Those of you who have been on the forums for a long time may remember that I set up a folding@home team a few years ago. Those of you that are newer though may not have heard of this team, nor know what Folding@home is.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project, that is, a project that aims to complete a monumental amount of work that is normally completed by only the most powerful supercomputers, by sharing small chunks of the information with ordinary computers around the world and letting them complete the work for you. The more computers that join the project, the more computing power that is available, speeding up the processing. Since there are millions of computers worldwide, distributed computer projects have the potential to become for more powerful than any single supercomputer.
Folding@home uses this concept for medical research. It aims to "unfold" proteins, which are the basic building blocks of life. Proteins are chains of molecules that must be made in a very precise way, and when even a tiny mistake occurs in the creation or maintenance of a protein, some very nasty diseases can result, ranging from Cancers, to Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and Huntingdons disease.
Folding@home aims to discover what molecule chains are needed to create specific proteins, what happens when a mistake occurs, and what conditions lead to the creation of these mistakes. This information can then be used to develop new treatments for disease.
To join the project, users must install a small program that runs in the background, using spare processing cycles to do their job. Since the program only uses spare computing cycles, there is virtually no effect on the day-to-day running of your computer.
When launched, the program connects to a server and downloads a small file called a "work unit". A work unit contains all of the instructions the program needs to learn the secrets of a specific protein. It then gets to work on completing the work unit, which can take anything from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the complexity of the work unit and the amount of time the program is allowed to run for.
When users first start the program, they can assign themselves a user name and a work group. Successfully completed units are then attributed to the set users and groups, which may be changed at any time. The BOTF2 folding@home team is team number 46574.
To learn more about the folding@home project, click This Link to go to the project website.
If i've piqued your interest and you want to contribute to the project, you can download the program from Here.
Once you've installed the program, load it up, and right-click on the multi-coloured blobby icon that appears in your taskbar, then click on properties. This will load up the settings for the program. Create a user name for yourself, and set the group to 46574 to join the BOTF2 folding@home team.
The BOTF2 folding team is currently ranked 2391 out of 167986 teams, so we're doing really well, even though our membership has dwindled from 27 down to our current 3 members; myself, Arthur_Wonderbird, and Mortse. I'm hoping to reverse this dwindle and gain new members to the team with this thread. You can find the BOTF2 group page Here to see how we're doing.
You can also find the latest stats on the active members of the BOTF2 group Here. (Link information is updated every 3 hours)
I look forward to seeing more people joining the group soon. Congratulations, you're helping to end the misery and suffering of millions of people worldwide, and that's something to be proud of. Plus you're helping to advertise BOTF2 by being a part of the group.
