Add a GPU to our folding team and help us get to number 1

Posted at: 5:58pm 27th November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

We need 360 more GPUs to get on top of the leaderboard

Now that Custom PC’s folding team is getting tantalisingly close to the number 1 spot, it’s becoming clear that our folding team has what it takes to be the top folding team in the world. Our production rate has already surpassed that of the teams at number 3 and 4 on the leaderboard, and we’ve worked out that we only need around another 360 GPUs folding in order to catch up with the production rate of the top team, [H]ardOCP.

As a result, we’re now on a mission to recruit those last few GPUs. We’ve just put up a new count-down thread on the folding forum to kick off the race to the top, so every time you add a GPU to our folding team, you can add your name to the thread and a new total of GPUs needed to take the number 1 spot. Okay, so it’s an unashamed rip-off of [H]ardOCP’s GPU countdown thread earlier this year, but [H]ardOCP’s GPU folding drive was hugely successful, and it would be amazing if we could repeat the same story on team Custom PC.

You don’t need a killer GPU to help out; it just needs to be compatible with Stanford’s latest GPU2 client. The client currently supports ATI Radeon GPUs from the 2000-series to the 4000-series, as well as any CUDA-supporting GeForce card – from the 8000-series and upwards. A 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS currently gets a PPD of around 4,500 with a quad-core CPU, so 360 of these would add another 1.62 million points a day to our team, taking us well over the production rate of the other top five teams.

So, if your GPU is currently sitting idle in 2D mode, then get it folding, add your name to the folding thread and make team Custom PC the number 1 folding team in the world. Not only will this be a tremendous success for the Custom PC community, but it will also give Stanford a lot more processing power.

Folding@home isn’t just about hardware bragging rights; it’s also a brilliant distributed computing project that researches protein folding. The project has already published a number of peer-reviewed results, and its aim is to gain a greater understanding of diseases such as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. Custom PC’s Folding@home team has been folding since 2004, and it’s currently at number 5 on the world folding leaderboard. You can join our team by using the team ID: 35947.