Folding @ Home

[dawnikus]

Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande. F@H is one of the largest distributed computing projects.The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."
How it works

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the F@H project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user's choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screen saver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the F@H client takes advantage of this unused processing power.



Folding @ Home



I am on Team 42, if anyone is interested.

[Scooter]

This is quite a worthy thing. I first found out about it on the webforum for PCLinuxOS; they have a PCLinuxOS Folding@Home team. I have a spare computer that I'm going to set up to handle this task.

Folding@Home helps to minimize the cost of molecular research into many disorders and diseases. A person who can't afford to give to research or who has misgivings about whether their money will actually go towards research can use this as a way of personally contributing to the cure, and be directly involved in it.

Thank you dawnikus for posting about this. If more people get involved, more research can be done.

[Scooter]

Sorry, ignore this post - it posted twice for some reason.

[Scooter]

OK, I'm in. I'm on Team 50619 with the PCLinuxOS users. I'm running this on both my computers - an AMD Sempron 3Gig and my old Pentium IIIE 1 Gig.

Here's a great video by the Folding Frogs Team that explains what this is about:

http://www.hel-razor.com/FoldingForOurFuture.html

So... how 'bout it, everyone? Who will be the next of our fine community to step up to the plate and help bat for a cure?

[bcteagirl]

Will take a serious look at this when I get back! Will need my laptop, and the old tower computer freezes up, so will have to wait a week.

[Scooter]

Say, dawnikus, do you have a sig with your folding team? I wonder if there would be any objection if I (or we) used them in our posts here, to show off this folding thing a bit, without really interfering with the boards? This is mine:

[ilovemykids]

A big thumbs up for this one!

[AmberLab]

Can't believe I never saw this before. My hubby has one that looks for extraterrestrials on his pc. LOL I'll look into it and may sign up later.

[kopykatz2001]

I think I will look into this one. Thank you