Do you leave your computer on 24/7? Want to contribute to research into how diseases like Parkinsons, Huntingtons and some types of cancer occur?
Folding @ Home is a distributed computing project which uses people’s spare computer cycles to study the way proteins form in an attempt to understand how that process goes wrong, which is known to be one of the causes of a number of diseases, including the above. The program is run out of Stanford University in the U.S. and has produced a bit over 100 research papers in the past 10 years based on the results from computers around the world.
You are awarded points based on how quickly you return completed work units to the server; faster computers will generally score more points per day. These points are listed online to encourage friendly competition and you can join teams to compete on a grander scale.
If you’re interested, head over to:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage
and download the client from the link in the middle! If you want to join in with the team we fold for, fold for team 24 🙂