folding at home!

Folding at home!
DO YER BIT FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH!!

...what, you ask? What is folding at home? Don't tell me you've not heard of folding at home! :eek:

To explain a littler further I shall just quote directly from the site, they can explain it for you far better than I can.

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease.

How can you help? You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.

I and many, MANY, other people forums and sites across the planet(including google, many people here may already be part of googles folding team) have found this to be a worthy cause, and downloaded the client and setup their own team. I believe IOL should be a part of this. Getting a folding at home team started would be a desireable outcome of this very thread, if anyone's intrested, that is.
It's simple, just download a client(GUI or Console version, doesn't matter, unless you're on a pentium 4 with hyper threading tech enabled, then just ask and I'll explain further) enter a screen name you desire and then sit back, and do nothing. It runs completely in the backround, you won't notice it. The only thing you'll notice is that your CPU usage has shot up, but, this is a VERY low rated process, so it will not take away from anything you're doing(using the net, playing games etc) because it just runs on the excess processer power which is not being used. I probably should have made a topic on this ages ago because I've been using the program for months now.


hope this has not already been mentioned/setup here because i'll look like a f00l. But I did a search and found nothing, so, stfu! :cool:
Im not sure if this is indeed the correct place to post this, but, I see it's about computing, and, most people that post in here seem to be using nice machines, so I need to reel you lot in first


So... anyone intrested?
Client Download