Koancomputers.ca - Folding@Home

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Welcome to the Koancomputers.ca Folding@Home team page. We are team 47097!

Click here to download the software and don’t forget enter team 47097 on the configuration page.

Click here to view our team stats.

Folding@Home is a non-profit research project organized by Stanford University for the purpose of studying protein folding. By better understanding proteins and the way they ‘fold’ into their various forms we can better understand numerous conditions, diseases, and viruses such as BSE, Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s, and several forms of cancer.

Stanford is currently using computers to simulate protein folding. The problem is these simulations require huge amounts of computing power to complete. Rather than try and build a supercomputer to handle all this work they’ve decided to divide the work up into Work Units (WU’s) that can easily be completed by a home PC within a few days. They then distribute these WU’s over the internet to millions of the willing to be completed by their PC on it’s ‘idle cycles’: much of the time your PC is actually doing nothing and this untapped CPU power is known as ‘idle cycles’. This computing model is called distributed computing - and this is were you come in!

By downloading and installing the Folding@home software on your PC it will connect over the internet and start downloading work units that it will compute when your PC is ‘idle’. When a work unit is complete it will send it back and request another. Over the course of your computers life span, just by using these unused ‘idle cycles’, millions of computations can be performed creating a significant contribution to medicine. This is a very real contribution that will bring us better treatments, and yes - possibly cures, to some of humanities deadliest foes. How many of us haven’t been affected by cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s? This is a way to fight back.

I’ve been involved in distributed computing for years now and the reason why I’ve switched to Folding@Home from some other projects is that this is the most legitimate and significant project of them all. This is the only project dedicated exclusively to medical knowledge - some projects are just random searches for interesting chemicals so a list can be sold to a pharmaceutical company. Folding@Home’s goal is to expand knowledge - not
profit. Folding@Home is the only distributed computing project to publish a peer reviewed scientific paper to the medical community at large. This paper’s topic is the “P53 cancer suppressing protein”. Over half of all cancers are thought to be caused by mutations in P53. The paper can be found here.

Please, download the software and start donating your PC’s downtime to a worthy cause. Join team 47097 while your at it.


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