Archive for the 'PSA' Category

A friend of mine turned me onto this project, run by Stanford University.

Basically, anyone who feels they have a little bit of free computing power lurking on their machine (and who, really, uses 100% of their processor(s)) can signup with Folding At Home to become part of Stanford’s distributed network for simulating protein folding.  Your computer logs into Stanford and downloads a work unit, which it does when you allow it to.  Options are to have the client only work while you are away or to run in the background continually.  When the work unit is finished, the client sends the results back to Stanford and grabs another work unit.

The result of all of this number crunching; advanced research in the fields of Cancer and Alzheimers, to name a few.  Proteins play a large role in these, and other diseases; the ability to learn more about protein folding would take the ability to treat these diseases leaps and bounds.  No fewer than 50 professional papers have been published based on the data compiled as a result of this project.  Furthermore, the distributed network, this last September, broke a speed of one petaflop; that is one quadrillion calculations in one second.  The fasest supercomputer is only capable of 1/3 that.

So, if your computer has some processor being unused, consider putting that dead power to work doing some cancer research.  The program is available for Playstation 3s, as well.