need to know more about folding

[tainice]

hey people, since i got a spare t-bird that is doing nothing, and i have no intention of selling it whatsoever, so i am interested in join the team, i know it is for searching those friends from outter space, but i need more than that. someone give me a brief tour?

[muddocktor]

tainice,
If you want to search for E.T.,you need to go to the other DC project. We are Folding proteins here for Alzheimer's research here.:D We would definitely welcome you here to Fold@Home with us, though. This thread here (http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51177) can fill you in on what the project is all about. I think it is a very worthwhile project and to me, is a lot more relevant to our lives and lifestyles than running Seti, not that Seti isn't a worthwhile project too. I hope you will come aboard with us; those T-birds and XP's Fold quite a bit faster than the Intel procs.;)

[Ploaf]

SETI@Home is the project that searches for aliens. They are searching for spikes in radio frequencies in the hopes that they find alien transmissions. So far they have analyzed the sky 2 or 3 times over the last several years. I don't know if they've found anything. The projects main accomplishment is that it has shown that individual computers can be used in large numbers over a network, such as the internet, to do massive calculations that would be too much for most supercomputers even or that would normally require a supercomputer to perform the calculations. The work contributed by volunteers reduces the need for supercomputer and the associated costs. Most projects are operated by univerities, although some are operated by for-profit companies.

I think you made a right wrong turn coming into the folding@home forum. ;) Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that is similar to SETI in the way it works but the project itself is quite different. We work with the Pande Group at Stanford University to find out how proteins fold and misfold. The proteins that we are working on are Alzheimers proteins, but the main focus of the project is centered on developing models for recreating the folding process of a protein. This is the creation of the protein. The misfolding of proteins is thought to be resonsible for many of our most dreaded diseases from cancer to alzheimers to pick your own. To recreate the folding of a single protein requires an awesome amount of computing power that was unavailable prior to this project and we are making strides and have folded several proteins since the project has begun. The work from this project has also attracted the interest of Intel, IBM(who is building a supercomputer called Blue Gene for this purpose), NASA and several others. The work that is being done on our end is simple. You merely download the Folding@Home client from the folding@home website and install it on your computer and let it run. Once running the client will download work from Stanford to be calculated. Once that work has been completed it is sent back and new work is downloaded.
The client and more information can be found at http://folding.stanford.edu

If you decide to join us and have any questions or need any help setting up the client there are many people here who will be glad to help.