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911 EVERY DAY
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html
This is a little app you can download. It utilizes your spare processor power to do research on protein folding, research that's mainly going to combatting Alzheimer's disease. I guess it's a bit like recycling. Protein folding simulation is an extremely complicated
Also, if you have an ATI X1900 GPU you should download the special "GPU" version of it. They've managed to tap into the extremely parrallel nature of the GPU in order to get up to 90 GFLOPS of performance, compared to about 4 GFLOPS of performance on an 800 dollar Core 2 Duo chip. The GPU version doesn't work on NVidia cards, or on the newer ATI ones.
Still, even with your plain old CPU's, most of you should expect to contribute about 1 GFLOP of computing power to combatting Alzheimer's. It won't slow your computer down, as it scales back automatically if your actually using it. And trust me, it isn't going to slow down your browsing the internet.
"Although Folding@Home's research involves multiple diseases, the primary disease they are focusing on at this point is Alzheimer's Disease, a brain-wasting condition affecting primarily older people where they slowly lose the ability to remember things and think clearly, eventually leading to death. As Alzheimer's is caused by malformed proteins impairing normal brain functions, understanding how exactly Alzheimer's occurs - and more importantly how to prevent and cure it - requires a better understanding on how proteins fold, why they fold incorrectly, and why malformed proteins cause even more proteins to fold incorrectly.
The biggest hurdle in this line of research is that it's very computing intensive: a single calculation can take 1 million days (that's over 2700 years) on a fast CPU. Coupled with this is the need to run multiple calculations in order to simulate the entire folding process, which can take upwards of several seconds. Even splitting this load among processors in a supercomputer, the process is still too computing intensive to complete in any reasonable amount of time; a processor will simulate 1 nanosecond of folding per day, and even if all grant money given out by the United States government was put towards buying supercomputers, it wouldn't even come close to being enough.
This is where the "@Home" portion of Folding@Home comes in. Needing even more computing power than they could hope to buy, the Folding@Home research team decided to try to spread processing to computers all throughout the world, in a process called distributed computing. Their hopes were that average computer users would be willing to donate spare/unused processor cycles to the Folding@Home project by running the Folding@Home client, which would grab small pieces of data from their central servers and return it upon completion.
The call for help was successful, as computer owners were more than willing to donate computer cycles to help with this research, and hopefully help in coming up with a way to cure diseases like Alzheimer's. Entire teams formed in a race to see who could get more processing done, including our own Team AnandTech, and the combined power of over two-hundred thousand CPUs resulted in the Folding@Home project netting over 200 Teraflops (one trillion Floating-point Operations Per Second) of sustained performance."
This is a little app you can download. It utilizes your spare processor power to do research on protein folding, research that's mainly going to combatting Alzheimer's disease. I guess it's a bit like recycling. Protein folding simulation is an extremely complicated
Also, if you have an ATI X1900 GPU you should download the special "GPU" version of it. They've managed to tap into the extremely parrallel nature of the GPU in order to get up to 90 GFLOPS of performance, compared to about 4 GFLOPS of performance on an 800 dollar Core 2 Duo chip. The GPU version doesn't work on NVidia cards, or on the newer ATI ones.
Still, even with your plain old CPU's, most of you should expect to contribute about 1 GFLOP of computing power to combatting Alzheimer's. It won't slow your computer down, as it scales back automatically if your actually using it. And trust me, it isn't going to slow down your browsing the internet.
"Although Folding@Home's research involves multiple diseases, the primary disease they are focusing on at this point is Alzheimer's Disease, a brain-wasting condition affecting primarily older people where they slowly lose the ability to remember things and think clearly, eventually leading to death. As Alzheimer's is caused by malformed proteins impairing normal brain functions, understanding how exactly Alzheimer's occurs - and more importantly how to prevent and cure it - requires a better understanding on how proteins fold, why they fold incorrectly, and why malformed proteins cause even more proteins to fold incorrectly.
The biggest hurdle in this line of research is that it's very computing intensive: a single calculation can take 1 million days (that's over 2700 years) on a fast CPU. Coupled with this is the need to run multiple calculations in order to simulate the entire folding process, which can take upwards of several seconds. Even splitting this load among processors in a supercomputer, the process is still too computing intensive to complete in any reasonable amount of time; a processor will simulate 1 nanosecond of folding per day, and even if all grant money given out by the United States government was put towards buying supercomputers, it wouldn't even come close to being enough.
This is where the "@Home" portion of Folding@Home comes in. Needing even more computing power than they could hope to buy, the Folding@Home research team decided to try to spread processing to computers all throughout the world, in a process called distributed computing. Their hopes were that average computer users would be willing to donate spare/unused processor cycles to the Folding@Home project by running the Folding@Home client, which would grab small pieces of data from their central servers and return it upon completion.
The call for help was successful, as computer owners were more than willing to donate computer cycles to help with this research, and hopefully help in coming up with a way to cure diseases like Alzheimer's. Entire teams formed in a race to see who could get more processing done, including our own Team AnandTech, and the combined power of over two-hundred thousand CPUs resulted in the Folding@Home project netting over 200 Teraflops (one trillion Floating-point Operations Per Second) of sustained performance."
