Folding @ Home Distributed Computing

Been running Folding@Home (FAH) for a couple of weeks now from two PCs – one on my 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo laptop and on my AMD 64 X2 3800+ desktop. If you have idle PCs around, you can be a part of this too:

Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding. It was launched on October 1, 2000. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project. When launched, it became the second largest distributing computing project after SETI@home.

As a chemist by discipline, this project reminds me of the days in the lab mixing polymers, doing gas chromatography and operating the NMR machine. My thesis then was about polymers + capacitors = electronic nose.

Anyway, I though FAH was a good way to spend all those unused CPU cycles. Besides, the desktop is almost always on 24/7. Why not use it to contribute to something good?

If you’d like to contribute your CPU cycles, you can download the FAH client here. Even ATI Grahics Procesing Units (GPUs) and PS3’s cell processors can perform these tasks. Actually, the PS3 are the best (or most powerful) number crunchers out there in the wild.

You could also join me in the team rankings. My username there is “yuga” and the team name is Pinoy Bloggers with team ID: 74308.