Fold what?

stueng

stueng

stueng

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Hi, I was browsing around the forums and came accross this area

I have very little understanding of what its about but I *think* its to do with getting a little peice of the pie in terms of some calculations that need to be done and then doing those calculations and uploading them back to the central server

Its my understanding that these calculations have something to do with medical research

So my questions are...

1) where is the best place to go to get a very quick introduction to how this works

2) has anything actually been acheived by all these computers around the world crunching away for like 10 years now?
 
Rather than regurtitate a lot of stuff a general explaination of how distributed computing works can be found in the boinc sticky. As you can see some projects aim to further medical research, others aspects of physics, climate research, detection of alien life, astrology, .....

Folding is a specific project trying to determine how proteins behave in the body and that if they misform could lead to disease such as Alzeihmers and Parkinsons. They have had varying degrees of success: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Diseases. There are other projects that have produced useful science. LHC for example helped to refine parts of the design for the Large Haldron Collider particle accelerator thingy. So yes these things can be of value.

Those of us in the OcUK teams do of course participate for the science, but equally we also do it for the kudos of seeing what performance we can crank out of our cumputers,
 
MGP said:
Those of us in the OcUK teams do of course participate for the science, but equally we also do it for the kudos of seeing what performance we can crank out of our cumputers,
Click to expand...

And the hot chicks, don't forget that.
 
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