For those of you who didn’t discerned, I added an image statistics-retriever (or whatever you can call that) to my profile.
Basically, its a Stanford University project called Folding@Home which I participate in.
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What is Folding@Home?
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.
Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
What is Protein Folding?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
Why Fold?
Because you’re helping to understand and cure these diseases.
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Okay, in short, basically you download a program, and because your computer isn’t processing data 100% of the time, it uses these times whereby you aren’t effectively using your computer to fold proteins. So it’s simply using your computer’s processing power which is not being utilised, to fold proteins and find cures for diseases.
So all I simply do is I activate the program, and it uses my computer’s unutilised processing power to fold proteins, while I do other stuffs like chatting, skyping, surfing the net, blah blah blah. And each time you complete a “workunit” (or rather, an assignment to your computer), you’ll earn points. And there are teams which compete with each other to see who has the most points. Apparently, I joined the Singaporean team VR-Zone, because they’re the only Singaporean one =__=
More info @ http://folding.stanford.edu/
And if wish to start contributing to science…
Guide to installing and using Folding@Home
Note: This is for the console client only. Console version runs faster then the Graphical version.
Step 1: Download the software here.
Step 2: Download it into a directory. (Eg. C:\Folding@Home)
Step 3: At the command prompt, type what I do in the following picture.
i) Of course, change the User name to yours, but you can gladly use mine “VRZ.HELiX” =)
ii) Use the same team number! 48269
Step 4: You’re done! Start it up! You should be seeing something like this below.
There’s also other similar projects, even astro related ones like SETI@Home. But apparently, according to the website, SETI@Home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
But seriously. Personally, I think the chances of receiving a radio signal from an intelligent civilization tens or hundreds or thousands lightyears away is a bit too miserably low to interest me… Oh well, I’m better off folding proteins.
