I've been a 'folder' for two-three years now. I donate those clockcycles which my computer doesn't use, to Stanford's medical science team. They use them for computating how proteins fold. Based on the result of those computations, they can discover how to help people with cancer, Parkinson's, Huntington's and many other diseases.

If you've heard about SETI, you know what's it about. The difference is that Folding Home actually gets results that are useful.

It is a very simple concept; Stanford University needs to make billions and yet more billions of calculations in their science experiments. Even with super computers, the calculations would take millenia to compute (or something in that order). So, they have taken to using distributed computing. This means that they use my computer to make some of those calculations. By now they have about 100.000 continous contributors - and all of those compute a few calculations a week. Taken as a whole, that's a huge amount of work being done every week. Stanford have already published quite a few papers detailing their discoveries based on all these computations.

All you need to do to help, is to download a free client. This client will install as a service on your computer. It will connect to the internet to receive a task, and then it will start to do the computations. The point is that this client has the lowest priority possible - so if you're just browing around on the net, the client will use a lot of your ressources. But if you start up Oblivion, the client will stop or just work very slowly, depending on your computer's specs.
NOTE: You're *donating* your computer's ressources; there are absolutely no money involved in this!

And whenever you compute a 'work unit', as one computation is called, you'll receive some points. They're worthless, except for bragging (I have 27.331 points in all ). You can also join a team (No members yet as it's two hours old; I'm joining now). There's a useful FAQ here.

My stephfather has cancer (althrough it might very well be 'had' *crosses fingers*), and I've heard of and known quite a few people who've had cancer and who died from it after a long battle. It is not just something you can ignore, so anything that can be done to help should be done.

- Khamûl

This is a good initiative, and I downloaded it once several years ago, but never ran it. I did however run the SETI applet for several years prior to that, but since it took resources from games I stopped using that as well.

So for anyone having a PC running on idle for most of the time or that is used mainly for business this is definitaly something to consider for doing your daily good deed! (the cancer program I mean, not SETI...). I'll be running this soon when I move to a place where I can have the PC turned on 24/7 without noise considerations to the neighboars.

I never quite understood how to run these things. Always thought they were neat since my system is on 24/7, and spends a lot of its time in idleland.
Perhaps someone could explain it to me.

Maybe there could be a Chorrol.com group

I don't want to intrude here on other people's ideas, but currently I'm running the BOINC client - basically you can sign up to several projects (Rosetta@home is the one I'm currently signed up to; it also calculates how proteins fold), and it does its calculations as a screensaver, giving you some visual feedback whilst its running. You might want to give that a try too:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Whichever one people decide to use, I think it would be a good idea to found a Chorrol.com team.

Does one have to be Online or can the PC work offline, left alone ? If it can do the job offline, this could work on my sorry collection of nuts-n-bolts...

EDIT: Crap. I am blind... and dumb, obviously. Ah well, I'll use it while using MIRC, at times.

Pffft... I cannot reveal the resources on my computer for science! The Dark Brotherhood would be most be displeased if their moonsugar plant was discovered by a scientist tinkering with the results from my computer!

Hmm, there doesn't seem to be enough intrested people.... And I already am in another team

You don't have to be online while calculations are in progress..... You need to connect just to send the results and take another work unit (takes about 2 minutes). Any rig can take it, and every calculation is appreciated