Switched from D2OL to Folding@home

I used to run D2ol's software app to use my computer's idle time to calculate drug vectors. They had a very cool dashboard showing which drug candidate was targeting which disease, and a list of teams that you could join for bragging rights.

Lately their data server has been non-responsive and they have not sent out any information to their users. D2OL's latest "what's new" post on their front page is from March 2004, almost 2 years ago. And their app, for some wierd reason, runs poorly on my Kubuntu installation. It is Java-based, so it is a memory and CPU hog - instead of playing nicely and relinquishing the CPU, it noticeably slows down performance, and the UI is nearly impossible to use once it starts calculating.

Fed up, I switched to Folding@home, one of the "virtual supercomputer" teams available at DSLReports.

Report for the first 12 hours: simple to use, polite system denizen. I recommend it.


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Sat 11 February 2006. Tags: technology