Official website wrote: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.
Basically, Folding @ Home is a program that you run on your computer at home to help medical science ...
With all of the home computers in the world running this program, it makes it one of the most powerfull systems ever.
You can run Folding @ Home on any home computer or server (Windows, Linux, Mac) and even on your Playstation 3 ...
You can check out the official Folding @ Home website here : http://folding.stanford.edu/
Silly Project now has a team for Folding @ Home. You can check out our teams statistics by clicking here ...
Our team is obviously called "SillyProject", and our teams Folding @ Home identification number is 92856 ...
For the geeks of us out there, this is a great way to show off your systems processing power, lol!
So, would you like to join the Silly Project Folding @ Home team? If so, read on ...
To install the program and join the SillyProject team, do - exactly - what it says here ...
First of all, you'll need to download the Folding @ Home program, you can do that at the following address ...
- http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
For most people, I suggest you download "Windows 2000/XP/Vista Graphical client Version # 5.03".
That's the first one on the page, and of course, that's if a newer stable version hasn't been released ...
When you have downloaded the programs install file, start it, and follow this ...
Click on next ...
Click on yes ...
Click on next ...
Enter a user name and then click on next ...
Click on next ...
Click on yes ...
Click on next ...
Click on next ...
Unselect view readme and then click on next ...
A new window should now come up. Enter your user name.
Then enter the SillyProject team number, which is 92856.
Then click on the connection tab at the top ...
Select use Internet Explorer connection settings.
Then click on the display tab at the top ...
Put molecule draw rate up to it's maximum setting.
Choose ball & stick as the visualization type.
Then click on the advanced tab at the top ...
Choose the level of processor usage you want to allow ...
Lowest possible, and slider in the middle for a slow computer.
Slightly higher, and slider at the maximum for a fast computer.
Then click on ok ...
Right click on the Folding @ Home icon in the task bar ...
Click on display ...
Welcome to Folding @ Home!
If you close the window, the program will continue working in the background.
If you want to stop the program, right click on the icon in the task bar and click on quit.
Obviously your computer needs to be connected to the internet to be able to send and recieve the work units.
If you install it on multiple computers, please use a different user name for each one, to keep the statistics fair ...
Good luck, lets hope that our team can work it's way up the rankings whilst helping with a worthwhile project ...
I hope you all enjoy taking part in this, and if you have any problems or comments, post them below ...
That's all for now ...
