I wanted to take a minute and tell you about a little program I have been running on my PC for about a year which I think has a great cause. It is called Folding@Home. What it does is take your unused resources, more notably your unused cpu power, and mimic the folding of proteins. Once a protein is successfully folded, it forwards the results to Stanford University and downloads the next one. The goal of the program: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and releated biological diseases.
Why is this important you ask? Here’s the answer..
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? 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.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfoldâ€), 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.
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.
What have we done so far? We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, Results section, or go directly to our press and papers page.
Want to learn more? Click on the links on the left for downloads or more information. You can also download our Executive Summary, which is a PDF suitable for distribution. Also, you can learn more by watching recent seminars (Stanford BMI ; Xerox PARC). One can also help by donating funds to the project, via Stanford University.
Sponsors:
Technorati Tags: Folding, protein folding, stanford, cpu, resources, health, disease
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