Folding@Home Support Programs for Mac OS X

Here are two small applications to support the Stanford Folding@Home project, a distributed computing project for doing protein folding simulations in support of biological research. (If you're interested in contributing to this important research, join Team Mac OS X.)

Most people who get serious about contributing to the Folding@Home project end up running the "no-nonsense" command-line program rather than the screen saver with fancy graphics, so that their CPU cycles are being dedicated to the research and not to the fancy graphics. (i.e. the no-nonsense clients are significantly faster than the graphic clients.)

The three programs below give some basic graphic feedback for monitoring the progress of the command-line client on Mac OS X. nFoldMan, the newest and most complete, requires system 10.3 or higher. FAHManager and FAHMonitor were designed for system 10.3 ("Panther") but will work with some limitations on 10.2 ("Jaguar"). These programs are independent and mutually-exclusive. You should pick the one that best suits your needs.

nFoldMan nFoldMan generalizes the monitoring and control of folding processes to enable tracking any number of them on this machine, a file-shared machine, or a remote machine over the network. Remote processes can be located for monitoring using Rendezvous. Local processes can be controlled and remote processes may be controllable if they permit it.

FAHManager FAHManager manages the execution of your command-line client(s) for you (one client on a single-processor mac and one or two on a dual-processor mac). It can start, stop, and pause the client(s) for you -- manually or automaically -- and provides a graphic indicator of progress.

FAHMonitor FAHMonitor is more basic. It provides only the graphic progress indication, and is for use when you prefer to start and stop the client(s) yourself. For example, if you are using "StartupItem" scripts in root mode so that the client always runs, FAHMonitor is for you.

For each of these programs, you must install and configure the command-line client yourself before using the montior program. nFoldMan helps with the configuration - with the other two programs you must do that yourself.

AppStartSaver

To assist with the automatic launching of programs like these, or the clients themselves, at idle time, you might find this screen saver module that launches an arbitrary application or command useful.