About 200 FReepers use their computers and Playstation 3s to process proteins for medical research. Called Folding@home, it is a large distributed computing initiative that has about 250,000 systems worldwide working at the moment.
These proteins are so big and difficult to simulate that even a supercomputer couldn’t process the chemical and molecular reactions that every protein in our body does in less than a microsecond.
A Work Unit is a single snippet of a part of a protein, for a time of less than a microsecond, simulated in our computer (by the jmol protocol). Most of the proteins we simulate are between 25,000 and 50,000 atoms; occasionally we get protein snippets with over 90,000 atoms.
It is great fun to know that you are making a real contribution to science, helping to cure Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
Free Republic isn’t only about politics, ya’ know.
The current Folding@home thread is here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1817941/posts
Thanks. Sounds interesting.