Given to my current...lack of interest in multiboxing, and the subsequent deactivation of all my accounts, I've found myself with a high powered, multiple gpu system collecting proverbial dust. So I decided to participate in the folding@home project, a distributed computing project designed to use your spare CPU cycles (and your GPU, if you so desire).

So far, the best part is that it be set to run automatically as a service, and sets its CPU priority to low so that other tasks can take precedence. The same applies to the GPU client. So for the past few days I've been running eight of the folding@home CPU clients (one per CPU thread) and two of the GPU clients, all the while gaming and watching movies at the same time. The biggest issue that might happen is that when running the GPU client you might be experience stuttering in your desktop/while gaming. Something that I found you could work around by enabling Aero (Strange I know, but it works).

What can this mean to you? Many of the people on these boards run fairly high powered systems for multiboxing, be it one or multiple computers. You can use the spare processor cycles on your computer to fold proteins for medical research. Whether or not you leave your computer on for a while, or six hours a day, you can help.

Did I mention you can get a shiny badge with your folding statistics?

Here is the folding@home website: http://folding.stanford.edu
Here is a set of tutorials for getting folding@home set up on your computer, as well as a site to track your progress: http://hardfolding.com/index.php?p=2&gtype=1

I fold for team 33, which is the [H]ardocp team. I have created a team for us here at dual-boxing.com so we can see how much work we're doing with folding@home.

So, when you're setting up the clients, you can put in a team number. For the dual-boxing.com team, the team number is 168810.

*shrug*. Let's help the world a tiny bit with our overpowered computer systems!

Did I mention you can get a shiny badge? (there are several styles, in variable colors)