QUOTE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home)
Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande. F@H is one of the largest distributed computing projects.[1] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[2]
Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), Cancer, Huntington's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis and other aggregation related diseases. [2] More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding -- how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state -- is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the F@H project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range—a time scale thousands of times longer than was previously thought possible.
Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), Cancer, Huntington's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis and other aggregation related diseases. [2] More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding -- how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state -- is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the F@H project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range—a time scale thousands of times longer than was previously thought possible.
The science behind it:
http://folding.stanford.edu/science.html
Basically what you do is download a small client which will run in the background and use the unused CPU power in your PC to perform these simulations. With hundreds of thousands of people doing this, it's much more efficient than using a supercomputer. And it doesn't take up any CPU power that's already being used, only the leftovers.
So yeah, I thought this would be a pretty cool thing for us to do, so let's jump on it. I already made a 404Error team:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.p...p;teamnum=54175
Just put in the team number (54175) into the 'configure..' menu when you download the client and your stats will go towards our team. I think you have to wait for the first packet (frame) to finish simulating and be uploaded back to the server for you to be registeredon the team's page so be patient with it.
