Folding@Home

For those that don’t know what Folding@Home or F@H is:

“Proteins are biology’s workhorses- its “nanomachines.” Proteins help your body break down food into energy, regulate your moods, and fight disease. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology much of the process remains a mystery.

When proteins do not fold correctly (misfolding), there can be serious health consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, AIDS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many cancers.

If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses.” – Stanford University

The F@H program has been around for several years now and uses your spare computing power for good! It also double functions as a good program to heat the room with hardware instead of your central heating system. We highly recommend anyone who’s got a bunch of spare hardware to check out the software and join a team to compete with people all around the world!

Luckily for us, GPUs lately have gotten a huge increase in their PPD or Points Per Day. See below for the average PPDs we were able to achieve with different GPUs. The 900 series right now are the best GPUs you can buy for F@H, both in the Point:$ and the Point:Watt ratios. With the reference GTX 970 having a TDP of only 145W and costing $329, you can achieve amazing results!

We let the GTX 970 SSC fold overnight and were shocked what we discovered when we woke up. As Folding@Home runs the GPU at 100% usage, we fully expected to wake up to the noise of the fans blaring, except we didn’t hear anything when we woke up. Even running under 100% load for 12 hours, the fans barely had to spin in order to keep this GPU running stable, very impressive.