Folding@home

Creator: Stanford University

Folding@home is possibly the most successful GPGPU application at the moment, with ATI pioneering GPU-based folding years ago with its Radeon X1000 range of GPUs. Since then, folding has spread to the point where Nvidia has supported folding on all GPUs since its GeForce 8-series.

Folding is a client-based distributed computing application that simulates protein folding to aid our understanding of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow Disease (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. To add some interest to the furthering of scientific and medical research doesn't hold any interest for you, Stanford also has team- and user-based leaderboards, so folding is also a competition.

To fold on your GPU, visit the High Performance Client page and download the latest version. The client downloads work units (aka 'projects') from Stanford, and each work unit is worth a certain amount of points.

You can monitor your folding progress via the FahMon tool, which will calculate how quickly your card can get through the current work unit and extrapolates a points per day (ppd) figure. You can join the Custom PC and bit-tech Folding team (currently ranked fifth in the world) by using the team number 35947. Your contribution is valued.



For those of you interested in Folding, it will probably come as no surprise that the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB recorded a slightly pitiful PPD compared to similarly priced Nvidia graphics cards on test which have more potent optimisation. However they still churn through work units faster than most CPUs so are definitely worth getting on the Folding band wagon. The XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB managed a PPD of 2,311 whilst working on a p5,736 project which is worth 511 points.

Power consumption was notably less than that of the Nvidia graphics cards on test however with the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB based test system drawing 226W as a whole.