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.
John Quiggin 
I’ve joined, after folding for a couple of years without being part of a team.
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.
joined, got seti as well, imperceptible
how do we check up on our team work?
meika you get them via
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/faq.html#stats.current
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/daily_user_summary.txt or http://fah-web.stanford.edu/daily_team_summary.txt
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?)
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.
Thu May 18 18:00:00 PDT 2006
team teamname score wu
50303 Ozploggers 5051 19