Overclockers Australia Folding@Home Version 5 Client Setup Guide.

 Folding@Home (F@H) is a distributed computing project that studies how proteins fold. As well as studying normal proteins, it investigates proteins that are involved in disease, ultimately resulting in a greater understanding of disease processes. If the disease processes are understood it is easier to find cures, so ultimately you could be helping to find cures for a number of diseases!!!

I want to help cure disease, how do I participate? 

To participate you need to download the F@H client from http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html. There are three different versions of the client – the graphical, console, and screensaver versions. This guide will only cover the graphical and console clients.  

Once you install your chosen client (covered later in the guide) you are done, your computer does the rest! The F@H client connects to the secure servers at Stanford, downloads a protein work unit to your computer, and then uses your idle CPU cycles to determine how the protein folds. As the F@H client runs at the lowest priority and uses only idle CPU cycles you will see no slow down on your computer. Once the work unit has finished the client uploads it back to the secure Stanford servers, and the data is analysed.  

You are also awarded points for the work you have done. You can fold as a team and battle against people around the world. As this guide is written for OCAU’ers, I’ll tell you that our team number is 24, and we are currently number 1 in the world!! However the teams from [H]ardOCP and Overclockers.Com are catching us, so

Which client should I use? 

The graphical client is the easiest and fastest client to set up. However, some people have reported problems with the graphical version interfering with certain games. If you are a gamer you may want to install the console version instead. You can also install multiple instances of the console client on a single computer, whereas you can’t do this with the graphical client. Installing multiple instances is useful if you are running a P4 Hyperthreading machine as 2 instances will produce more points per week than a single instance on these machines.