I may have to give this one a shot since I haven't been at my PC much recently.
Great! Now you can actually say that your pc is doing something productive instead of sitting and collecting dust :D
LoL... yeah... that's about it. I built my computer back in April (I think) of 2003 and it hasn't gotten a ton of use. I was anticipating a bunch of games to come out, but they never did... yet. I've got a few spare computers laying around too, but those aren't going to get used often. Usually to help me repair peoples computers.
So yeah, I guess I can say my computer is doing something now.
Oh, I was just reading some more on this and discovered something interesting:
It's amazing that not only do proteins self-assemble -- fold -- but they do so amazingly quickly: some as fast as a millionth of a second. While this time is very fast on a person's timescale, it's remarkably long for computers to simulate.
In fact, it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years! That's a long time to wait for one result!
A SOLUTION: DISTRIBUTED DYNAMICS
To solve the protein folding problem, we need to break the microsecond barrier. Our group has developed a new way to simulate protein folding which can break the microsecond barrier by dividing the work between multiple processors in a new way -- with a near linear speed up in the number of processors. Thus, with 1000 processors, we can break the microsecond barrier and help unlock the mystery of how proteins fold.
