Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease … These are some of the incurable diseases that challenge scientists everyday, racing to find a cure. What if common people like us can contribute to finding such cures? All that is needed to be done is to install a client on a computer and let it run in the background? And it only costs a little of extra electricity bills?
Folding@Home (F@H or FAH), a distributed computing project by Stanford University, attempts to simulate how proteins in our bodies behaves (or misbehaves, which can lead to diseases), and provide the vital data for scientists to research further. Conventional science research will require supercomputer(s) housed in science labs, crunching the data day and night. A supercomputer is not a small investment, and such data crunching do not produce guaranteed results (eg errors in data), leading to wasted time and resources which ultimately would impact research quality. Distributed computing breaks down the data to be crunched into smaller pieces, and put them into several less powerful, networked computers, pretty much like a divide-and-conquer approach. This approach is much more budget friendly, delivering the same quality of results, and, in the event of miscalculation, can provide partial results which may still be useful. I will not bore you with the technical stuff like “what’s protein?” or “what they do?” The FAH website already has some excellent FAQs which provide much better answers than I can.
Do note that results generated by your computer may or may not contribute directly to the research. The results only form the basic data which researchers can work on. It still take years or even decades of work before something solid can be announced. Published peer-reviewed results can be found here.
There are many other @Home programmes, such as SETI@Home or Boinc@Home. The former is to search for alien life in deep space, while the latter deals with issues like global warming. The idea of distributed computing is the same, just crunching different types of data. Personally I am more interested curing diseases, as I think it is the more pressing concern compared to the other two.
Team NLT (Team No: 224508) has been created if you wish to join us in the fight. Just follow these steps:
- Download the client.
- Choose a user name
- Put “224508” as the team number to join Team NLT
- Register a Passkey here and type in the client setup. Doing so will grant you the bonus points of folding if you can deliver the results consistently.
- Start Folding!
Some Tips:
- Officially there is no minimum requirement, as long as work can be finished on time. Common consensus points to Pentium !!! 450MHz is the absolute minimum in order to complete the work on time. So yes, your Atom machine can contribute too.
- GPU can fold too. Any GPU capable of GPGPU qualifies to fold (ie GeForce 8 and Radeon HD 2000 or later). However Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000 and HD 4000 are no longer supported officially, since they lack some hardware to fold efficiently. You can still install the old clients to fold on such GPUs, but it’s going to be hell tweaking them.
- AMD GPU requies 1 CPU core to feed it. This is normal due to the way that AMD Catalyst works. No such issue with Nvidia GPU.
- Linux and Mac OS X (10.6 or later) are supported too, just saying.
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