Folding @ Home!!
October 21st, 2007 by WaltI know, the title probably sounds like a chore related with doing laundry… It ain’t!!! It’s actually medical research.
Folding is what proteins do when they do what they do do. When they fold wrong, bad things like Alzheimer’s, and other problems occur. This can explain it better than I can.
Thousands of hours of thousands of computers working on the same thing yield microseconds of real time simulation. Folding @ Home is their way to reduce the time it takes to simulate this process. People volunteering the unused processor time on their computers is what makes this possible. Each computer is given a project to run and then report the results back, and then receive another assignment
This is much faster than trying to simply use “supercomputers” to do the work. Being a fan of technology, I ran across DL.TV some time ago. They support Folding @ Home, and have formed a group (number: 757391) to promote a bit of community and even a bit of friendly competition to other groups participating in the Folding project. Their site is www.dl.tv. If you don’t see a group that interests you, DL.TV would love to have you as a new group member! Check out their episode 200, where Robert Heron intervies Vijay S. Pande, a professor and the creator of the Folding @ Home project.
As I said, the competitive spirit is friendly, with everybody knowing that medical science and mankind being the real winner. EXTREME Overclocking graciously operates a wonderful site dedicated to Folding news and stats.
The Stanford site has software to download for just about everything out there including the newer video game consoles!
For those worried about errors, each assignment is repeated several times by different computers. This helps prevent unintentional and malicious errors from being introduced. The same repetition would occur if they didn’t use anything but their own computers.
