Legit Reviews

You are sitting at 999,850 points! Next work unit should put you into the Million Point Club along with Darkstar_dd, Jeff_Grant and KnightRid!!!

Congrats!

I gotta get on the ball and get back in the game. you guys running SMP have shoved me to 21st place.

Been waiting and finally I will join the elite group YEA

haha...

999984

I guess you needed two more work units...

What does Folding@home do to your computer?

top wrote:What does Folding@home do to your computer?

It makes your computer .... Think!

top wrote:What does Folding@home do to your computer?

Helps to cure disease's...plus it gives Darkstar bragging rights...

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.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Congrats for when you break it ^_^

Dan

I've already read all that and watched the videos, but I still don't understand what the program actually does to your system. Is it sourcing power or CPU cycles to the project via the internet(if so, then how?) to cut off the amount of time in seeing protein movements or "folding"? Or is the program assigning the computer to work on a particular *part* of a misfolding of a particular(?) protein by using the computer's free CPU cycles and then sending the data to the network, kind of like if someone were to use a bit torrent to download a large file?

top wrote:I've already read all that and watched the videos, but I still don't understand what the program actually does to your system. Is it sourcing power or CPU cycles to the project via the internet(if so, then how?) to cut off the amount of time in seeing protein movements or "folding"? Or is the program assigning the computer to work on a particular *part* of a misfolding of a particular(?) protein by using the computer's free CPU cycles and then sending the data to the network, kind of like if someone were to use a bit torrent to download a large file?

Closer to the second one, but the analogy is a bit off.

- Stanford send you a work unit to complete, which is a fraction of a second of a protien folding simulation (they have ones that missfold on purpose and others that dont, some I dont even think they know what will do).
- Your PC works on that for about a day solid (depending on the WU and the specs of the PC), using the CPU when you aren't (it's set at a low priority so if you need the CPU power it is given to whatever else you are doing).
- When completed the client on your PC then sends the results to Stanford, and gets another WU to crunch (so the internet is only needed a small fraction of the total folding time).
- Stanford piece together all of these fraction of a second simulations and they make a nice video to help them understand how proteins fold and more importantly (as this is what cancer starts off as) miss-fold.
- You get points for every WU returned, and they can to a team and there is a global ranking system to help give friendly competition to get more people folding.
- In return the work units everyone do allow Stanford more complex computer simulation time than they could ever afford by hiring a supercomputer (supercomputers are basically loads of PCs joined together anyway, and folding doesn't need the high speed interconnects used in them, just the raw processing power).


Dan

I understand it now.

Thanks Dan!

I'm surprised more company's aren't volunteering though.

EDIT: Woah wait a second

Stanford send you a work unit to complete, which is a fraction of a second of a protien folding simulation (they have ones that missfold on purpose and others that dont, some I dont even think they know what will do)

So is the data is already stored? And the folding pc decodes a fraction of the data then?

top wrote: EDIT: Woah wait a second[...]So is the data is already stored? And the folding pc decodes a fraction of the data then?

Well yes and no...more no though. What they do is study how the protein folds and why it folds the way it does. By changing certain variables, the results can be drastically different. They can then analyze each result further.

If a protein doesn't fold right in the cell, it could potential become a cancerous cell or it may not work at all and die. Either way, they're trying to find out why proteins do what they do. So yeah, they have the basic instructions and data for the protein but that doesn't mean it's fully understood.

Oh, and this isn't just studying cancer, there's also research in Alzheimers and many other diseases...

BTW congratz to NoviceGamer!

first record 5/06/05 here it is 3/13/07 just went over 1million points! way to go! Fold on

go novice go!!!!

Mike

congrats!

way to go!