E-Goat Folding Team - Using their PCs spare capacity to find medical cures

[wobbly]

I don't know if your aware of this project but here is some info.




Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

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.


So, I'm going to run this at home and have made up an e-goat team if anyone wants to join me.

The PS T- shirt piccy is our team logo and the team page can be found here.

Download the software here.


Team number = 54234

After install you just enter the team number and your away.


NOTE : If you own a Playstation 3 you can also get in on the action. Folding at Home is built into your console so get crunching for a good cause.



Official Team Page

Team Stats

[monobrow]

Downloaded....

Always on the net here, and unlimited down/upload limits, so anything to help

[wobbly]

Cheers mate. I'm currently at work and will download it when I get home at 7 ish.

[monobrow]

According to the program, it's going to take 3 days to process a WU, with an athlon 3000+, being the avid gamer you are, probably have alot better CPU than me so will work quicker, but it's all for a good cause.

current CPU usage 98%, but thats all to research when I'm just browsing the net!!! If I set it to normal behavior it doesn't go much higher than 15% but you can set a CPU % limit from 1% to 100%

(just found the slider!!)

[simplysystems]

Normally I would think twice about changing teams when I've stuck with one for so long, but I believe my folding services would be better utilised here. Count me in.
Apologies go to custompc as I will be leaving them in favour of a site closer to home.

[sausage2]

I may posssibly being a bit retard here, But WTF are you lot on about. Explain to me in laymans terms, cos that lot may as well be written in Chineese

[monobrow]

S2... Early Learning Center version....

When you happily surf the t'interweb, your computer only uses a small fraction of it's processing power....

So, whilst you do this, the program wobbly has linked to does some complex biology stuff in the background, helping research things like cures for cancer and other diseases.

By using a fraction of processor power that is otherwise not being used worldwide, it's like having a massive supercomputer number crunching for the research.

All you need to do, is download the program, let it run in the background. You won't notice the difference, and it will help boffins research into big uncurable diseases.

Thats all you do!

(Mrs_M, don't download it again, after a good session this morn, it crashed the pooter! Last time I put it to 100%! Might need to let the CPU cool down a smidge!!)

[wobbly]

Right,

Proteins join to protect your body, when they join its called folding. Things like Cancers and alzheimer's come about by this folding process going wrong.

To run a super computer to carry out these folding simulations would cost billions. So Stanford Uni in the states came up with this brilliant plan to make a computer program that will download a batch of simulations from their computer to yours and let your computer do it for them. With hundreds of thousands of people helping the university they have been able to generate simulations at a rate thousands of times greater than if they had a batch of computers at their place doing it. This will hopefully lead to more positive results earlier meaning they may stumble on the reasons behind a lot of illnesses quicker.

So in laymans terms.....they use your computer to carry out their research for them. The process may use a lot of your computer power so use it when your computer is on and your browsing the web. In turn your helping scientists to try and come up for a cure for loads of deseases on the cheap......

[wobbly]

Ooops, sorry MB mate, beat me too it.

[monobrow]

Well, you explained the proteins bit better! (but I did say Early Learning Center version!!! It was aimed at S2 after all!)