Go to [thread=21083]this thread[/thread] to see the original post and comment on it!
Quote from: DuVeL;207334Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) is a great project, one which shows how gamers and enthusiasts from across the world can come together for one single, shared purpose and help end suffering across the world without doing a damn thing.
The project, for those not in the know, let's people contribute some of their unused CPU power towards a system dedicated to investigating protein folding, a cutting edge technique which could one day prove critical to fighting back against all manner of diseases and cancers. Protein folding is something which is incredibly complex you see and therefore it needs all the CPU power it can get.
PS3 owners has been particularly lauded (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/04/25/PS3_users_try_to_cure_Alzheimers/1) for the way they have embraced the project, with over 250,000 PS3 owners jumping in and more than doubling the processing power of the program.
The Folding@Home project, which is centralised at Stanford University, has reached a massive landmark in it's development today and the combined processing power of the project is now equal to a single petaflop. That's one quadrillion floating point calculations every second.
Put another way, it means that every single person on the planet would have to do 75,000 calculations a second, every second in order to achieve similar results. It's a concept so massive that Microsoft Word doesn't even recognise a Petaflop as existing in its dictionary. Needless to say that the boffins at Stanford are pretty happy about the whole thing;
"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.
"Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases."
So do you have a PS3 or PC just running, join team 33597....
Go to [thread=21083]this thread[/thread] to see the original post and comment on it!
Just a shameless bump of this, hoping some more might feel for joining in on the protein folding :flirty:
You can read all about it in the folding sub-forum linked in the above post!
i wont dare leaving my pc on when ime not in its presence, (not the 1st time, goverment workers fry everything in a house) so unfortunately i cant help with it :(
You could still run it even when you are there. If you've got a hig spec PC (and IIRC you have) I bet it has quite a few spare CPU cycles when you're playing WoW, or when browsing the web and not gaming or whatever.
well, i always play on it, the only moments ime not is while browsing the forums, it will also be a hard hit for my ping since my connection is riduciousely crappy, i get around 600kb from a 4mbit line, 300+ ms in wow
It doesn't hit your ping at all unless it is sending or receiving a work unit back to base - which is usually once per 24-36 hour period.
TL.
I run it, but for some reason it crashes every time it updates.