On a side note before I start this article: The website usage has nearly doubled in the last two weeks for the overall monthly totals. (Interesting enough, so has the spam). Despite this, we get very few legitimate comments. Please comment and tell us what you think!
Folding at Home (F@H) is an interesting project at Stanford University that anyone can be a part of. F@H is a distributed computing project which helps find the answers to curing diseases that are caused by misfolded proteins, such as Mad Cow Disease, Parkinsons, cancers, and Alzheimers. Why distributed? A super computer is very expensive — so is renting time on one. A university such as Stanford simply can not afford to build or use one for the purpose of research. So, as an alternative, they’ve come up with a clever way to allow people all over the world to help.
From their website:
“Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.”
Some people might be concerned that Folding@Home will slow their computers down, but this is not usually the case. F@H only works in your computers “idle” time, when it is not doing anything. The only problem I have run across is that it causes my laptop fan to stay on “high” power mode due to the additional CPU usage in its’ spare time.
Visit Folding at Home on the web for more information, and for the installer. You can run F@H on just about any PC (32 & 64 bit) and a PlayStation 3.
