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What are proteins and why do they "fold"?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.
What does Folding@Home do?
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.
How to join the fight with DigitalShadow
There are two ways to join in, if you are running a Geforce 8 based graphics card or newer then you can download the new GPU2 Client which is many times faster than the CPU client (even compared to the latest quad core processors)
There are three main clients you can run, here is a quick quide to all three, you can also run the software on your PlayStation 3.
GPU 2 Client (Remember you can run the GPU client on your ATI card too)
1) Download the folding client from here
Download these Forceware drivers for your graphics card. Head to here to get the latest drivers.
2) Install graphics drivers, on reboot install folding client to computer
3) Choose your username, make sure it is unique (can check here)
4) Enter our team number, it is 47890
5) The control panel can be brought up by right clicking on the icon in your system tray, near the clock.
6) You can watch the folding happening by watching the display.
7) Read the FAQ on the Folding website here. If you need any other help, you can email me here.
Standard CPU Client
1) Download the folding client from here (link opens a new window from Stanford University)
2) Install client to computer
3) Choose your username, make sure it is unique (can check on the same link as above)
4) Enter our team number, it is 47890
5) The control panel can be brought up by right clicking on the red icon in your system tray, near the clock.
6) You can change the desired CPU usage, the program only uses free CPU time, if you open up even Notepad, it will have priority, but you can still set it to use less CPU power if you want.
7) Read the FAQ on the Folding website here. If you need any other help, you can email me here.
High Performance Multi-CPU Client
This won’t run as a service and will need starting manually each time you restart or shutdown your computer, the workunits must be completed within 4 days of starting. Only use on quad core computers.
1) Download the folding client from here (link opens a new window from Stanford University, you are looking for the clients named Windows: V6 Beta SMP/CPU clients.
2) Install client 6.22 to your computer, read the instruction guide that came with the installation file.
3) Choose your username, make sure it is unique (can check on the same link as above)
4) Enter our team number, it is 47890
5) Your windows account will need a password.
6) When client is running minimize the window, don’t close it.
7) Read the FAQ on the Folding website here. If you need any other help, you can email me here.
We have added 3 x 9800gt to our folding effort, you can see the impact they’ve made in the graph below.
Thankyou to Fouronesix for joining our team.
Thankyou to Colin and xuk for their continued support.
Thankyou to Fouronesix for joining our team.
Thankyou to Colin and xuk for their continued support.
29,167 Points in a Day! Keep it up everyone, that is amazing!