I’ve always wanted to contribute to society, but I’m no hi-tech scientist who can cure diseases or find out the whys and the wherefores of the universe, so I was thrilled to hear about the folding@home project that Stanford University runs. It lets me sit back and watch, as my computer’s wasted processing capacity gets utilised by their distributed computing core.
The folding@home project is trying to unravel the mysteries of how, proteins, the basic building blocks of our body, fold into various forms so that they can perform a vast multitude of tasks. Simulating this would usually take many years of computer time, or very expensive “super-computing” time.
The folding@home project has effectively harnessed the unused computing power of thousands of desktop computers to solve this problem. The basics are better explained by the experts, so I’ll leave it to them. If you have questions, they have a comprehensive FAQs Listing.
You can be part of this project simply by downloading and installing their client on your Macintosh or Intel PC, or even on the extremely powerful Sony Playstation 3. Interestingly, the Playstation 3 has the most interesting interface of them all!
Giving back to the community has never been simpler, I encourage all of you to do so.
Update: You’re also invited to Join the Coloursalive team by entering the number 76256 in the folding@home client configuration box. You can also visit the team statistics at any point of time. Right now, its just me, but you’re invited to the party, to help make those numbers grow.