An Analogy to Explain Computers to Novices

Imagine that the inside of you computer is an office cubicle. The office cubicle has a few items of interest. In the office sits a desk, a file cabinet, an office worker seated in a chair, and a special fax machine. First of all, the file cabinet represents your hard drive. This is where all information is stored. The desk represents the memory or RAM of your computer. This is where all the files currently in use are at. Next, the office worker represents the CPU of your computer. He is the one that does all the real work around here. And lastly, the special fax machine represnts a graphics card. When the boss needs to see something, the worker puts a paper on the fax machine and it comes out on the other end of the line as a picture.

Cranking up the heat

It has been quite a while for me, but I have finally got my computer back to running Folding@Home. Folding@Home (F@H or Folding for short), is a distributed computing project maintained by Stanford University, which benefits disease research. The program uses you CPU or graphics card to simulate protein folding, hence the name. Anyways, I recently purchased an Nvidia 8600 GTS graphics card from a friend. While I current graphics card is faster than the 8600, I intended to use them in tandem for different purposes. My faster ATI card drives my displays that I uses for games and work, and the 8600 runs Folding non-stop. This gives me the advantage of using a graphics card for Folding, which is faster than regular CPU folding, but at the same time be able to do all of my normal work without lagging. Although I could settle for the 1800 points per day that my graphics card can manage alone, I don't want to. In a quest for more folding power, I have created two virtual machines running Ubuntu Linux to run on my ultra-fast CPU. You may ask, why go with virtual machines? Isn't that slower than running a program natively? Yes and no. In this case, I choose to run the Folding client in Linux because the Linux version can make use of more efficient F@H (a2) cores which are much faster. However running the a2 cores in a virtual machine is slower than running them on an actual Linux machine. Now when I fire up both virtual machines and the GPU core, I can fold about 6000 points per day. With all those processors running, I end up with a lot of heat. My 8600 GTS card averages 70C folding, and my Core i7 CPU averages about 58C.