Curing Cancer: Folding@Home

You probably heard of searching for aliens by using the Seti@Home project, but I find looking for aliens stupid. On the other hand, trying to find a cure for the following diseases sounds amazingly juicy:

• Alzheimer's

• Huntington's

• Cancer

• Parkinson’s

So how do you help find a cure when you're not a biology/chemistry major? Well for one, you could download and contribute to the Folding@Home Project. It's easy and sometimes fun to use.

To start, proceed to the download page here. Now, download the one with graphical client (I will only be discussing Windows as its the most widespread and Mac/Linux people are generally more savvy about their computers).

Meanwhile, while downloading the client, you might as well go see if your username is taken, but it doesn't really matter that much.

After you downloaded the software, execute the installer and proceed through it. I assume that you're able to do this, if not, get your geeky cousin. Then start up the actual program. You should see something like this at your bar.

That means you're up and running. Now to the actually cool part. If you right click on your little protein like red thing, and click on display or full screen, you'll be able to see something like this:

Now you can see a rendering of the protein you're analyzing.

Of course, this is what we call distributed computing, whose definition is

Distributed Computing is a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program, or different portions of data, are processing simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network or through the Internet.

and the client's default CPU usage is 100%, meaning that if you're using a laptop, it's going to get amazingly hot. If you want to turn down the CPU usage, either because you want to save energy or you are using a laptop, right click on the icon and select "configure"

You want to select "Lowest Possible" for core priority, that way, Folding@Home won't interfere with your normal computer usage. The "CPU Usage Percent" slide bar is the one where you can lower your CPU usage... slide to the right for less, slide to the right for more. Also for laptop users, CPUs suck up energy so you might want to check the "Pause work while battery..."

Also in the configuration box, you can add your username and team number (find a random one to join at the web site) under the "User" tab, edit the method of connecting to the Internet (which should not be messed with unless it does not work for you), the "Display" tab you can change the refresh rate of the pictures ("Molecule Draw Rate"), the type, mess with the screensaver settings and so on...

After you've been running this thing for a while, you'll get down with a few analyzing task of proteins (or otherwise called foldings or a work unit). To check how many you did compared to others, right click icon -> status -> My Folding

I hope you have fun...

p.s. I find it ironic that I'm encouraging global warming by trading in a possible treatment for caner :P

-runiteking1

Got Comments? Post them below!