Folding@home

Join the Hampshire College Folding@Home Team!

Team name is HampshireCollege

Team number is 175711

password (if it asks) is hampshirecollege

What is Folding@Home?

Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. This computing power is used to simulate 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. 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.

How do I install it?

Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download and download the client that works with your Operating System (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).

Then, install the program, start it up, and enter a username (can be anything) and the team number: 175711.

Links

project home page: http://folding.stanford.edu/

more on distributed computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing

another distributed computing project which seeks out intelligent extraterrestrial life: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/