Friday 13th: Folding at Home Milestone
Posted by lordpinoy on March 13, 2009
Folding at Home Distributed Computing Project (http://folding.stanford.edu/)
Some day, a cure for cancer (and other diseases) will be found.
The project, launched on October 2000, is a concerted effort to understand protein folding (or misfolding) phenomena. Until very recently, efforts to develop a cure involved countless clinical trials and experiments, Folding at Home, attacks the problem (among other things) by going down to the molecular level. It does so by intensive computer simulations of the folding process.
The complexity of the computations as well as the magnitude of the “computational universe and parameter space” involved necessitates the use of facilities with supercomputing capability. This unfortunately is, a bridge too far for most research labs, especially small ones. Distributed computing leverages the collective power of millions of computers around the world, connected via the internet, as a means to achieve this capability. The overall number of computers involved greatly exceeds the power of top supercomputers, which typically hosts a few thousand CPU’s. What is immediately compelling about distributed computing is the low entry level. One needs only to volunteer idle computer time to contribute to the project, usually, via specially-designed screensavers or background applications.
An so, one hot afternoon on the 27th of January, I volunteered my spanking new GTX260 core 216 OC to the Folding at home project. A month and a half later, I acheived the 100,000 milestone.
This is just the beginning
