This section will list the aims of the project and outline and summarise the objectives and deliverables that are associated with these aims.
The primary aim of this work is to write a program that will serve as a user interface front end to the Folding@home client. The client is a command line program that runs without any user input, it uses idle CPU cycles on the machine on which it runs on to contribute to Work Units that are sent to the client from one of Stanford University's servers. These work units contain processing instructions to allow your machine to do the work required by the project. The program is to collect the information produced by these work units and from within the client and display it in a way that is easy to view by the user. Software licensing methods will be briefly touched upon, as the project's source code will eventually be released to the community as an open source project.
The final outcome of this work is to fully understand how data is stored within the client and to reverse engineer the extraction of this data. Also research will be carried out to understand the relevant technologies that the Folding@home project uses such as PyON (a subset of JSON). The program that will be produced shall be written in Java and will that will derive information from the data contained within and used by the Folding@home client. The intention is to write the program in such a way that it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux; all of which are the operating systems supported by the Folding@home project all bar the client that runs on the PlayStation 3 games console. The PS3 client will not be covered at all within this work solely due to restricted access to the console's file system.
The objective of this report explains a brief history of Folding@home and it's limitations; it is being produced alongside the main program. The report will explain the Software Engineering processes used to create the program and will provide research into Distributed Computing and User Interface Design.