Watching the Democrats - it's Fun and Macabre!

[Adak]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

What is that I don't even

Ha! Glad you asked, IM!

Folding@Home is a HUGE distributed computing project, run by Stanford University. It's purpose is to research how our proteins (that's the part of us that DOES the most stuff!), build themselves into these complex 3 dimensional shapes.

If the "build" goes bad, it's big-time trouble for us - like a key that not only doesn't open the lock, but might even break it.

It also studies how diseases get into our cells, at the molecular level, and finds the most likely candidates for effective drugs to treat diseases. We've done projects for Huntington's Disease, Alzheimer's, Cancer (helped lower the toxicity of a breast cancer drug to normal cells), Leukemia, etc.

Taken together, Folding@Home is the most powerful super computer in the world - by far.

My team is Overclockers.com (there are thousands of teams, and we are #4 in the world). This is the video from our leader of F@H, Dr. Vijay Pande: (he's interviewed by a DLTV member).

The video of the protein folding, is amazing!

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Learn

( team DLTV - hah! )

Note: This is NOT for laptops or tablets. In moderate use, you won't notice F@Home is even running, if you have good cooling for your PC.

The F@Home client runs in lowest priority, so everything you want to do, it yields cpu cycles to you (even to the screensavers). Takes 1/3rd of a second to do that.

For heavy gaming - turn it off (click the quit button in the app). Restart it later.