How we can help science! Protein Folding!

[Caoimhe]

I just signed up for this so I will paste some information since I am not sure how to describe it intelligently. No you don't need a computer or science degree to do this, just the computer you are sitting at!

Folding@home is a distributed computing effort by the Stanford University to compute protein folding to understand how to combat many of the worlds diseases, like Cancer, Mad Cow (CDJ, human form), Alzheimer's, ALS and Parkinson's disease.

Over 2,000,000 Mac and PC users run this small application on their computers to put their spare CPU cycles to use and help contribute to this worldwide project that requires hundreds of thousands, if not millions of processors to complete. No effort on your part is required, the program loads a work unit, finishes it and gets another automatically, all with high encryption back and forth from Stanford's servers. No personal information is required, just a nickname and a team number.

It doesn't interfere with your normal usage, it runs at the same time as other applications, utilizing your spare CPU cycles, you just set it and forget it. All Folding@home versions will self scale down if you require more CPU, instantly; meaning it will get out of your way if your running other applications at the same time.

Points are generated for every finished work unit that goes towards your score and towards the teams.

There are thousands of teams of people doing this now, all over the world, and Democratic Underground now has a team. We've recently surpassed the Daily KOS team ranking and are honing in on the Freepers team! Please visit this thread for more information and if you have any questions:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=753&mesg_id=753

I set this up on my computer and even though I do heavy graphics work during the day, I haven't noticed anything being slower or acting glitchy. This is simply a wonderful idea!

Please join your fellow DU'ers and let's catch the Freepers! Oh, and let's do what we can for disease research!

Thanks!
Caoimhe, new member of Folding Team #48157 - Democratic Underground
DU Team statistics: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157
Freep team: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120