diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's disease, and many more. Our school district can help just by running a simple piece of software called Folding@home. F@H is the largest and the most powerful distributed computing project in the world. The project is developed by the Pande Group/Harvard University and their mission is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases." Folding@home accurately simulates folding and misfoldings of proteins which helps scientists better understand the development of diseases mentioned above. Folding@home depends on the contributions of personal computers such as those in our school.
F@H will run in the background, making use of the unused computing power. Computers in our school usually run Internet Explorer, Word, or other small programs, and Folding@home will utilize the unused CPU power. Each user receives points based on what they complete, and each user at their will can add their points to a team such as WW-P School District team. Teams will create a competition between the schools, and this competition will help the scientific community.
West Windsor-Plainsboro regional school district should make an effort to run Folding@home on all capable computers. A team for our school district should be created as well. When a computer finishes a WU it receives points, and the user of that computer can add those points to a team. Each computer in our school district should add its points to the school district’s team. Running Folding@home on student’s home computers should be promoted, and the students can add their points to the school district’s team as well. Points will create a competition among the schools and students as they try to earn the most points. At the end, this significantly helps scientists find cures to diseases as we all donate our idle computer time to research.
My experience with Folding@home so far is very satisfactory. I discovered Folding@home trough my Playstation 3, and I run it on my personal laptop at home all the time. My computer is a Dell Inspiron B120, and without running Folding@home my CPU usage at most is 20%. I run Google talk, AIM, Firefox, and I have McAfee running as well. With F@H running my CPU usage is at 60% and up. I never experience any lagging or delay when I use other programs and can never tell that such a program is running. Based on my observations, F@H only uses the CPU power that is unused, and makes room for a program I am about to run.
Folding@home is a low-priority program; therefore, it will not consume all the CPU power or slow down the speed of the computer. Folding@home has a feature that allows us to control the amount of CPU usage. I let my FAH use about 60% of the CPU power. Helping scientists understand cancer is as easy as turning your computer on, and will not take any effort or additional resources. Folding@home will run when the student is logged off or logged in. This means that those computers turned on but not being used will be finding cures for diseases. The IT department can have complete control over Folding@home and they can monitor it. I request that you try this on a few school computers to see for yourself, and if you are satisfied I ask that you run the program on all possible computers in the school district.
Please take a look at: folding.stanford.edu and foldingforum.org for more information. Thank you for considering this. I will be glad to speak with you in person to discuss this matter further. Every little Folding helps.


Thank you,



how does this look? tips? suggestion? i can use every feedback u have!

[MoneyGuyBK]

Good Luck!

Make sure you make it more readable by using paragraphs and making it more presentable with fonts and spacing.
You know how those professors/teachers can be

Let us know, and Thanx for doing this for humanity!!!

Peace

[ruth]

Oh yah
I did this is Word i just hit copy paste so it wasnt all spaced out right

[uncle fuzzy]

The project is developed by the Pande Group/Harvard University

[ruth]

The project is developed by the Pande Group/Harvard University

uhhhhhh is that not good?

[uncle fuzzy]

Pande lab, Departments of Chemistry and of Structural Biology, Stanford University
http://folding.stanford.edu/Pande/Main

[ruth]

wow i am shocked

Thank you for finding it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[bruce]

What you have written (once Stanford U replaces Harvard U) looks fine to me.

Nevertheless, I'm going to make a couple of suggestions which you can decide to accept or not.

Most computers are fine running at 100% so the 60% seems low to me. In some cases we've seen some slight sluggishness, depending on how much RAM the computer has and what applications are running and people have suggested 95%. (I use 98% on a laptop which has relatively poor cooling but 100% on all desktop machines.) Nevertheless, if the school decides to use the 60% number, it will still be a nice donation to FAH.

I'd add the http: to this sentence: Please take a look at: http://folding.stanford.edu and http://foldingforum.org for more information.

[brityank]

how does this look? tips? suggestion? i can use every feedback u have!

Hi ruth,

Nice letter, good luck in getting your school to help out. Something to put in your kit for reference when you talk to the powers-that-be is a viewing of the F@H Molecular Simulations through Jmol. You can get to them here: http://jmol.sourceforge.net/fah/ to get a view of what the molecules look like. I've also seen some short video clips of how a fold or mis-fold occurs, but don't have any links readily available.

Cheers.

[jrweiss]

My computer is a Dell Inspiron B120, and without running Folding@home my CPU usage at most is 20%. I run Google talk, AIM, Firefox, and I have McAfee running as well. With F@H running my CPU usage is at 60% and up. I never experience any lagging or delay when I use other programs and can never tell that such a program is running. Based on my observations, F@H only uses the CPU power that is unused, and makes room for a program I am about to run.
Folding@home is a low-priority program; therefore, it will not consume all the CPU power or slow down the speed of the computer. Folding@home has a feature that allows us to control the amount of CPU usage. I let my FAH use about 60% of the CPU power.

Your analysis regarding the 20% CPU usage is very good. You may want to emphasize that even if F@H is set to use 100% of the UNUSED CPU cycles, it still releases the CPU for any other program you launch, though there may be a short lag while it releases the CPU. However, if F@H is set to use less than 100% of the CPU, that lag will essentially disappear, because the other program will be able to grab almost all it needs immediately.

I run F@H on a couple old P3/700MHz computers. I found that at 85% CPU usage there is no perceptible lag in F@H's release of the CPU. On newer/faster machines, 95% usually works if you notice a lag at 100%.

[uncle fuzzy]

Hi Ruth. Nice letter, but please do a spell check before you print it.

If you think the Powers-That-Be in the school would be "impressed" with hard science, here's a link to a link to an mp3 file of an interview with Vijay Pande. It's worth the 25 minutes to listen to.
http://folding.typepad.com/news/2007/12 ... in-bi.html

The news blog can be accessed with the News link at the top of this page.

[Joshua]

A few things to keep in mind mate.

First, most computers in schools are connected to a central database and connect to the internet through the same cables. I don't know if that will affect anything, but worthy of mention I feel.

Also most computers are kept in two states. The first is logged off, when students are not using them. Sitting at a login screen would do nothing, so figure out a work around. Furthermore you'll need to talk to the tech guy, because the computers are wiped clean every night.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great idea (mostly because I've been thinking about it myself) tell me how it goes! If you can think of any tips to shoot my way in fact, I would appreciate it.

One tip to you I can think of, make fliers and pamphlets and such and get the students involved.

[ruth]

My biology teacher who has a Phd said that one problem would be: Not many scientists use the data from Folding@home. So this will only help the small number of scientists

[ruth]

Also most computers are kept in two states. The first is logged off, when students are not using them. Sitting at a login screen would do nothing, so figure out a work around. Furthermore you'll need to talk to the tech guy, because the computers are wiped clean every night.

I did ask the people on this forum about it. And they told me that Folding@home will be folding even if the computer is at its login screen.

[Cajun_Don]

My biology teacher who has a Phd said that one problem would be: Not many scientists use the data from Folding@home. So this will only help the small number of scientists

Hi Ruth,

Most scientific projects can only afford a few scientists to do the research to find the answers that can help millions of people.

The cost of research by scientists is very expensive, and money and grants to cover the expense is very limited.

The Folding At Home Project has written 52 papers about the folding process, so other scientist can learn about what they have discovered. Then more scientists can expand their knowledge, and try to expanded the research further, for everyone.