What is Folding

I have seen the folding forum many, many, many times, and I have even ventured inside a couple of times, yet to this day I am not sure what Folding is. Could someone please explain what exactly folding is or does?

Thanks,
Explorer

Folding is a program that runs in the background of your computer that only uses your unused clock cycles. What it is doing is processing data for Alzheimer research. This is done in by synthesizing proteins. When your computer is done with a protein the data is sent to folding@home and a new protein is down loaded for processing.

All you have to do is down load the client and run it. I hope I explained this ok and I hope you will join the folding team.

First take a piece of paper, grab the opposite ends and bring them together. Now, press a crease opposite the two ends. That is folding. Bad Joke....

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project, the sole purpose of which is to figure out how proteins fold and misfold in the body so that we can come up with medicines/treatments to help prevent diseases that are caused by misfolded proteins. This task requires amazing amounts of computational power. The projects are divided into smaller tasks which are sent out to users on the internet to take advantage of the power of thousands of individual pc's all connected to the internet. The power they derive from this method is greater, although different in function and ability, than most supercomputers and is useful for this sort of task. In this project we allow, in the case of Folding@Home, Stanford University's Pandegroup(the people running the project) to send information that needs to be calculated to our computers. The computer performs the calculation and sends the work back to Stanford where it will then get more work to complete. The results from the project will be released to the public and it is proving useful to IBM, NASA and a few other folks and has received the endorsement of Intel.
We have gathered into a team that competes with other teams to see who can do the most work. The science of the project is serious. The teams and competition are just something to help keep your interest. Hope that helps. If not then more information can be found at http://folding.stanford.edu

Ploaf said:

First take a piece of paper, grab the opposite ends and bring them together. Now, press a crease opposite the two ends. That is folding. Bad Joke....

Click to expand...

LMAO

Do I have to stay connected to internet at all time?

This sound interesting and I think I want to try.

Nope

gsxr750 said:

Do I have to stay connected to internet at all time?

This sound interesting and I think I want to try.

Click to expand...

You only have to be connected when your pc sends the wu results to stanford and then dl another wu. On a dialup connection(I connect at 26.4 or 28K usually) it takes less than a minute. Hope you join