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"Help save the world."

You see this is an appeal for you to join www.find-a-drug.co.uk You might have heard about SETI@home, you know the thing where a program runs in the background using your unused processing power to scan data from a satellite dish.

Well FAD is similar in operation, except that instead of looking for aliens it looks for molecules and proteins that can be targeted for further research and stuff in finding a cure for cancer.

I have been running distributed computing projects for over a year now.
It doesn't require much effort, you download a small program and a work unit (WU). Then the program runs in the background just processing. When it finishes that WU it moves on to the next in the queue of 2 or 3 that you download every so often from the net. When it is finished it gets sent back to FAD.

The program doesn't cause slowdown, it only uses unused power, as whenever you do anything else like type a letter it lets you do that and then starts processing again. After all other than in video editing or really high powered games you only ever use an average of 10% or so of your computers capacity. So why don't you donate it to a good cause?

FAD has several ongoing projects. Currently these are cancer, HIV, malaria, multiple sclerosis, SARS and bio terrorism antidotes.

If you do decide to join, I have now created a Special Reserve team. The team number for entering on the setup screen is 2072. So come on join up. So far there is 13 of us in the team. Out of 147 teams, Special Reserve is ranked 54. There is even a linux version now.

One day our efforts could make a difference. Imagine the lives that could be saved. In Britain, 1 in 3 people get cancer. Over a million people a year die in developing countries from Malaria, 3 times as many as AIDS kills. Even so, HIV is at epidemic levels and kills 100,000s a year all around the world. 40 million people in Africa have HIV, and in time it will kill them all.

This project doesn't require anything much of you, all you have to do run the program in the background. You can help to make a difference. It all builds up, just from lots of people running this. So far nearly 4,000 years worth of computer time has been spent scanning 27.62 billion moleculules.

There have been successes in finding growth inhibitors on several occasions in several areas. So come on, join us and help save the world.

Okay it's working again. Back to getting 500,000+Gflops a week for me, looks like we'll need it with more people quitting.

EDIT: Excellent, maximum CPU rating too, 220 (110x2) not bad for a P4 2.4 and because I'm not overclocking I dont miss a single hit.

Expect it to take a day or two worth of running to finish. If jobs were much smaller and took less time then there would be more bandwidth usage. This keeps it down and the load on the servers smaller. Amongst other things.

Nice to have you with us anyway Kev.

16.37% 91 hits with cpu 167 but iv'e been doing this for hours waiting for it to finish.

Cheers, come on people do your part and sign up!

You won't appear in the stats until you finish a job Kevstar. The average PC was based on a 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 or something like that.

A good CPU rating is anything over 100 I suppose, that would be above average. I have a very highly overclocked Athlon XP, which has been known to score over 250. But then it was running at what AMD would probably label 4200XP speeds.

The ratings are needed for calculating the points given for a job. For stats purposes.

For an average PC 100 points are awarded per CPU hour. The time taken for each job varies quite significantly with the jobs giving the most hits often taking longer. The time spent on a job also depends on the speed of the computer and other activities which use CPU time. A simple benchmark is used to estimate the speed of the CPU and the average load. While this approach is approximate, it aims to provide the best measure of a members contribution.

CPU Ratings mean what exactly?

And what's a good / best rating?

When I type my nickname and thje number 2072 it says no members found, does this mean it's not letting join up or do I have to finish running one of there jobs before it will show on screen?

I'd expect around a CPU rating of 185, perhaps higher in total if you ran two instances of FAD with hyper-threading. GFLOPS are cumulative, so I can't give an answer.

Well Mark, the 1.25G version went gold a couple of days later. It may work now.

So er, how many "Gflops" would my system achieve?

P4 3.2
1GB RAM