Folding@home (Spread The Word!)
The other day, I randomly came across a post on the Fediverse writing about a project I had never heard about: Folding@home. I started reading about it, and found it fascinating: it essentially consists of lending one or more cores of your CPU to “fold” molecules useful for medical research. You just install a small agent on your computer and set it up in a couple of minutes.
The skeptical part of me immediately asked: is it safe to run potentially unknown software on your computer? Or better, is it ok to trust these work units it downloads and processes?
After some research, I decided to trust this project –it probably is not the riskiest software I run on my machine– and gave it a chance. On my MacBook Air M5 I dedicated 4 of its 10 cores to it, and I can’t tell the difference during everyday use. As you can see under here, with 15 apps open, the machine is unloaded except for those four cores. I also dedicated a core of my Raspberry Pi’s CPU, and I can’t complain about it either.
I also asked myself, Is it useful? Well, it seems so! As someone who often keeps their laptop plugged into the AC adapter… Why not?
So, if you have a machine idle most of the time, spread the word!
🎧 A new masterpiece by Cult of Luna
📖 Still on Walter Scott’s ghost stories
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The other day, I randomly came across a post on the Fediverse writing about a project I had never heard about: Folding@home. I started reading about it, and found it fascinating: it essentially consists of lending one or more cores of your CPU to “fold” molecules useful for medical research. You just install a small agent on your computer and set it up in a couple of minutes.
The skeptical part of me immediately asked: is it safe to run potentially unknown software on your computer? Or better, is it ok to trust these work units it downloads and processes?
After some research, I decided to trust this project –it probably is not the riskiest software I run on my machine– and gave it a chance. On my MacBook Air M5 I dedicated 4 of its 10 cores to it, and I can’t tell the difference during everyday use. As you can see under here, with 15 apps open, the machine is unloaded except for those four cores. I also dedicated a core of my Raspberry Pi’s CPU, and I can’t complain about it either.
I also asked myself, Is it useful? Well, it seems so! As someone who often keeps their laptop plugged into the AC adapter… Why not?
So, if you have a machine idle most of the time, spread the word!
🎧 A new masterpiece by Cult of Luna
📖 Still on Walter Scott’s ghost stories