Team Rage3D Weekly Update: Sep 4 - 10

[aRandomRobot]

Hello! And welcome back to another [email protected] Weekly update!

This news item is part of a weekly set of updates to raise awareness and encourage participation in Rage3D's [email protected] team. [email protected] is a distributed computing project created by Stanford that simulates how proteins form, fold, and mis-fold in the body. Running [email protected] allows you to donate your own computer's processing power to help better understand and develop cures for diseases that include cancer, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's.

This Weekly Update is a little bit special since it marks the first Rage3D Weekly Update published 1 year ago this week. Although there was a pretty huge gap between October and March, I'm hoping I'll find more time in the coming year! With that lets jump into the numbers:

Last week Team Rage3D:

• Completed 3,615 Work Units (WUs) which is down 0.8%% from last week,
• Earned a total of 4,072,399 Points which is down 1.2% from last week,
• Averaged 1126.5 Points Per WU which is down 0.5% from last week,
• Averaged 581,771.3 Points Per Day (PPD) which is down 1.2% from last week, and
• Averaged 103.1 Active Users with a -2 change trend.

As we can see, the slow slide continues. In absolutes terms we aren't doing as badly as we were at this time last year. However, we must consider that note the nearly 50% drop in total work units produced since then which clearly indicates a significant shift to high performance clients. Since these newer clients tend to be more efficient, the fact that we are not producing many more points a year later is troubling.

The team radar looks much the same as in recent weeks. It is difficult to make a comparison between now and a year ago since in that time we have dropped from 16th in total points all the way down to 26th.

Although activity will certainly pick back up in coming weeks as summer temperatures wind down, we are still left with a problem of attracting new participation. To that end I'm going to try something a little bit different in this Update. In past Calls to Action I've always emphasized the importance of [email protected] in scientific breakthroughs that will make all our lives better in the long run. All of that is still completely true.

However, this time I am just going to go after the jugular of why many people hang around tech websites like Rage3D: to show off the silicon e-penis that is their PC. Well guess what shallow internet user: [email protected] is the perfect way to show off just how impressive your custom uber-rig is. In many ways [email protected] is far more impressive than a any synthetic benchmark or mere game since it is much more demanding. [email protected] will dig deep to find the weakest link in the system and truly show weather that overclock really is "24/7 stable". It is in fact such an incredible feat to continuously run [email protected] that Nature itself will bend to your will granting you s posse of Lions and Hell-Demons that will obey your every command. The awesomeness of your achievements will cause your power meter to run backwards so your utility company has to pay you for the privilege of supplying your power-beast with its lifeblood of electrons. Your e-penis will be so massive that beautiful people from around the world will flock to worship you. In point of fact, our own caveman-jim recently had to severely cut back his production as a result of the constant stream of hot babes pissing-off his wife.


Or as I've said before, if you don't have a super awesome computer you can just run [email protected] for a few hours a week instead. That too is also pretty cool.

Quick-Start Links:

• Stanford's [email protected] Guide section
• V.7 Beta Client Download Page (Try this first!)
• Why you should use a passkey (Important!)
• Basic Client Download Page
• ATI/AMD V.6 GPU Client Guide (For HD4xxx and older)
• Rage3D's Distributed Computing Forum