I'm folding @home

Before i started to folding , i am curious on what kind of distributed computing in the trend is talking about till recently when i active in TR .

Let's explain abit about Folding@home

Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

in general word.(Wiki)

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client runs in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power. The older, no longer used version of Folding@home for the the CPU could be run as a screen saver, only folding while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve "work units", which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

Currently i'm folding at Standford.on protein folding...

What is protein folding?


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.

Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers


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.

I just checked that , the client which install at my pc will not having any big impact to our system because it only take a small substain of resource only..If i have a individual GPU(Graphic Processiong Unit --> Graphic card it even better to help them).

Will try to blog more about this..

Why folding ??? - Helping people on disease ,

Anything to loss ? Nope, if we are running a pc with more then 24*7 hour why not let it run when we are out of office or not at home..for benefit of society too.

Let's fold.....