28 March 2006
Folding@Home Distributed Computing
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: Random Websites .
A computer should do good work only because it can! The Folding@Home Project’s goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? 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.
You can help by simply running a piece of software. 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.
Read more here or download the client for your computer
If you don’t have any particular team you want to join, then join Team 1971 :)
Good luck and happy folding!
