OCForums Folding@Home Chimp Challenge 2008

Some of you will remember the Folding at Home Chimp Challenges from 2006 and 2007: two ‘subteams’ were set up, one representing OCForums and one representing MaximumPC. The team that managed 1 million points worth of contributions was declared the winner. The Overclockers.com Team were crowned champions last year and this year we intend to do the same again!

This year it’s a four-way fight: [H]ard|OCP and Overclockers Australia are also competing. We need all the help we can get to emerge champions!

Folding at Home is a scientific project established over six years ago by Stanford University in order to investigate the way proteins assemble (or ‘fold’) in order to perform their function. When folding goes wrong, various conditions can occur, including Cancers, Alzheimers Disease and Parkinsons Disease.

Contributors to the project download a small piece of software that acquires a portion of data, performs a number of calculations on it, and returns the results to Stanford. Thousands of computers are working away at solving the puzzle – no single supercomputer could perform all these calculations itself.

In order to add an element of competition to this project, users can join various teams where the work performed by their computers is attributed to the team in order for contributors and teams to track their contributions. Team 32 is Overclockers.com – our home forums are of course overclockers.com/forums and we have a lively, vivid (and sometimes rather random!) crew comprised of people from all over the world.

Interested? We are looking for new members to join the team! No personal data is collected, no spyware or adware is installed and you could be part of one of the most exciting and promising research initiatives of the century!

More details can be found here on the forums

HERE or HERE.

Statistics can be found on Seadave’s site or on Extremeoverclocking Folding at Home Stats Site so you can follow the race.

Please feel free to post any queries in the Folding Team forum (everyone is welcome!) or email myself at davidnelson [at] gmail [dot] com.