Folding Home, Use your computer to battle cancer !!! Options

[HyPN0]

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

A friend of mine posted this on another forum. Instead of writing a new introduction, I thought I should just quest her .
Myself, I have started this just today. My computer is online 24\7, so I thought I should put it to some use. I have no medical knowledge at all, but even if I'm a medical dumbass, I would like to help somehow. I just thought I should share this with Chorrol.com community

[HyPN0]

Maybe there could be a Chorrol.com group

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

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.

'tis all good. They're both doing the same thing, I don't know why would I object.

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.

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

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!

Here comes the irony; This was posted on The Dark Brotherhood mod team forum. In fact, I'm in the Dark Brotherhood folding team. So, you have our blessings dear brother