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Folding @Home

May 1st, 2006

Among the fun and useful things you can do with your computer, distributed computing (using spare cycles on lots of personal computers do do big jobs) has always interested me, and I’ve now signed up Folding @Home which models the folding process needed for proteins to function. Misfolding contributes to diseases such as Alzheimers.

Folding @Home encourages team efforts and I can see why. After a week, my G4 Powerbook has only managed 18.25 per cent of the first job (the program doesn’t impose any perceptible load on the processor). So I’ve set up a team called “Ozploggers” and I hope some readers or fellow bloggers will join it. The team number is 50303. To join just go the Download page pick a user name, and nominate this team. Feel free to notify me in comments or by email.

UpdateWith a few readers joining in, the pace has picked up noticeably, reaching 29 per cent today. So please, some more volunteers. It’s fun to watch the simulations, you can get a screensaver if you want to, and there’s a pretty good chance that you will help to save lives.

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  1. doug
    May 1st, 2006 at 12:23 | #1

    I’ve joined, after folding for a couple of years without being part of a team.

  2. Simonjm
    May 1st, 2006 at 14:06 | #2

    At the moment i’m running the BBC’s climatechange distributed experiment
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/

    Spotted folding@Home a few weeks ago and will give it a go after I’m finished with the BBC’s.

  3. May 1st, 2006 at 15:25 | #3

    joined, got seti as well, imperceptible

  4. May 1st, 2006 at 15:38 | #4

    how do we check up on our team work?

  5. wilful
    May 1st, 2006 at 16:22 | #6

    done. Did it a while ago, didn’t work very well for me back on a 56k modem.

    By teh way, if you don’t know, the settings for johnquiggin.com are currently totally whacked out, as of this afternoon. Old template (or is it new?)

  6. May 3rd, 2006 at 00:39 | #7

    I’m running the World Community Grid app on a fairly average P4 Windows box, and I am involved in the FightAIDS@Home and Human Proteome Folding projects. Both are also protein folding computation models.

    I’m averaging a little over 10 hours per result, with the agent alternating between projects.

  7. May 19th, 2006 at 14:07 | #8

    Thu May 18 18:00:00 PDT 2006
    team teamname score wu
    50303 Ozploggers 5051 19

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