As some people around here may remember - SETI had a screensaver ages ago that used people personal computers to search through data to look for alien messages.
Times have changed but the need for massive amounts of computing grunt is still needed every day - Folding@home ( http://folding.stanford.edu/ ) is a simple program that uses your computers idle time (to any amount you decide) to look at how proteins fold.
So why would you want to do it?
" 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. "
The interesting thing about this program is you can join a "team" of people - perhaps an OCUK team could be created as there are an awful lot of us here with very powerful computers which are more than likely spending a lot of their time running the system idle process at 99%
Times have changed but the need for massive amounts of computing grunt is still needed every day - Folding@home ( http://folding.stanford.edu/ ) is a simple program that uses your computers idle time (to any amount you decide) to look at how proteins fold.
So why would you want to do it?
" 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. "
The interesting thing about this program is you can join a "team" of people - perhaps an OCUK team could be created as there are an awful lot of us here with very powerful computers which are more than likely spending a lot of their time running the system idle process at 99%