http://folding.stanford.edu/You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.
Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
http://folding.stanford.edu/ WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR AND WHERE ARE WE GOING?Folding@Home has been a success. We have folded several small, fast folding proteins, with experimental validation of our method. We are now working to further develop our method, and to apply it to more complex and interesting proteins and protein folding and misfolding questions.
Since then, Folding@Home has studied more complex proteins, reporting on the folding of many proteins on the microsecond timescale, including BBA5, the villin headpiece, Trp Cage, among others.
More recently, we have been putting a great deal of effort into studying proteins relevant for diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Hunntington's, and Osteogenesis Imperfecta.
You can learn more about our results, on our Results Page and you can see specific , peer-reviewed scientific achievements on our Papers Page.
http://folding.stanford.edu/Why not just use a supercomputer? Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@Home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer cycles than we do with the Folding@Home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.
It runs in the background, you can pause and stop it at any time if you are running something intense on your computer. But internet surfing, using word, or excel or similar generally leave room to spare for this work.
I encourage everyone to support this work.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3597738.stmDrew
