coolest distributed computing challenge

[Uncle Jesse]

http://folding.stanford.edu/

[Fourway]

nice

[AkCoyote]

Not meaning to rain on a parade but with all of the hackers, viruses, trojans etc, why would anyone allow an organization to download software to their PC and then use that PC as a part of the organization's network? Doesn't make much sense to me but then viruses have wiped out my computer 3 times in 15 years and I'm a little tired of it.

AkCoyote

[linw]

Same thing went through my head, too, AK. Call us paranoid, but .......

[Guest]

Same thing went through my head, too, AK. Call us paranoid, but .......

Paranoid is right, and paranoid I am. My system has been wiped out 3 times in the last year.

[Uncle Jesse]

i've been running seti at home for year and recently switched to folding at home.

if you're that paranoid, why do you surf the web? homedistiller connects to you all the time.

[MyDBear]

just what exactly is the porpose of this soft ware

[Uncle Jesse]

folks,

you download this as a screen saver, basically, or you can set it to run in the background all the time. mine does that on my XP box and i run a client on homedistiller.org also which is on FreeBSD UNIX.

the project uses idle computer power to create a HUGE amount of CPU cyles to work on these folding problems. nobody can afford the amount of computing time necessary to simulate the folding of proteins.

it will download a chunk of data called a "work unit" from folding.stanford.edu, then it will do millions of computations to simulate the folding of a protein. once it is done, it will send the finished result back to folding.stanford.edu, download a new work unit and continue from there.

many diseases are not understood because protein folding is not yet understood. using your computer, my computer, hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide in our idle time, we can simulate these foldings, figure out the results, and help do some actual science.

SETI is nice, but scanning 3% of the known sky for radio signals from another world is unlikely at best in my opinion. a better understanding of the folding and mis-folding of proteins can help a lot of people.

it is no more dangerous than installing any software package onto your computer. the transmissions to/from stanford are no more dangerous than any web interaction.

[Fourway]

the transmissions to/from stanford are no more dangerous than any web interaction.

probably an awful lot safer.