vraa

Top of the morning to everyone!

There is this program by Stanford University that you can run on your computer which can aid in finding cures for cancer, alzheimers, parkinsons, huntingtons, and a number of others as well.

It's really simple to get started.

Download the correct client from here.
The Windows 5.03 version if you're running Windows (shortcut here).
The MacOSX SMP one if you have a Intel Mac (shortcut here).

Once you install it, enter in whatever username you want (I use vraa) and the team number (45431 for mbworld.org)

It literally takes about 2 minutes from the start of this thread to the end of install and you're already contributing to the effort.

The way it works in a nutshell is every few days it downloads a "workunit" from Stanford, processes it and then uploads the results. It's really compact and it runs in the background, I run it on all my computers and all the computers at the office I work at.

Go ahead and ask questions if you have them, I've been contributing to this project for more than five years. It has the support of many big name companies such as Intel and Microsoft as well as support from other well-known universities such as Oxford and Berkeley.

Tell your friends and family too, it's for a great cause.

If you want to see how much you've contributed to the effort, you can check here
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.c...php?s=&t=45431

As you can see, team mbworld.org is doing relatively well, but we could always use more help.

hecdog

What is this? What does it do and how exactly does it help to find a cure for cancer?

vraa

I'm glad you asked!

What the program does is download a small "workunit" from Stanford University to process. It can take from a day to a month to process this unit (in the mean time, you can still use your computer just as normal, it just sits in the background waiting whenever you aren't using the computer) and then sends the unit back to Stanford University.

To explain what exactly happens during the process is a little tough, so I'm going to just start at the basics so we're all on the same level. If you remember from highschool biology proteins are literally chains of amino acids. It's the basics of -- life. From the basis of the chemical reactions in our bodies, to the materials of our bones, skins, blood and other parts, to forming antibodies to form our immune system: proteins are an essential part of our body.

Since proteins are so essential there's obviously a lot of interest concerning these proteins and how they function, how the interact and WHY as well. The sequence in which these amino acids present themselves is important, but more important is the method in which they "fold." That's when proteins take on a particular shape: they literally assemble themselves.

The goal of the Folding@Home project is simple. Simulate this folding so we can understand how natural proteins fold quickly and reliably (or sometimes the opposite ). Later we can get more information on how to possibly create synthetic polymers with the same properties.

You can see lots of results that Stanford University (and others) have put out here.

How is this linked to cancer, alzheimers, and a slew of other diseases? Misfolding. So why doesn't Stanford University just use their own computers? The physics and science involved in folding in mindboggling. Literally So they've turned to this idea of "distributed computing" which is like a supercomputer composed of a bunch of smaller computers. This lets them split up the work efficiently and reliably.

Since about 2000, they have roughly 200,000 computers working on the project all over the world. I think that so many people have these computers and could help put them to good use with almost zero impact on their normal usage so that's why I advocate Folding@Home.

If you're interested on how it works on the computer level, and why it won't interfere with your daily tasks I can explain that as well

hazehk

Ahh, I was an active member over at www.extremeoverclocking.com a few years ago and they had this program going on. At that time, I was an active member.

This program is truly for a good cause, and for those of you who leave your computers idle all the time, it won't cost you practically anything.

Now I only have a laptop, and I just can't afford to run this program 24/7, so I stopped. But guys, I strongly encourage everyone here to give this a try.

FYI, this is me:
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.c...php?s=&u=88717

vraa

I run it on my laptop, I love the Mac SMP client

You were really crunching before, what kind of systems did you have under your name?

vraa

Well just a small status update with what is going on.

Clublexus, another car enthusiast forum is fully on-board and competing with us. Although we outrank them by a fair margin, they are catching up quite quickly

We just recently broke into the 400 ranks. As of now we're ranked 491 and expected to be 415 in 30 days. That is out of 27633 teams!

In the last month, the Stanford folks have released a client for Windows computers with multiple processors and also a client for computers with multiple GPUs.

An even bigger announcement is that Sony has come on board with the project by allowing users to run Folding@Home on their PS3's with the latest firmware update!

Thanks to a few members and their PS3's on our team, we've really skyrocketed on the team ranks and the entire project continues to grow. There are now a little less than 250,000 computers that are actively engaged in the project (meaning in the last week they've delivered results).

So if you haven't started it yet, go on and download the client here.
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Come on board and show your Mercedes enthusiasm pride and help make a difference at the same time!