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Team PowerPage Climbing in the Folding@home Ranks: Tips to Maximize Performance

First of all, thanks to Jason for creating the PowerPage folding team. I never cared to contibute any CPU or energy to SETI when it came out a few year sago, but this project impacts real people in real time and is definitely worthwhile to me to contribute as much as I can. I probably wouldn’t have been aware of it if not for the PowerPage. In case you missed the article previously posted on the PowerPage, the essentials are as follows: Click read more for the full story!


First of all, thanks to Jason for creating the PowerPage folding team. I never cared to contibute any CPU or energy to SETI when it came out a few year sago, but this project impacts real people in real time and is definitely worthwhile to me to contribute as much as I can. I probably wouldn’t have been aware of it if not for the PowerPage. In case you missed the article previously posted on the PowerPage, the essentials are as follows:

Read up on the project and science involved, download the client, and don’t forget to enter Team PowerPage’s team #, 3072. First, to extract the most work out of the F@H (Folding@home) client, assign the client to launch at each login automatically in the Login preferences. Once it is started, “display” the protein and hide it. Do *not* minimize it. Minimizing will cause it to run almost half as fast as if it is hidden and having it in the background causes the client to spend more CPU cycles on the graphic display.

Second, do not have your machine set to “sleep” and do not select the built- in screensaver unless you have to. On my machine, I have the separate setting for my display to go to sleep, which still preserves my LCD and saves energy, but not the machine itself. A sleeping machine will bring F@H to a grinding halt.

Third, if you happen to have a SETI client running on the same machine- forget it. The two cannot co-exist and SETI will hog all of the useful cycles from F@H. If you only have one CPU at your disposal, you need to decide wether it’s more important to you to donate your cycles toward searching for E.T. or helping people right here on earth, right now.

Lastly, keep in mind that all of the above tips are regarding the Graphical client. I have not used the text console version and I do not use the screensaver version and don’t know if they apply to same. Additionally, there are great differences in the molecules that are processed and the time it takes to complete them and the credit recieved are greatly different. Apparently, Mac users have just begun to recieve the larger molecules and the delay was thought to have stemmed from the lack of understanding of wether Mac clients would be able to complete the larger work units in enough time. The time limits and values of each of the various proteins are described on a webpage. It seems that we are doing fine (duh) and there are now about 7 Mac teams in the top 100 and several more making strong charges toward it. Team PowerPage has made tremendous strides in the last 2 weeks swooping from the 500s to a rank of 231 at the time of this writing. F@H ranking site only lists the

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.