*Posted with permission from our kind moderators*

Hello fellow hardware guru's and overclockers,

The LYN forums need your help.

More specifically, the Folding@Malaysia team needs your assistance.

1. What is Folding@Malaysia (F@M)?
The team was formed over 7 years ago and are involved in a distributed computing project called Folding@Home (F@H). This is a project created by reknowned Stanford University in the USA and its main purpose is to find cures for protein-related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cancer, Huntington's diseases, and others.

Basically, you use your PC's spare CPU/GPU cycles to perform simulations of protein folding. We typically use our PC for Internet surfing, MS Office type tasks - light tasks. So the CPU (and GPU) are idling - this idle capacity can be dedicated to F@H, to help find cures for these diseases!

For more information, please check out the FAQ at the F@M forums.

2. Why should I bother?
Other than indirectly doing charity work on your PC (and hence accumulating alot of "goodness" for yourself ), there is also a friendly, global competition where most of the top forums/companies are participating in (Hardocp, Anandtech, xtremesystems, techreport, EVGA, Google, NVIDIA, etc). And this is why F@M was formed - so we as LYN forum'ers and patriotic Malaysians can contribute to this good cause together! This is where we can put lowyat.net on the global map!

Right now, we are ranked 66th and slowly sliding back, being overtaken by many other teams with more folders! So we need YOUR help! We can't be beaten by the others, we are lowyat.net! Let's show them who we are, and what we are capable of! lowyat.net boleh!

If you can spare some CPU and GPU cycles, please join us in this good cause!

3. How can I help?
You can download the F@H client here. There are a few different types of clients (CPU, GPU) and F@H also supports different OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3). Please take a look at the official F@H guide for more information on these clients. Read below for a short section on these clients.

In summary, you can use a CPU-based client (uniprocessor or SMP) and/or the GPU client if you have a discrete gfx card like NVIDIA or ATI. YES! You can even fold on your CUDA cores or your Stream processors, and the advantage is typically 5-10 times faster than the CPU client :



All you need to do is to download the client and start folding! Join F@M as team 2999 with your own userid!

4. Won't running the F@H client interfere with my PC usage/gaming?
It depends - if you use the CPU client then it automatically runs only when the CPU is idle, and so will *not* interfere with your daily usage, even when gaming!. If you use the GPU client and you play games, then it is recommended to temporarily pause/suspend the client before gaming.

For the hardcore overclockers, the F@H clients are also a good way of stress-testing the CPU/GPU. Whilst it will not send your CPU and GPU temperatures soaring like Prime95 or Furmark, it is nevertheless a good indication of stability as well.

5. What if folding does not produce a cure?
In the end, folding will not produce the cure, it has and will continue to produce results for researchers to study. These results teach us things we did not know, or had not considered. The more we learn, the more we adapt our understanding of nature and its mysteries. Folding will never replace the human mind. And with the right tools, time, and curiosity, eventually a cure will be found. If you have a friend, relative, or know of someone suffering from these diseases, help find a cure by joining this great project!

We know there are many, many hardcore PC guru's here in LYN, and the level of expertise here probably equals the gurus in forums like HardOCP, Anandtech, xtreamesystems, Techreport, etc. These forums all have their own F@H teams and are doing very well - let's show these guys that we in LYN forums are just as good, if not better! Let's try to give these guys some real competition!

Please do join us at the Folding@Malaysia forums, and post any questions you have - we will be glad to help!

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Added on November 1, 2010, 11:08 amHello OC gurus,

I see that you are a little hesitant to participate - please feel free to post your queries/questions in the F@M forums. We already have a few new joiners from the HW forums - this is for a good cause (finding cures for cancers, Alzheimer's diseases, Parkinson's disease) and you are making use of your CPU/GPU to assist !

Fold on!

This post has been edited by Diademz: Nov 1 2010, 11:08 AM

You're spot on dblooi - F@H IS indeed a form of charity, and is absolutely voluntary. As you can probably tell, hackremo is one of our most passionate members and like many of us is trying to encourage more LYN'ers to participate in this good cause.

You're also correct about participation in the OC forums - unfortunately not many of us are hardcore o/c'ers - I am still using a 4-year old C2D rig, and that is why we are trying to spur some interest especially for those of you with high-end rigs with powerful CPUs and GPUs. So our participation is somewhat limited both by our knowledge and also resources. Having said that, we do have a handful of members with i7 rigs.

As for contribution to the community, as per my first post, the whole aim of F@H is to try to understand the process of protein folding - this is a project originating from Stanford University and instead of investing in a multi-million dollar supercomputer, they chose to harness the power of distributed computing to do this, and hence F@H is born. To date, F@H is the world's most powerful "supercomputer" with donors worldwide contributing over 5.5 petaflops of computing power.

As with all scientific projects, the process of protein folding is very complex and what Stanford are doing is collecting and analysing our donor results and coming up with the corresponding scientific papers and publishing them in many scientific journals, ultimately improving the overall understanding of how we can try to find cures for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and other protein-related diseases. So whilst it is still very theoretical, at least there is scientific proof that the science has advanced because of the folding community's contributions.

More details on this :
Recent post on the latest papers
Blog by F@H's founder Vijay Pande who is the Associate Professor in the Chemistry Dept of Stanford University on recent scientific achievements

Whilst it gives many of us a "feel-good" factor of doing something good for science, there is also the other aspect of F@H - which is the points-based system that Stanford has come up with mainly to make it a big attraction factor for those of us who fold, and consequently formation of many global IT forums/teams to participate in this project (EVGA being the top folding team now followed closely by HardOCP, Anandtech, etc)

I would say in terms of hardcore oc skills, we have guys like you who are extreme (LN2 heh) and would easily match the top oc'ers in the global community. So we're trying to put Folding@Malaysia (and LYN as well as this is F@M's home) on the global map as well, and need everyone's help to do so.

Once again, it is absolutely voluntary - and btw the folding clients are also good ways for stress-testing your rig for stability (eg it could pass p95 but could still fail when crunching on the folding client).

Let us know if anyone else has further questions - we'd be glad to answer them, or do drop by the F@M forums even if you don't fold, to see what it's like.

Overclock on, and fold on too!

Nice! I used to do seti@home before moving over to F@H many years back - they are all good causes no doubt - just do which one feels closer to your heart.

Wanna switch one of them for F@H and help F@M out?

Definitely Folding@Home