[ExI] [wta-talk] Folding at Home

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:30 AM, M.Simons <msimons at slackware.com> wrote:
> I'm currently running www.worldcommunitygrid.org projects - and
> recommend them because they're easy for the average person to
> install and run.  In addition, their website, etc. is geared towards
> the average joe, so if you want to install it on your family &
> friends computers, etc. it should not be an uphill battle to explain
> it.

I welcome and praise all distributed computing initiative, but perhaps
transhumanists would get a little more more collective visibility by
concentrating the efforts.

In this respect, I am partial to the Folding at Home project for three reasons:
- Stanford U is a very credible institution having already published
significant results, and proteomics is a more obviously
transhumanism-related issue than the exploration of arcane
mathematical space or weather model, interesting as the latter may be;
- the clients include a display making somewhat "visible" what the
processing taking place is doing;
- the PS3, of which I have a couple always on, comes with Folding at Home
out-of-the-box, and delivers a full order of magnitude more
performance that your average instance of the x86 client; more
importantly, for PCs equipped with hi-perf Nvidia or ATI GPUs there
are now GPU clients delivering a more or less equivalent punch per
watt and gigaherz and once again in a whole different league than
traditional distributed computing on Intel CPUs.

Setups and configs, needless to say, are really a breeze.

-- 
Stefano Vaj