Which DC Projects?

Soldato
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I used to run SETI a few years back but packed it in as my machine was getting on a bit. My current laptop, while not the most powerful thing in the world (2Ghz C2D, 8600GT) seems quick enough, especially with this new fangled CUDA thingy, to actually run some DC projects.

Now the world has moved on a bit since there was just seti and folding at home. Thanks to bionic theres pleanty to choose from, sooooo.

What projects do people run and why? At the moment I'm running climate prediction and GPU grid so I can max out the CPU and GPU but is there anything more worthy of processor time? I'd rather do something a little less far fetched than looking for aliens (not saying theres nothing out there, I just think the odds of picking up any transmissions are so slim its maybe better to focus on the here and now:))
 
Soldato
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I run SETI primarily (but am concentrating on the Astropulse side of things now, as that can also detect pulsars, primordial black holes etc, which I'm interested in). I'm also currently running Rosetta@home*, which is very similar to Folding@home. Lots of members here run F@H though, but the SMP etc business scares me :eek:. It really depends on what you're interested in.


*Granted that this is to help fend off those pesky pirates, who are starting to catch us up again - explanation 1, explanation 2
 
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Man of Honour
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Firstly, check to make sure your laptop isn't one of the ones nVidia messed up (due to poor choice of TIM on the graphics chipset). If it's less than six months old you should be OK, but watch temps if you're running CPU and GPU together as it'll get mighty toasty.

Other than that, it's personal choice. Of course, it'd be remiss of me not to try and tempt you to join our Rosetta@home team for the reasons already given. :)
 
Soldato
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Laptop is about a year old, its an inspiron 1720 and fitted with a 8600GTm. GPU grid has been getting computation errors but I had put that down to the core being overclocked too far. Will stick it back to stock and see what happens. I have quite a good cooling pad so the gpu temp sits in the low 50s most of the time.
 
Man of Honour
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Same age as mine then - and mine does have a dodgy nVidia chip. They (Dell) 'fixed' it by tinkering with the CPU thermal monitoring so that it reads hotter than it is and thus runs the CPU fan harder. At least I hope that's what they did because I got a reading of 99C when I was running both cores flat out on Rosetta. :eek:
 
Soldato
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Rosetta is a good project which investigates the mechanics of protein folding and docking. The site admins are very communicative and the published research has been well received.

Einstein is still going strong and continues to up the sensitivity of the laser interferometers they are gathering date with. That gravitational wave can't be too far away now.

SIMAP is a valuable project which looks for similarities in recently discovered proteins to proteins in their database.Proteins with similar structure probably have similar functions so it assists scientists in directing their work towards potentially useful targets. They have work at the start of the month for a week or two before the db is up to date and then the queues run dry again.

That's the nice thing about BOINC though. You can run a whole bunch of projects and just decide which way you want to assign your cycles. If you find one that's paying out over th odds be sure to shout about it here. :)
 
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Soldato
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I should have said that 3 cores of my quad runs BOINC WUs. It's set up so that most of the time it works on Rosetta but will grab SIMAP and LHC work when it's available.
I have an A64 which runs Leiden and SIMAP when work is available.

The last core on the quad is used for GPU folding@home.
 
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