A Usefull Project

Hi guys im not sure if this has been mentioned here before but after reading about Roy's friend Jeff, it reminded me of a project i run called "Foldiing at Home" which can help to find out the causes and therefore help to find the cure to certain diseases like cancer, parkinson's and alzheimer's.

Il try explain how it works although it will probably be easier to understand on the website linked at the bottom of my post. Folding at Home (or FAH) is a distributed computer project which vmeans that instead of haing one large supercomputer which would be very expensive, it uses lots of different computers all linked via a network, in this case the internet. This alllows it to have an amazing processing power relativly cheaply.

What the project is doing scientificaly is calculatiing how proteins fold and misfold. Proteins are the biological work horses of the body that are necessary in so many processes and understanding how they fold, or change, or misfold, can help to understand more about the body and certan diseases. Scientists then take the information gathered and use it to find cures and cases.

To help out all you do is install and run a program on your computer. It then uses any spare CPU (or processor) cycles to calculate and work on the proteins. It is set on low priority so if you start somethign else which requires lots of CPU power it automatically stops using it.

The project is ran by Stanford University and has alreayd made some breakthroughs. It is not guarenteed that amazing results may happen but it is a possibility and it can only help. The way i see it is it will be an extra pound or so on the electric bill which in my mind is worth paying to help the project.

Here is a Link to the website if you wish to read more about it and understand how it works. http://folding.stanford.edu/

Sorry about my explanation it can be quite difficult to explain. Feel free to ask any quesitons regarding it, I've ran the program for about half a year now.

Thanks,
Matt