Distributed Computing Projects

I’ve been wanting to stop wasting my CPU cycles and so jumped back into SETI@Home again. What’s SETI@Home?

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.

Then I started wondering why not donate to two projects instead, you know, every alternate day or on separate computers or something. After looking at almost all projects out there the only other one I find worth contributing to is the Folding@Home project by Stanford. What is it?

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. We use 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 our approach to examine folding related disease.Aah. Here on, I won’t have a bored computer!

And I should probably mention The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator which helps test the monkey Shakespeare theory! The theory states: “If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare.”

And if that’s not enough, they actually had results — the current record is “the first 15 letters of “Pericles,” on April 12, 2004”