General Discussions

**NullPointer** · 12:57 AM

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that I've been running in the background on all of my computers. It simulates protien folding for medical research, working on cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, Cancer, and Huntington's Disease. Its not invasive at all and does a great job of not using resources when you are using your computer, even on my slower machines I notice no slowdowns when running it.

If you guys want to help out and donate your idle computing power you can download the client software at: http://folding.stanford.edu/

There are even teams you can join, some of them offer prizes for the most Work Units completed and stuff like that.

Also, if you guys are into it, it might be cool if wmt started its own team so we could track everyone's stats.

**theinspirer** · 10-06-2007, 02:30 AM

Yeah! Folding@Home is a good concept. I'm a member of TR folding team and i usually run it when my PC is ON. It's a good thing that WMT has also started it.

**NullPointer** · 10-06-2007, 01:41 PM

Right now I'm a memeber of the CustomPC magazine team, they give away free hardware every month (not that that is the reason I'm doing this). I'd be glad to switch however if there were a WMT team.

We could even start a pool or something: five bucks gets you in, most points at then end of the month takes all. I know some of you guys probably have like a teraflop of processing power sitting around in your house so there might have to be a rule about how many times you can win in a row, but I'd put money into getting more support for this.

**ForrestCroce** · 10-06-2007, 01:59 PM

Interesting. I've been running the World Community Grid software to accomplish about the same thing. It sounds organized in the same way, too.

**serandfae** · 10-06-2007, 02:34 PM

That's pretty cool--I think the first people to use this concept were the folks at SETI, where you can have your computer monitor a portion of what their dishes are picking up.

But, darn, I was rather hoping that Folding@Home was something that would fold my laundry for me while I sit here typing....

**NullPointer** · 10-06-2007, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by serandfae

That's pretty cool--I think the first people to use this concept were the folks at SETI, where you can have your computer monitor a portion of what their dishes are picking up.

But, darn, I was rather hoping that Folding@Home was something that would fold my laundry for me while I sit here typing....

It's either that or curing cancer... you can't have both

**swiftmed** · 10-06-2007, 09:47 PM

how does this whole thing work? i dont get it :S

**NullPointer** · 10-06-2007, 10:45 PM

You download the program from: http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

install it and it runs in the background. As it is running it is using your idle cpu power to solve medical problems.