Porkchop Technology Review's

You probably already read my review about Folding@home in my PlayStation 3 Review,  basically Folding@home is a way of understanding protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases with the use of simulating all this on computer’s around the world.   The research is done by a team at Standford University in America.  The great thing about this is that they use the computer power of everyone around the world who uses the program, instead of local super computer’s there is nothing greater than this.  Especially now since computer’s are now very powerful, and have up to 8 cores, and they also figured out how to use the massively powered GPUs in computing the folding of protein’s.  One of the greatest Folding@home computers was the PlayStation 3, they broke records with it, being the best machine to do folding due to its cell processor, that is very powerful, but now that has changed, since they can use the GPU now to do the work, which some GPUs can outperform the PlayStation 3.

You might be asking why I am writing a review on this, well the fact is that I know a lot of people do not donate money to organizations because they think there hard earned money isn’t arriving at the appropriate, place, well this just uses your Electricity power in return for research.   What they are trying to find cures for are, Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.  Of course they won’t find a cure the next day for any of these, but they aid in the research of this, as you can see if you visit there website http://folding.stanford.edu/ they have a Results page, on that results page they have all the written articles on there research available to anyone in the world, so researchers can take these results and use them to help there research.  Most of the articles there are confusing to the average person, you have to be a scientist/researcher to read them and understand them, since its  for that kind of people.  There’s millions of people around the world supporting this effort, since almost everyone in this world has a computer and Internet, and most people leave there computer’s on, well this is great to run if you are one of those people, eventually they will find a cure with the more Computers running the application.

There forum’s are great, and they have the Vijay Pande the director of Folding@home post frequently there and responding to user’s posts, they have a big community.  They have won awards from various organizations, even the Guinness World Record on September 2007 for the researching 1 petaflop or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, on the power of people’s home computer’s as well as their PlayStation 3 innovation to simulate the processes inside living cells that can lead to diseases.

How it works is that you download the client and it downloads the current work unit on your computer or PlayStation 3 and it starts simulating the protein folding, it shows a percentage of it being completed, once its completed it’s sent back to the servers at Standford and then all gathered and organized they preform the research and post on there results page the findings. They also have this team’s function that anyone can create a team and anybody can join it and contribute, what this does is it adds some level of competition that always brings out people, people like to compete and get top standings.  The nice feature of Folding@home is that it also has a personal stats page, that shows what units have been completed and gives you more information on which protein you have completed and folded, and gives you a global rank of where you are, you can also show the page off to anyone, to show how much you have contributed.

Hopefully one day they will find a cure and cure all these common diseases in the world such as cancer and the great thing is you can contribute to it as well, So I suggest that you download the client and run it and help, even if your computer is not that fastest in this world, you can still make a difference.

Here is a video of a very cool setup this guy has, he has 23 Nvidia GTX295 GPU dedicated to Folding@home that’s a lot of money invested, great job for a good cause.