What is folding?

[Ice Rich]

Hi all,

I know this must get asked a lot and I have tried doing a google but it left me confused.

Is folding basically putting idle/spare PC's to use by working out calculations and then uploading them? What is the aim of it (i.e what are you trying to find out?)

Is there any financial benifit? Ive read a few posts in another part of the forum of people trying to get to 1000000 points first?

 

[Ice Rich]

Folding allows you to put your unused CPU cycles to use conducting medical research and get a warm feeling inside Specifically, you'll be studying the misfolding of proteins, which is thought to play a part in many diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. My personal involvement started after I lost a couple of grandparents to cancer and wanted to do whatever I could to stop other people from having to endure that hardship.

The great thing about Folding compared to other distributed computing programmes like SETI is that Folding has already produced a wide range of useful scientific results which are proving significant in the fight against these diseases.

Folding@home is surprisingly entertaining, particularly when you get competitions going with other members or with other teams. It's also surprisingly addictive - plenty of people have been known to build systems specifically for F@H once the bug has bitten them. Each participant is awarded a certain number of points for each work unit which their machine completes, and this is where the competitive element comes from.

OcUK has a pretty active Folding team which is currently 25th and rising on the overall team statistics. We're always looking for new members, no matter how much or how little you can contribute. You can fold on your CPU (multi-core CPUs are much more productive as there's a multi-core client), on your graphics card (Geforce 8-series / Radeon HD3xxx or above) and even on your Playstation 3.

If you're interested or have any more questions, come to the DC forum and we'll set you up!

Thanks for the great explanation Mattus, much appriciated.