07.20.07
Folding@Home
Medical researchers at Stanford University are researching how proteins fold, because when proteins fold incorrectly they can cause diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, etc. Here’s how you can help them by doing nothing…
Stanford researchers have developed software that does the calculations they need for research. The difference with this project is that the research software does not run on super computers. It runs on ordinary computers like yours and mine. This software is designed to only run when you aren’t using your computer fully.
Most people don’t use 100% of their computer’s capability. Even when checking your e-mail and watching YouTube videos you only use a small fraction of your computer’s capability. However, your CPU does not stop when it is not in use. The CPU does unnecessary tasks to waste time, called system idle or wasted CPU cycles. So, the software developed by researchers at Stanford is designed to run in the background and use the wasted CPU cycles to do medical research.
There are thousands of people (over 200,000 processors) around the world who are running the Folding@Home software. The computing power of all these computers put together is greater than multiple super computers! And all in the name of medical research.
Also, each person that participates joins a team and is given points for the amount of work their computer has done. Then Stanford ranks the teams by points earned and makes it a friendly competition. If you want to join our team, we would be more than happy to have you. Our team name is DS9, and our team number is 63553. My user name is tallfoo. As of this post our team is ranked 4,459 out of 73,929 teams.
Ray said,
July 20, 2007 at 4:26 PM
I refuse to spare the cycles.
Jeffrey K Gibbs said,
July 23, 2007 at 12:56 PM
Why am I not surprised, Ray?
Ray said,
July 23, 2007 at 4:13 PM
I did folding@home and seti@home awhile ago, and I just remember leaving them on overnight, then coming back the next morning to a locked up system. Needless to say, I uninstalled and haven’t ran it since.
Jeffrey K Gibbs said,
July 23, 2007 at 10:15 PM
I have run both seti and folding on XP, as well as folding on Linux successfully. I would suggest installing one at a time.
Brandon said,
July 24, 2007 at 12:19 PM
I should put my web server on folding. It sits there most of the day idle. I don’t really want my personal pc spinning its wheels. If I had a PS3 (pfft… not likely), I’d probably put that toward your group as I certainly wouldn’t be using it for anything else.
I wonder if my company would let me put it on my nice shiny dual core machine
JeffreyKGibbs.com » Giving said,
January 14, 2008 at 2:06 PM
[…] includes: tithing, a donation to Campus Crusade for Christ, donating my excess computer power to Folding@Home to do medical research, and donating my old clothes and belongings to various charities. By making these donations I […]