I'm folding

[RomeoOhRomeo]

I don't quite understand it, but I'm doing it! :thumbsupsmileyanim:

[Bailey-lover]

:thumbsupsmileyanim: :thumbsupsmileyanim: YAY!

[Taeric]

Welcome aboard. :)

[skunkstripe]

Welcome to the team! :cheers:

[vagreys]

Welcome to the team! Here's to seeing your first work unit! :cheers:

[techie]

I think folding although a good idea, leaves your PC open to a lot of hacker attacks. I would NEVER do it on my computer.
Too many malicious people out there taking advantage of trusting people
techie

[melissa2007]

I don't do folding on my computer but i fold throught the internet on my PlayStation3 :D

[Taeric]

I think folding although a good idea, leaves your PC open to a lot of hacker attacks. I would NEVER do it on my computer.
Too many malicious people out there taking advantage of trusting people
techie
I'm sorry to say (well, actually happy to say) that is not true. I've been doing this for over 2.5 years and manage a team with 350 active folders, and we have had exactly zero cases of malicious attacks due to running the folding software.

[mermaid2708]

Folding??? can someone enlighten me...

[skunkstripe]

Here's some info on folding for you:
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
from: http://folding.stanford.edu/

The folding at home project harnesses thousands of computers worldwide that do a tiny bit of computation when they would otherwise be idle and so are able to contribute computing power that would not be possible any other way.

It's amazing that not only do proteins self-assemble -- fold -- but they do so amazingly quickly: some as fast as a millionth of a second. While this time is very fast on a person's timescale, it's remarkably long for computers to simulate.

In fact, it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years! That's a long time to wait for one result!

To solve the protein folding problem, we need to break the microsecond barrier. Our group has developed multiple new ways to simulate protein folding which can break the microsecond barrier by dividing the work between multiple processors in a new way -- with a near linear speed up in the number of processors. Thus, with power of Folding@Home (over 100,000 processors), we have successfully smashed the microsecond barrier, simulating milliseconds of folding time and helped to unlock the mystery of how proteins fold.
from: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science

Hope that helps!

[mermaid2708]

:confused::confused::confused::confused::confused: oh...crystal clear to me now!!! :confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:

[skunkstripe]

Sorry! I'm not sure how to say it - how about these links?
http://www.dogforum.org/showpost.php?p=7162&postcount=1
http://www.dogforum.org/showpost.php?p=110917&postcount=1

[mermaid2708]

Sorry! I'm not sure how to say it - how about these links?
http://www.dogforum.org/showpost.php?p=7162&postcount=1
http://www.dogforum.org/showpost.php?p=110917&postcount=1

its not you...its me...i still need my son to help me play a dvd...not very tech savy!!!:)

[Taeric]

In a nutshell, Stanford has a HUGE science project going on. It would be impossible for one big computer to do all of the work, so they split the project into very small piece that they send out to volunteers (just like us) for our computer to work on. When our computers finish with their small piece, they send the computations back to Stanford, and they get another small piece. With MILLIONS of computers all working on small pieces of the project, amazing progress gets made.

Is that any clearer? :)

[Robdogg]

What is the overall goal of the project?

I'm doing it at the moment but not sure why, lol.

[skunkstripe]

I'm not a biologist, and I think that even if I were I would be hard put to come up with a simple explanation for what the background is for the folding at home project. :)
The link in wikipedia has a picture though that shows what the project is about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
What they are trying to calculate (I think) is how these complex protein molecules go from being a long strand to something which has "folded," be it that the molecule has folded the way it has supposed to or with some kind of error. And if they can understand that, they feel they can get a better handle on what causes certain diseases.
Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness, and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."

Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis and other aggregation-related diseases. More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40Home

[melissa2007]

I wounder how long it will take for the folding to be complete, do they have an estimate with the ammount of current volunteers how long it will take? Like millions of people are volunteering and folding daily, I just wounder how long it will take for the project to be completed?

[Taeric]

I would imagine a project like this could go on indefinitely. There's always going to be some disease out there that needs curing. As long as folding continues to contribute positive to the research efforts, there would be no reason to stop it.

[mega_option101]

You can see in this (http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/images/ActiveCPUs2007.png) picture just how many computers are folding for the cure.

[bal3wolf]

I think folding although a good idea, leaves your PC open to a lot of hacker attacks. I would NEVER do it on my computer.
Too many malicious people out there taking advantage of trusting people
techie

Folding in no way puts your pc at risk your at more risk just opening any website or talking to someone on msn,yahoo,icq so on.

[Charles]

Still don't understsnd it. folding???:wtf::confused::confused:

[skunkstripe]

It's donating time that your computer would otherwise be idle to let it compute a tiny bit of work that fits into a much larger puzzle. Since I have an old clunker at work that is on all the time whether I am using it or not, I let it run the folding program day in day out.

[Dauxside]

Folding is a way of creating the worlds largest computer.

People from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

It's like a tinker toy...each computer links up to create an ever bigger computer which allows a company to more quickly solve problems by using this "world-wide" computer.