Folding

[craig333]

A little something I do with my unused computer power. http://folding.stanford.edu/home/

I don't pretend to understand the math or even the science behind it but it works my computer hard. Fans are running fulls speed trying to do the little chunk I have.

Of course if you're interested in another project theres a surprising number out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

 

[MarkBC]

Interesting -- first I've heard of this.

Years ago I contributed my home computing power in a similar way to analyzing radio-spectrum signals from space looking for evidence of aliens, the "SETI@home" project.

 

[craig333]

Yeah, I did Seti too. Probably one of those things I forgot to migrate when I built a new computer.

 

[Rusty]

My son had 9 towers going all tied together working for Stanford....fortunantly he was away at school and had reduced electric bills....not mine..... ...the heat generated by those computers was significant

he had monitors on them to check usage and completion times for the programs they were working on....pretty amazing stuff

there are times when children and parents have minor role reversals....going into his garage was one of those

 

[huskyrunnr]

Hey, cool! I didn't know about that effort. That lab had asked for some of my code on an unrelated thing I published on natively disordered proteins. That was a long time ago. I was in that field for 30 years, but from the experimental side, not computational. Then 9-11 happened, perpetual war in the Middle East, NIH funding went down the rathole and never recovered, and I was not a big enough dog to compete for what little funds remained. Luckily I landed a low level teaching job in an engineering school. Thats OK: more time to kick around on my hobbies, and the engineering math is actually a heck of a lot more interesting than the math behind structural biology.

Good to see non-structural biologists get interested in this. Too late for me, but it might help a lot of my former colleagues if there was significant public support and interest in this sort of stuff. There's a lot of sick folks in the world, and they aren't going to get much help with their disease from the latest, greatest jet fighter, or the newest way for us to spy on ourselves.