What's Folding@Home? Well, it has nothing to do with laundry. I'll let an excerpt from the Folding@Home site describe it for everybody:
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.
You can find more about Folding@Home
HERE.
DU has a team which donates some of their extra CPU power to this effort. It's actually very easy. You just run a program on your computer which borrows your processor when you aren't using it. I never notice the program running, but I have contributed quite a bit to this effort since I joined the team.
Over the past few months over 200 DU contributors have contributed 326 processors to this effort and worked on over 6000 "work units" each for which we earn points. In the next 24 hours, the DU team will pass the 1 million point mark, which will put our team in heady company with regards to this effort.
DU's is team #48157. If you join the Folding@Home effort, consider joining our team so that we get credit.
Thanks.
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