Folding@home Team 56895 and Life with PlayStation

[saprano]

Never folded before. Didn't wan't to leave my 60gig on all the time for obvious reasons. But i have a slim now so i'll be joining the team.

Active CPUs means the number of PS3's folding right? It currently says 69.

[Nathan P]

Originally Posted by saprano

Never folded before. Didn't wan't to leave my 60gig on all the time for obvious reasons. But i have a slim now so i'll be joining the team.

Active CPUs means the number of PS3's folding right? It currently says 69.

Not just PS3's. You can fold on your computer's CPU or graphics card - if its powerful enough. The number of active CPU's includes those as well as the PS3's

[Ite]

What the heck is Folding@home? Can someone give me a brief summary of how it works?

[slick1ru2]

Originally Posted by Ite

What the heck is Folding@home? Can someone give me a brief summary of how it works?

Uses spare computing power to help compute different social problems that your computer/console has a small piece of. It downloads the data and crunches it in the background of your computer. When it finishes that chunk of crunching, it uploads the results and downloads another set of data to work on. The projects do all kind of things, you can choose what you want to work on. That includes cures for diseases like cancer, thinks that need massive super computing. The Air Force has a PS3 supercomputer with over 1000 linked and Seti's Seti at home program uses this type of computing to go through their raw data to look for artificial signals that could have been made by ET. Folding at home looks specifically at proteins. From their website:

Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers.
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.

What is protein folding?
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.

What have we done so far?
We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page.