Folding@home - Put Your Idle Computer to Good Use

Folding@home is a way of putting your idle computer to good use by means of distributed computing project which is similar to one of the first projects of this type; SETI@home. It uses the spare computing cycles of your home computer by sending it a small chunk of work to process, which alone isn’t a great amount, but when thousands of other computers are also contributing to a project in this manner, all that combined processing power equals a huge supercomputer which can process highly complex data.

In this case, the data in question centres around simulating the folding of proteins in the human brain - which when they fold incorrectly cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Folding@home hopes to help in the medical research of finding cures to these diseases and you can help this research by downloading and running the Folding@home software.

A few year’s ago I used to to run this on several PCs I had available, however over time (and many machine re-formats!) I’d stopped running this, however after reading an article over at Connected Internet, it’s inspired me to get back to it and am now running again as part of the Bloggers United folding team!

So why not try it out and put your spare computer processing power to good use?

UPDATE: Engadget has reported that you can now download and use Folding@home on your shiny new Playstation 3. If you take a look at the Bloggers United page, you can see Everton from Connected Internet has been using and it would PS3’s are rather good at Folding! So when you do drag yourself away from it, you can leave it in the safe knowledge that it’s repaying it’s substantial price, by you being able to contribute to a good cause!