What is Folding ?

I'm aware of Seti but is this similar to that ? I have read references to protein ? Is this some sort of algorithm used to try and diagnose an illness ?

Thanks in advance
Neville

Neville said:

I'm aware of Seti but is this similar to that ? I have read references to protein ? Is this some sort of algorithm used to try and diagnose an illness ?

Thanks in advance
Neville

Click to expand...

FOLDING:
You are made of Proteins. Constructed from the building blocks of life according to the instructions in your DNA. However it's not as simple as reading off the recipe from the DNA and constructing the protein's molecular chain. It's the *shape* that that big complicated molecular chain naturally takes that determines how it interacts with your cells and your body. Knowing how Proteins Fold has been called "the holy grail of molecular biophysics", and the potential uses of this knowledge is nearly endless. Proteins are big and complicated, and the forces between the thousands of atoms that make them up is unbelievably complicated. Calculating their shape has been the realm of supercomputers. (from the team site- www.overclockers.ws)

What are proteins and why do they "fold"?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.( - From the Stanford page)

think i will quote ploaf on this one:

Folding is Folding@Home. It's a distributed computing project that exists to find out how proteins fold and misfold in the body. When a protein creates itself it does so by a process known as folding. Misfolding is what happens when something goes wrong during the folding process and is thought to be responsible for a number of diseases such as alzheimers. The project is creating models to find out what causes the misfolding of proteins by breaking down the folding process and recreating it so that it can be further analyzed. This requires awesome amounts of computing power which has, for the most part, been unavailable to researchers until now because most supercomputers simply aren't powerful enough to process the information. This is where we come in. Thousands of people, many grouped into teams like ours(go team 32), volunteer their PC's to help with the research. The information is broken down into small manageable pieces and distributed to the various PC's so that they can perform the necessary calculations and then send the information back to Stanford University where the results are then recombined. This way PC's connected to the internet can be used together to create a virtual supercomputer more powerful than what is available to most universities.
More information is available in the folding section of these forums and at http://folding.stanford.edu and there are a lot of people in the folding forum that would be glad to help you if you decide to join our effort. If you would like to try it out the client is available at http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html


also try these links
here
and
here

FAQhere

and the stanford homepage for folding can be had here

and here is the detailed page about the science of it -- here

our team site here

the client can be found here and i recommend using the 3.1 text only client. And if you need any help with setting up it ask away?!?!?!?!?

FOLD ON
NAS

Blistering Barnacles !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 memory overload. OK I get the pciture. so everything is brokendown into workunits like Seti and from your post like others cmdline is the fastest way to achieve a WU. OK so whats the quickest WU in this team ? Can I run it parallel to Seti ?

Neville said:

Blistering Barnacles !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 memory overload. OK I get the pciture. so everything is brokendown into workunits like Seti and from your post like others cmdline is the fastest way to achieve a WU. OK so whats the quickest WU in this team ? Can I run it parallel to Seti ?

Click to expand...

there really isn't a benchmark page like SETI but the weatherman has been working on getting some figures together. you can find that here and a list of the currently running proteins here

you can run folding and SETI but it usually doesn't go well if both are on the same machine. but it is possible if you still want to go for it.


FOLD ON
NAS