Folding@home

[WoodiE]

Just curious if anyone uses Folding@home? I've started a RCNT team (161824) a few months back and have it running on two computers... have managed to bring the team rank up to 12921

Anyways thought it was a pretty good cause and I haven't had any issues so far with running it.


Those who don't know what Folding@home is...

What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Stanford uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct Stanford's approach to examine folding related disease.

 

[Lessen]

interesting, although I'm still fuzzy on it all.

 

[Amoeba]

It uses the same distributed computing tactics as Seti@home. Essentially, whenever your computer is at idle for a time (which you can specify), the Folding process will grab chunks of data from the main Folding project servers & process them . Once the chunks are processed it sends back the checksums and grabs more bits to process. This all should happen in the background and for the most part is completely unnoticeable in impact on your system's performance. The only time you may notice it is when starting an app there may be a slight lag while the Folding processor saves it's current state and hibernates.

 

[Lessen]

... flyover...

I'm envisioning Jeff Dunham and Peanut....nnnnnnnnnnYo!

 

[NCNitro]

I was folding some t-shirts earlier

You know me Mike, I am a computard, I have no clue what folding is or how it works, even after reading Amoeba's explanation.

 

[Karl M]

I was folding some t-shirts earlier

You know me Mike, I am a computard, I have no clue what folding is or how it works, even after reading Amoeba's explanation.

Its just other people borrowing your computer to do some work for them.

 

[NCNitro]

Why in the world would anyone want to let some stranger use your pc to do work for them?

 

[Amoeba]

Why in the world would anyone want to let some stranger use your pc to do work for them?

Because the work in this case is trying to find cures for diseases n stuff

 

[NCNitro]

I don't know, it just sounds really risky to me to allow access to your pc to total strangers. Isn't that why we all have firewalls to keep strangers out? What are the chances of your pc being hacked while allowing folding?

 

[Amoeba]

I don't know, it just sounds really risky to me to allow access to your pc to total strangers. Isn't that why we all have firewalls to keep strangers out? What are the chances of your pc being hacked while allowing folding?

Slim to none. All it does is math computations on chunks of data. Folding@Home has been around for a long time and has been fully probed for holes & crap.

 

[Rolex]

I was expecting laundry room tips.

fully probed for holes & crap.

Isn't that what Michael Jackson was accused of?

 

[jnjritz]

I was expecting laundry room tips.


Isn't that what Michael Jackson was accused of?

ROTFFLMFAO!!!!!

But anyway Folding@home is on the PS3 system also. And if i can Woodie i will join you on there.

It is a good cause. And the usage of your pc and internet is so minute.
I will kick it on later and try to join.