Folding@home - Cutting edge research on your Mac.

Macaholic G5

Macaholic G5

Tech
Every second of the day, millions of computers around the world are sitting around doing nothing at all. In fact, it’s been estimated that roughly 99 percent of the average personal computer’s processing power is idled and hence wasted. Why let your Mac’s idle CPU cycles go to waste when they could be doing something really worthwhile? The next time you leave your keyboard and screen - or even pause to read a web page - your Mac could be working on a cure for AIDS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease or certain types of cancer.

How, you may ask? * By participating in a distributed computing project called Folding@home based at Stanford University. Since October 2000, the project has enlisted individual computer owners worldwide to donate their machines’ unused processing power to model the self-assembly or “folding” of protein molecules. Working together, the project’s network of over 100,000 personal computers is 100x more powerful than any supercomputer. Is the science good? Absolutely! Results have already been published in several landmark scientific papers. Check out the published article in the October 2002 issue of the scientific journal Nature at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01160 *

Join us and put your unused computer power to work! All you need are 1) a Mac with at least a 300 MHz processor, running OSX and 2) internet access. (Windows and Linux versions are also available) The folding program from Stanford installs effortlessly and runs at the lowest possible priority so that it immediately “gets out of the way” whenever your computer needs power for something else. You can play games, burn CDs, retouch photos, without the slightest change in the responsiveness of your system. The only difference you may notice is that the fans run more often. When you begin Folding, the program downloads a work unit (wu) and starts crunching through its computations. When it finishes, the program uploads the results and gets another unit. Depending on your setup, it can all be done automatically.

To keep things interesting for participants, the project uses a point system that helps people keep track of their project contributions. You can also create or join “folding teams” that offer technical support, camaraderie, and friendly competition for project ranking. There are thousands of teams in the project, including many Mac-centric ones. *

Why join Folding@home? Many of us have family or friends who have suffered or died from one of the diseases mentioned above. We want our children to enjoy a future free of those diseases. *Now, ordinary computer users with no specialized research training can help investigate, and someday cure, debilitating and/or fatal diseases - all at minimal cost in time, money or effort. Most of us folders have also made new friends and had fun along the way. IMHO you’d be hard pressed to find a nicer bunch of people, overall, than the participants in this project. *Why hesitate?

If you would like to learn more, come visit the Team MacOS X Forums at http://teammacosx.homeunix.com/forum/cgi-bin/ikonboard.pl *Have a look around a little to get a feel for us. *Engage us in a discussion or two. Check out our links to learn more about the project – or try these:

An article written by one of our team members for her Mac user group newsletter: http://www.ismug.com/atree/0402/atree3.html#foldingproteins

An Apple.com "Science Profiles" article from mid-2002 on Dr. Vijay Pande, the project director: *http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/stanford/

Another Apple.com article from March 2004 on Folding@home and our team captain Noah Johnson: http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/proteinfolding/

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for staying with me. *I hope to see you at our forums or read your comments below.
 
Cheryl,

I looked at the SETI project, until I came across an article on Apple's website last April regarding Folding@Home. I thought I could do more good with my excess computing capacity by helping to cure diseases than finding exterrestial life.

My grandmother died from Alzheimer's disease, and my wife suffers from Celiac disease, an intolerance to wheat and grains and the gluten that is their basis.

Since the article mentioned Team MacOS X, I checked out their forum at www.teammacosx.com and found a great bunch of people. I joined their folding team, and now I am ranked #8 on the team and #723 in the Project as a whole.

Cheryl, Team MacOS X has a user that has written the easiest application to help your iMac get up and folding, it is called "Increase" and is found on the "Software" tab at www.teammacosx.com. There are many users able to help you get up on folding on Mac's, PC's or Linux machines, they are a great group of people.

Hope you decide to take up the cause.

Thanks,
J.R.
 
Welcome to the forum :)

I'll check out the forum. I agree with the cause. I just need to adjust some numbers so I can help on both sides.
 
I used to cruch WU for Seti@Home, Team MacAddict, but I heard of other projects that used distributed computing so thought that I'd do a search for something more interesting. Guess what I found? Folding@Home!!

I've folded for several different teams, including my own, and found that Team MacOSX has the best sense of community and a great bunch of volunteers willing to help anyone out, even those not participating on their team.

I'm happy that you've decided to join the cause! I hope that you find it as rewarding as I do.

I feel confident that you will enjoy the community at Team MacOSX.

Keep up the fold,
 
Excellent post! It amazes me that something like folding can do so much good and have so little impact on the computer users computing experience. If it can advance science towards a cure for disease why not do it? And as a added bonus we can support our favorite platform! :D

Cheers!
 
If anyone doesn't help without a decent reason then I wonder.

I will keep my Powerbook on during the night, and let it fold then. I will also let it fold when using it (does folding take up much space?), and I'll keep it running while I am at school. Of course I'll need to give the Powerbook a break from time to time.

I certainly wish my best for people who need us. I show a tremendous thanks to all those who have helped, in whatever way.

I will be spreading the word. I have 7 PC's in my family, I think 4-5 are online. I'll be asking my family to help out.
 
Thanks to all those that have taken the time and effort to join in this worthy cause! Glad to see lots of new "faces" at the team forums and the growing list of contributors to the folding community at large! Keep on folding on!
 
Proof positive that those spare CPU cycles everyone has been donating are being put to good use. Directly from the Folding@home News blog.

1/15/2005 First results from Folding@Home cancer project published. We have been studying the p53 tumor surpressor and our first results on p53 have recently been published. To our knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed results from a distributed computing project related to cancer. Thanks to the continued support of FAH donors, this is will be just the first of many cancer related works that will come from FAH.

The nature of our results can best be described in our paper. However, here's a brief summary of our results. Roughly half of all known cancers result from mutations in p53. Our first work in the cancer area examines the tetramerization domain of p53. We predict how p53 folds and in doing so, we can predict which amino acid mutations would be relevant. When compared with experiments, our predictions have appeared to agree with experiment and give a new interpretation to existing data.
Click to expand...

For those with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, please feel free to visit here in order to immerse yourself. FOLD, it does a body good!
 
That's some interesting information. It's great to see that the project is making progress due to our computing contributions!

And I would also like to say thanks to everyone for taking the time to join up in our quest to smite many diseases and such.

If you haven't yet joined, please keep an open mind and be sure come on over to our forums and ask some questions if you have any.
 
Those of you wanting to learn more about the future of Folding@home and hear it from Dr. Vijay Pande himself, please check out the exclusive interview conducted by Noah Johnson. Thanks to all of you that have taken the time and effort to join the project. Currently Folding@home has harnessed 180,000+ CPUs donating cycles! Outstanding! More is a good thing!
 
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