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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.

When you installed FAD, you had to enter a Nickname and an email address. The Nickname shows up on the website, along with information on how many jobs you've run, how many hits, how many hours etc. Just the various stats about you running FAD. That's all in the statistics.

Now people can club together and form a team, and the teams are the total of everyones stats, or at least those in the team. So me and bRAINdEAD and AOE and ortega and many more are all in the Special Reserve team. Our team stats page: [URL]http://stats.find-a-drug.net/stats1.php?Team=66&Period=1&Order=GFlops[/URL]

I don't get this.

What's this about nicknames and teams and such forth?

I really don't understand.

Nuts, another job finished a minute or two after the update hour and it didn't include it. Should have been another 30,000Gflops. I guess a lot of the people in our team don't have their PCs on all the time. I'm guessing most people have computers much faster than mine but only manage 6 jobs a week while mine does 40. A laptop with a CPU rating of 50 can actually do quite a lot of jobs quickly. It even managed a new record for me by doing 3 jobs in 6 hours. Giving it a HIV job could take it over 2 days though.

Any ideas who Lore and LeanneH are yet?

Well, once you install it, it all runs automatically in the background. No need to do anything.

Well Flock, it might take a while, but just let it run and it'll be fine.

I downloaded the thing, so how do I start a "job"?

I'm currently doing something for cancer, i'll change it over once it's done.
I told you i had a slow pc, i think the processor runs around 160 and it's 32bit, the internet works suprisingly quickly considering what you've told me.

A CPU rating is a rating given to your processor and used in calculating the points you get. Points are a CPU rating times the hours a job took. So a faster computer runs a job in a shorter time, but has a higher CPU rating, so every one gets fair amounts of points.

You see the CPU rating in the Job Info window, which you get by right clicking the FAD icon in the system tray (bottom right of screen) and then selecting Job Info.

What's a CPU rating and how do I find what it is?

It gets you membership of the "inner circle" on SR. You get to join our little clique.

No, it won't miss hits when you overclock, it just runs faster, in the same way that a 3200XP is faster at running the same job than say a 2800XP. Or a P4 3.4 GHz is faster than a 2.6 GHz.

The only way you could miss hits is if you have an artificially high CPU rating. Reason for that is the time out on a molecule is based on the CPU rating. So my computer for instance might spent twenty minutes trying to get a molecule to bind, whereas P3 1.3 GHz might have half the CPU rating and then take 40 minutes. But if somehow the CPU rating was artificially high then you could miss some hits. This happens partly with Linux/Intel systems.

However, missed hits tend to be those with the lowest energy, or some other chemistry thing that goes WHOOSH over my head, and so are less likely to work in real life. In saying that, it is of course an issue, which they are working on with the beta versions to try get the Linux rating anomalies fixed.

I might have a look at this.

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