Kevin Tracy

From the Desk of

Kevin Tracy

2010-05-12

Join the Folding@Home Project

For Christmas, my family was awesome enough to get me a PlayStation3. It's a great little machine, but not just for gaming. About 98% of the time its on, it's using the Life With Playstation software, which runs scientific calculations that help researchers better understand how proteins fold and why proteins sometimes misfold. It's part of a larger operation out of Stanford called "Folding@Home." The program is almost always running on my PS3 and PC.

So what the deuce is folding? Right?

Well, hopefully we all learned that all living creatures have proteins. Well, proteins aren't constants. They change and restructure themselves to meet certain demands of our bodies. This restructuring is called protein folding and because there are nearly infinite folding possibilities for the 6 Billion people in the world, the process could never really be studied. Even with modern super computers, only so much can be researched.

What the deuce is misfolding?

When proteins don't fold correctly, it's sort of like "Crossing the Streams" in Ghostbusters, only in biology. Misfolding is believed to be responsible for diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, Huntington's, and most cancers.

Obviously, these are all diseases that we need to find cures for; but without a proper understanding of the process that leads to these diseases, cures are going to be difficult to come by. Helping uncover the mysterious process of folding and misfolding is the purpose of Stanford and the Folding@Home project.

Distributed Computing

Folding@Home uses a process called 'distributed computing' to process this data at previously unimagined speeds. Instead of having one super computer process the folding calculations, Stanford researchers want to use our computers to process small bits of this data and send the results back to them via the internet. Since the project started several years ago, millions of people have "donated electricity" to the project by connecting their Playstations, Personal Computers, and Macs using the provided software on the group's website.

Once you get everything set up, you can either remain anonymous or use your name and even form a team of family and friends to see who has completed the most "work units." Scores are even given based on how useful the data is to researchers.

The team I use to keep all my computers together is: 183126 (Feel free to join)