The Folding@home project has central servers which divide the
project up into independent pieces which can be farmed out over the
Internet. People volunteer to run the Folding@home program in the
background, on their PCs. The Folding@home program uses CPU cycles which
would otherwise be unused, i.e. it kicks in only when the system is
idle. So the only impact on your system is slightly increased memory
and Internet bandwidth usage. 99.9% of the time, you won't even notice
that it is there!
The Folding@home servers maintain statistics on the work performed by each participant's computer(s). Each piece of the problem (or "work unit", as they are called) is assigned a point value, based on how computationally intensive it is. When a participant's computer turns in a completed work unit to the central servers, the participant is credited with the point value of the completed work unit. Participants may also designate a team that they belong to; the team receives credit for any work units turned in by its members.
The JustBrewIt.net web server participates in the Folding@home project. Any CPU cycles that aren't needed to serve web pages are used to run the Folding@home program. (Several other machines I use in my software consulting business run Folding@home as well.)
You can view my current participant stats page here. I am also a member of the Tech Report folding team; their team stats page is here. And, for the über-geeks out there, here is the log file for the Folding@home program running on this server (updated live, times are in UTC).
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