MFest Team for Folding at Home

[David @ ViP Status]

***Current Team MFest Stats: ***
***http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...teamnum=164336***

Let's join in and help cure Cancer!!!

It only takes 5 minutes of your time and it's for a great cause!

Alright guys... It's kinda complicated and if you want to understand it, read below. Basically, Stanford University's Pande Lab is asking for help by installing a program called "Folding @ Home" There isn't a supercomputer powerful enough to handle the number of calculations that they need to "Fold Protein", so they created a network that takes a small part of you Home PC's computing power and "create" a supercomputer comprised of everyone's computer running the program. The purpose to their research is to speed up the process of research to help create cures for diseases such as:

-Sickle-Cell Disease (drepanocytosis)
-Alzheimer's Disease
-Parkinson's Disease
-Mad Cow Disease
-Cancer
-Huntington's Disease
-Cystic Fibrosis
-Osteogenesis Imperfecta
-Alpha 1-Antitrypsin Deficiency

, and other aggregation-related diseases.

My father passed last year of Cancer and I've been actively participating on Club Lexus's Team to help the cause. I've decided to create a "Team MFest" and use my office computers to help Team MFest. Everyone should help out a little and put their 5 minutes into installing this program. Your 5 minutes time could help save many lives soon. It DOES NOT have any spyware or malware. You can research the program yourself.

To install the program, Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download to download it. You CAN run it on multiple computers with the same Username.

After downloading the program, open the program and enter a Username. It will also ask for a "Team Number". MFest Team's number is 164336.

Check out our current Team MFest Stats. I just created it so don't expect much. Here's a sample of the Club Lexus one (I'm Eternity3G).



Taken from Wikipedia

Folding@home (sometimes abbreviated as FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness, and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.

Purpose

Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, mad cow disease, cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases. More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the5-10 microsecond range — which is a far longer simulation than it was previously thought possible to model. The Pande Group goal is to refine and improve the MD and Folding@home DC methods to the level where it will become an essential tool for the MD research. For that goal they collaborate with various scientific institutions. As of February 19, 2009, sixty-three scientific research papers have been published using the project's work. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that Folding@home distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.

Function

Folding@home when running takes advantage of unused CPU cycles on a computer system as shown by this computer's 99% CPU usage.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user's choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve "work units", which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a2048 bit digital signature.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

Taken from Folding @ Home Website

"Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved."

[415Banker]

Hey Dave...I'm about to sign up and am definitely down for this cause since I've had some of my family members fall victim to cancer too. I have two questions though.

1. Will I need to open up multiple accounts so I can upload this program to multiple computers? I ask this because I would like to contribute more computer hardware.

2. Will I have to worry about any kind of spyware that the program may imbed? Of course, I have personal and business info I would like to protect.

[David @ ViP Status]

Originally Posted by Jo@EuroDyne

Hey Dave...I'm about to sign up and am definitely down for this cause since I've had some of my family members fall victim to cancer too. I have two questions though.

1. Will I need to open up multiple accounts so I can upload this program to multiple computers? I ask this because I would like to contribute more computer hardware.

2. Will I have to worry about any kind of spyware that the program may imbed? Of course, I have personal and business info I would like to protect.

1. no need... just download the program and use the same username and team number... It will automatically detect how many stations you are using.

2. no spyware or malware. I've been running the program on several other systems under my clublexus account for 2 years now and never had a problem. there is also a setting to adjust how much CPU usage you allow the program to use.

It's a great cause and we're helping out with little to no effort...

[Stack]

reminds me of the Seti project just for a better cause.

[David @ ViP Status]

Originally Posted by Stack

reminds me of the Seti project just for a better cause.

Basically same thing, but we're not looking for ET!

[Khyber]

Great cause, I know Clublexus heavily pushed this on there members and has helped alot!

[David @ ViP Status]

Originally Posted by Khyber

Great cause, I know Clublexus heavily pushed this on there members and has helped alot!

Yup... I think Club Lexus has close to 327 Members and are running average of 550 CPU's a day... They are ranked (58 of 158288)

The S2K forums are also very active in this.

Everyone here should join and help out!

[Stack]

Yeah i joined and got 2 of my pc's running them. Both computers run 24/7 so that should help

[Am3n]

Well my laptop is dying out and barely runs as is but as soon as my new laptop arrives (2 weeks?) i'll be up and running. Good Find Dave.

[David @ ViP Status]

Com'on guys!!! Team Mfest of 2 right now... Just me and Stack! Let's get the ball rolling!!! =P