RE: The Purpose of Folding

spike09 — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:24:27 GMT

Just to add to the excellent write up from Frosty, a pair of folding promo videos they often get the point over more powerfully and succinctly, than any amount of talking and badgering can ever do.

Chris

http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Promotional_Stuff

The Purpose of Folding

frosty15 — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 19:49:07 GMT

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. "misfold"), 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.

CURRENT PROJECTS AND PROGRESS TO DATE:

Your participation can help lead to a cure for these diseases.
Click here for free download.

Results from Folding@Home

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.

Since October 1, 2000, over 1,000,000 CPUs throughout the world have participated in Folding@Home. Each additional CPU gives us an added boost in performance, allowing us to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing research faster or more accurately.

The purpose of Folding as shown above, is to run computer simulations on proteins to extract data which can then be analysed and added to the university's extensive archives. The information gained through this process would take a much longer time if it was run solely on the resources available to Stanford University. By creating the Folding @ Home process however, it is possible for these simulations to be carried out on a global level, in essence using F@H users as a giant supercomputer and cutting the processing time dramatically.

The program itself (in graphical form) is a 371kb file which doesn't take up much hdd space, the console client takes up even less 248kb.

Running F@H takes very little setting up and only requires connection to upload results and download protein cores, all work is done offline and can use as much or as little, of the processing power you have available, as you wish, (specific non-deadline cores are used for slower cpu's or those only used at intervals).

For details on how to install the software, known issues and Linux installation, please read Tom Morton's thread here : http://forum.micromart.co.uk/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=52&MessageID=76302

Thankyou for reading.

Join the MicroMart-UK folding team by using Team number 46590.

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RE: The Purpose of Folding

The Purpose of Folding