Folding @ Home. Why???

[Laughing Man]

Lets make this clear I am not some nub who's just found F@H and is wanting to know what the point of it all is. I tried it out on my PS3 and I understand the theory behind it. Infact the idea is a great one. Solve the ills of humanity by passing out the seriously complex folding calculations to the average PC user and get them to do the work while their PC is sitting ideal. Great idea in theory.

You can look on pretty much any forum, any PC magazine, any blog and you'll find some listing or mentioning their F@H team and handing out the number so that you can join up and help the cause.

The problem is what exactly is the cause?

I was reading through Custom PC today and noticed their F@H section. In this section they were highlighting a person who had the dubious honour of being 'Folder Of The Month'. In this article the person mentioned they had several computers of varying power levels. The guy main rig was an Athlon x2 4200+ with two 9800GTXs. IN it he said he had multiple clients running which allowed him to run his PC 24/7 at 100% load. Only ever cutting the folding grind to play games.

Now this is the problem. The initial idea was that you downloaded then client and ran it in the background where it would use idle processing power to cure the human race but look around and what do you see. League tables, people building high end system that are focused on gaining as many 'points' as possible, people talking about their team being in third in three months if they keep folding at their current rate.

A year and a bit ago F@H entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world! The record was set on September 19, 2007 when F@h surpassed a petaflop. A great achievement but in amongst all these number, points, league tables and general new age epeen waggling where are the actual results? What beyond stealing peta bytes worth of internet bandwidth has folding at home actually done. Has it actually achieved the original idea has it actually brought about any cures or solutions?

I typed 'real world results from folding at home' in to google just to see if their was anything of real worth come from the F@H project and all I got was the Guinness record and endless pages of hints and tips on how to maximise your system to fold like no machine has folded before. Is folding at home like nerd level overclocking. Just a new way of measuring your epeen with no real world use able result?

 

[Bofus Teefus]

You really should do better Googling.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

Of course, none of this means anything to you because you aren't a molecular biologist. So I guess you'll have to wait a couple more years before this can result in something that the mass media can water down and spoonfeed to the masses as pop science. Patience is a virtue, I suppose.

That link is gold. Basically, due to the number of chemical interactions involved in the shaping, or folding, of a protein, it's impossible for the hottest computer that they have at Stanford to predict how this will happen for a given protein. They've spread the work out amongst the computers of anyone who downloads F@H.

Apparently, they've had good results with this, but think about the headline OP- "We can tell you how a protein is going to fold itself!" It's possible, but you're not likely to see a headline talking about the results. In the table of contents on the link, #1, 2, and 3 give a decent summary of what good the program does.