Folding@Home screen saver for KDE

It bugged me that there was no fancy visualization front end around for Folding@Home that yields more than a progress bar and whatever else it could extract from the unitinfo.txt file. Especially the PS3 client looks awesome (I've never seen the Windows client) so I thought it's time to do one myself. It didn't take me too long because I've already written a KDE screen saver for a molecule dynamics framework at University of Stuttgart/HLRS.

So, here it is. FAHss displays the current work unit as an OpenGL model. The configuration dialog is a main part of the application and aims to give the user a choice as to how it should handle rendering. It allows the user to choose to ...

• let the camera move (e.g. rotate around the center).
• set the speed with which the camera moves.
• select a background color.
• draw a grid box around the unit and choose its color.
• display the models solidly or as a wireframe.
• adjust the number of subdivisions on models to increase performance.

Furthermore the user can select which information to display as an OSD, e.g. the progress and the due date. The font type and color and its position can be specified. All changes being made in the dialog are directly reflected in the preview window it contains.

There are several features which aren't implemented yet (such as core status or CPU usage) but it's already usable. Maybe I'll set the project up on Google Code some when, but for now I'm hosting it on my own server. It can be checked out like this:

svn co http://svnro.alphagemini.org/fahss/

I've also set up a WebSVN service to track changes at http://svn.alphagemini.org

fah top 1000

I never thought it was possible to reach the top 1000 Folding@home teams with our little dorm group - but here we are: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/teamstats/team70659.html
This proves that buying a PS3 isn't necessary for now - a quadcore CPU and a G80 GPU should satisfy my needs until I need a bluray player.