Custom PC & bit-tech’s first Chimps Challenge ended this week, when our team passed the required twenty million point mark at Folding at Home. It’s been just over seven weeks since the folding team started the competition, which has kicked off on the 5th of May every year since it was created.

This year saw eight of the worlds largest and most successful Folding@home teams go head to head in a race for 20 million points. The challenge was won in record time this year by team Overclock.net’s chimp, “OCNChimpin”, but there was some close competition from the other teams.

The team that CPChimps was chasing for the first few weeks of the challenge were 7th place [H]ardOCPs altergo [H]ardApe. Strangely, [H]ardApe seemed to give up weeks ago and the CPC & bit-tech.net team entry, CPChimps, wasted no time in upping production to sail past them and ultimately on to an impressive 7th place. It’s not a competition victory, but it’s a win for all who were involved and a powerful demonstration of the team spirit and determination that a small team like ours is capable of.

As well as that, the folding forum here on bit-tech hasbeen buzzing with talk about the Chimps Challenge, which was a great way to launch the new folding forum and give it some publicity. The CPChimps team has been getting great support and encouragement from the other teams involved since overtaking [H]ardApe, and lots of messages congratulating us since finishing the challenge on Tuesday. We would like to thank everyone for their kind words both while we were still producing and also to those who have dropped in on bit-tech to say well done since Tuesday, or who have been singing our praises on their own forums.

Thanks especially go to the unsung heroes of the challenge, many of whom we never see or hear from, like the people at Stanford who keep the stats servers going whilst the large influx of points that the challenge creates is received, or the hundreds of participants in all the other teams who make an extra effort to increase their production to make the challenge interesting. One person who is definitely worth a mention is “bigtoyota479” from Maximum PC, who invited us to take part in the challenge this year. Without the invitation from MPC - who started the challenge in 2006 - we would not have had the honour of participating and thoroughly enjoying the past 7 weeks of competitive banter, tweaking and tuning our rigs, and for some of us, boiling in the heat that the machines produce in warm weather!

Next years challenge starts as always on the 5th of May, and many CPChimps participants from this year have been discussing ways in which CPC & bit-tech could better prepare for the 2010 challenge. We will be giving it more coverage in the mag in the issues leading up to the challenge next year, and advertising it on the forums also. If you would like to add any other suggestions for how we can prepare, or would like to know how to get involved in folding for CPChimps in 2010, let us know in the forums.