Recently, I joined a project which I find quite remarkable. It is a distributed computing project hosted by the Pande Group at Stanford University’s Chemistry Department since around September of 2000. Now I took Grade 13 Advanced Biology in high school, and I therefore have only rudimentary understanding of the concepts involved here, so I will try my best to describe them in layman’s terms, and hopefully with some accuracy. If I turn out to be slightly incorrect, please excuse me – my knowledge in this area is limited, but I make the attempt.
The aim of this project is to achieve understanding of how proteins are assembled within the body, or ‘folded’. When proteins ‘misfold’ during the process of being assembled, or during interaction with other proteins or enzymes, the resulting mutated structure can give rise to a large spectrum of disorders, diseases and maladies. Hence, achieving a clear understanding of how this misfolding can occur will logically place researchers in a better position for developing preventative or curative treatments.
The name ‘Folding@Home’ belies the method by which they are achieving this understanding. The folding sequences of a vast number of proteins are studied via computer simulation. In order to utilize the computing power required to run these innumerable simulations both quickly and efficiently, the simulations, or “work units” as they are called, are performed by thousands of individual computers, belonging to volunteers, networked across the globe.
Each volunteer installs a small Folding@Home client program in their computer, and it runs silently in the background performing the calculations, downloading new work units and uploading the results. The reason why this is not an imposition upon the host computer is that the folding program is designed to yield to all other system processes, using only the idle CPU cycles of the computer. There is no perceptible difference to the user while the folding client is running. There are versions of this program available for Windows, Linux, Mac and BSD, as well as thorough instructions and information and a support forum.
The collective simulation data that are uploaded back to Stanford are openly available to researchers. Some of the successes that have resulted from this project can be read about on the Folding@Home Results page.
The great thing about this is that there is no scientific knowledge needed to participate. And it is a significant thing to be able to contribute so directly to research that affects us all. In my opinion, it is a far more useful thing to help ‘find a cure’ in this way than to expend ludicrous amounts of time and energy in charities and fundraisers, when the unfortunate reality is that research actually only sees a fractional amount of those funds collected by charities.
At the time of this posting, there are 2,234,556 CPUs out there running the folding program (worldwide) according to the Stats by OS page. The list of teams (yes, people can join teams and compete for folding rank!), which can be found at the Folding@Home – Stats – Full Team List page, is not only interesting and informative to peruse, but is also quite long, further demonstrating the level of involvement in this endeavor. The list includes some major websites, universities, schools, companies and organizations, as well as interest groups.
There is an excellent short video summary about this project produced by Team 734 – “The PC Perspective Folding Frogs” below:
I currently have three computers running the program simultaneously, one under Windows and two under Linux. The only precaution I would recommend is that you ensure your machine has excellent ventilation and adequate cooling fans as your CPU will be running at close to 100%.
To join or investigate further, go to the Folding@Home website. Your added contribution will doubtless be appreciated, and may even benefit yourself one day.
Sources:
Folding@Home Distributed Computing website
http://folding.stanford.edu/
Deborah Claymon, ‘Strength In Numbers’, Stanford Magazine, http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2001/janfeb/departments/brightideas.html
And, of course, me.
