Our Team # 157829
Phandroid.com Folding@home Official Team Stats Page
While I am at it, I’d like to thank everyone who contributes to this team effort by donating their unused processor cycles and as well as posting and helping out in this very thread.
So what's the actual purpose of the folding team? Well it's not about folding laundry! Stanford University runs a distributed computing program called Folding@home and its goal is to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. That last part, related diseases, is what this is really all about; it's what nearly 3,000,000 processors are doing and that is helping to find cures to various forms of cancer.
From the Folding@Home home page:
"Proteins are biology's workhorses- its "nanomachines." Proteins help your body break down food into energy, regulate your moods, and fight disease. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology much of the process remains a mystery.
When proteins do not fold correctly (misfolding), there can be serious health consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, AIDS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers.
If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses."
How does the Phandroid Folding team work? Basically you download a small program or client that once installed will utilize your processor’s ‘unused’ cycles to work on folding. Unused cycles? Simply put, it is the portion of you processor that isn’t doing any work, so if it’s running at 80% while you game, the other 20% goes to folding. It does this on the fly and will not interfere with your gaming or other computer usage. The clients run either in the background or as a screen saver, only folding when the computer is idle.
What are the requirements to run it? Whatever processor you use needs to be able to complete the work units on time which can usually be done on a processor running at 1GHz or faster. Even better are the new generation of graphics cards which support CUDA (Nvidia) or OpenCL (AMD) parallel computing models. The faster your machine is, the better. You will score more points and help our team climb up to the top ranks.
You can download the client here.
