Help SG (and do a good deed)

Sen set up an SG team on Folding at Home. The team number is 38844.

At the moment this team is ranked 3981 of 34820. We can do much better than that.

Visit the Folding at Home website, and download the client. Make sure you set it up with team 38844.

It is a tiny download, and there is software for macs and pcs.

It would be cool if SG could get in the top 2500. It'd be cooler if the SG team could get in the top 1000. If enough people try this the SG team could probably get in the top 750.

Also, by doing this you're helping science understand about protein folding, which might help science cure some diseases.

once i'm on a faster computer, consider it done.

ah, fuck. the IT guy at my work is going to kill me

[Edited on Dec 07, 2004 by pandamonium]

I would help, but I only have this computer. Do you think it is fast enough to do any good?

Im on the SG Seti@home team on a couple of computers. Ill see if I can't hijack a couple more for Folding.

I downloaded the program and joined the team

Hooray!

I'm in. May as well have something going on while I'm at work.

-Trevor

I just signed up. I love these programs.

OK... I downloaded it and its running...

now, because I'm too lazy to read the web page, what exactly is going on?

Oh, you know, just lots of world domination and buttsecks.

Done

Joined. I have a slow computer, but it's idle a lot... thank goodness, since the very first project I was given is one of the larger ones.

While I'm all for doing a good deed (as long as it doesn't interfere with my alcoholism), how exactly does this help SG? Seems like it helps Stanford more than anyone else.

Well, okay, it doesn't really help SG very much. *ponders* *grasps straws* If the SG team get higher on the ranking thing, more people will see the team, and follow Sen's referal link, and maybe might even join SG.

That's all I got.

woo hoo! Does this make me a scientist?

maybe explain it a bit more before i download some strange software

Proteins are huge molecules, consisting of long chains of amino acids (which are much smaller molecules). The function of a protein in, say, the human body is determined in large part by its shape. The shape of a protein is determined, at the most basic level, by the order of the amino acids (which is determined by DNA). However, once the protein is manufactured, it immediately folds and folds and folds into the actual shape (the one your body needs it to be in order to do the Right Thing).

That folding is very slow to simulate, but we have good models and we want to use them to simulate it. If we can simulate it, we can understand why sometimes proteins misfold. Misfolded proteins cause a lot of problems for humans, because they are unable to perform their function.

The good folks at Stanford found that they can split up the workload of simulating a folding protein by letting lots of different computers work on the problem at once (the specifics of how they split up the computation is probably more boring to the reader than the previous paragraphs, so I'll omit). So they borrow idle cycles on your computer to do a small chunk of the modeling, and every so often your machine communicates the results of its work back to a computer at Stanford. That computer then gives your computer a new part of the problem to work on.

They claim to have near-linear speedup, which means that if it takes one computer 500 days to complete a problem, it will take 500 computers a bit more than a day to complete the same problem. They have ~10,000 machines churning on the problem now, which means they can work about 1000 times faster than a typical lab with access to tens of computers.

It's a good thing, in my opinion. Hope that helps.

Edit: trying to un-techspeak a bit

[Edited on Dec 07, 2004 by threejane]

[Edited on Dec 07, 2004 by threejane]

Yes. Yes it does.

W00t. My first WU finally got credited to the team, 234 points. Now we're ranked 3682 of 34938. Working on my second, and it's another large one- 241 points- that'll take this old PC a couple of days to crunch.

Okay I started, and joined the team, I'll probably leave the thing running as much as possible.

done

Folding??

scientific background

I'll download it when I set up my Mac.

[Edited on Dec 12, 2004 by anonymouse]

Stupid question, but will it work when not connected to the 'net, like Audioscribbler, and then get work/send work when it is connected?