Folding@Home

Currently listening to “Chain” by “BACK-ON”
Currently waiting for something

Do you have a powerful computer at home? ( even if you don’t have one, no offense, keep on reading ). Ever wondered any other GOOD stuff your machine can do other than playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at flawless 60 fps framerate for maximum setting ( even my PC can’t do that…)?

Ever heard of Folding@Home program? Yeah, if you heard of it, it’s THAT protein folding thing. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s NOT THAT lipat baju work that you do at home.

If you haven’t heard of it, no worries. I can try to summarize everything in one sentence: “Doing mankind a favor by just paying extra electricity bill”.

Interested? I can tell you more but I bet Wikipedia can explain things better than me :D. Here’s some related links.

Folding@Home
Protein Folding

“ Folding@home (also known as FAH) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University’s Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande. Folding@home is one of the largest distributed computing projects. ”

Yep, everyone can join this ( yes, even you who’s using a Pentium III pc there ). It’s not a hassle at all. All you need to do is: Download, Install, Start. That’s all.

Basically, this is what the program will do: First, it will fetch it’s data first ( not that big ), then use your CPU to simulate protein folding ( takes hours per job usually ), then when it’s done it will submit it’s result to the database. That’s the cycle. Yes, your PC works like a part of a BIG supercomputer ( actually, IT IS something like that, but it’s called “supercluster” ).

The program will use a lot of your system resources, but usually participants only run the program when they’re not using the PC. Don’t worry, it wont affect your BT download. If you still wanna fold while using your PC, it’s your call. It won’t effect much if you’re doing light tasks like chatting, surfing, listening to music and writing with Microsoft Word. If you’re doing heavy duty tasks with Photoshop, rendering videos or playing ‘Elder Scroll’s IV: Oblivion’ with an expectation of playing it at a flawless 60fps WHILE folding in the background, forget it.

So, if you’re interested you can visit these sites:
http://folding.stanford.edu/ – Folding@Home’s official site ( must visit )
Folding@Malaysia – Malaysia’s Folding@Home Community ( a must visit too )

So, what are you waiting for? Start folding and help mankind to find a cure :D . We maybe not going to find a cure in short time but at least we are SPEEDING up the finding process a lot faster!

NOTE: You might have problems with the connection now due to the recent earthquake

PS: I’m folding using my X1950XTX GPU which claimed to be 20x-40x faster than CPU. Kewl huh? Read here for more