Fellow Scouters,
Looking for a way to help out
without really trying? Stanford University is asking for volunteers to
crunch numbers in a project called Folding@Home
Distributing Computing.
Who
are they and what are they doing?
Stanford University's
Chemistry Department, the same people who
recently completed the human genome project, is now studying protein folding,
misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Proteins are
biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before
proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they
remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein
folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a
mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly,
when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be
serious effects, including many well known diseases, such
as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), Dementia (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
(CJD)), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, otherwise known as Lou
Gehrig's
disease), Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease. By studying
how
proteins fold or misfold, they hope to predict and prevent future
diseases caused by this phenomenon.
So
what is it?
Folding@Home is a
distributed computing project which studies protein
folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. They use novel
computational methods and large scale
distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than
previously achieved. This has allowed
them to simulate folding for the first time, and direct their approach to examine
folding related diseases.
Why not just use a supercomputer?
Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in home PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like theirs) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, their application does not need the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@Home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if they were given exclusive access to ALL of the supercomputers in the world, they would still have fewer cycles than they do with the Folding@Home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.
So what’s my role?
Helping them in their effort is as simple as downloading a progam and running it on your computer. There are two programs to choose from; the console mode and the screen saver mode. Both versions ONLY run when your computer is turned on but not in use (called “in an idle state”). The console version runs in the system tray (icons in bottom right of your screen while the screen saver only runs when the screen saver pops up. Both versions crunch the numbers for folding while your computer is idle and then sends the results back to the scientist automatically. They even made helping out, a little fun. When you install the program, you can join a team and each team competes to fold as as many proteins as possible. I set up a team for the Scouters of Boy Scouts of America. There are other scout-affiliated teams but unfortunately the teams were EMPTY! I think we can change this by all helping out and use our collective computing ability to make a difference. When you install the program, it will ask you for a User Name and Team. Use a User Name that at least identifies what Pack or Troop you are with (i.e. lawrencewendall_Troop_379_MD). The Team I set up is 44386. I realize everyone is cautious about loading a strange program on their computer. Complete info, including security considerations are available at http://folding.stanford.edu Please, let’s get the word out. Our impact may even save our own lives or our loved ones down the road. Thanks in advance for your help. Yours in Scouting.